I dont get it why the movie playbacks lag on a Sun Ray. To rule out the 40mbit/sec hub D-link 604, I tried to directly connect a Sun Ray to my Solaris computer via crossover network cable. But the Sun Ray dont get any contact with the server. It doesnt show the login window. It say that it is searching for a server. It says:

<- 100F ->

00144F946B02



It should work to connect directly to the server via cross over network cable, yes?

Correct.

Perhaps you have a bad cable?

I bought a brand new cable. It should work.

I dont have to turn on dhcp servers or something like that?

utadm does that automatically.

As my friend pointed out:
A movie streamed to 1280x1024 yields frames that uses ~1.2 Mpixels. Suppose each pixel uses 2 bytes for color, then each frame will be 2.4 Mbyte. A movie is ~30 fps. That means each second there will ~60MByte to be streamed to the SunRay. This demands almost a 600 mbit NIC.

I have 100 Mbit internally, and 40mbit to the internet, my other friend speculated. That is why it lags when streaming movie.



Solution: I am thinking of decreasing the resolution temporarily to 640x480 pixels. Then each frame will be ~0.5 MByte. With 30 fps it will be 15MByte / sec. Almost 150Mbit. As my NIC is 100Mbit, it could maybe work to stream a 640x480 resolution movie.

Ive found out that the command to change the resolution for SunRay is "utresdef". I will look into it and see if I can change resolution on the fly, and back again to 1280x1024 when I want to work.

Annoying, though. I was hoping that the SunRay would work almost as a normal computer. However, I wonder if the SunRay does some graphic compression to save band width, and if it will be effective for streaming video (probably not)...



If anyone comes up with another solution, please tell me.


The Sun Ray 2 has 100mbit NIC. I wonder, could I plug in a 1000mbit NIC via the USB using a port multiplicator and then use 1000mbit all the way? 1000mbit would suffice to stream 640x480 movies.

I recall reading that SunRay 1 series can only handle a 40Mbps data stream, despite the 100Mbps port.

As far as a 1Gbps USB NIC, I'd imagine that you'll have difficulties getting the 'Ray to recognize it. If it does work, I'd really be interested in the speed results. My experience with USB up to this point is mostly frustration with keyboards, scanners and mice that don't always work reliably, and hard drives that work slower than expected. Have not yet tried networking!

My experience streaming video to my 170 is very poor. Even small videos end up getting laggy and pixelated (must be some sort of compression going on). Very disappointed, Sun claims much better results than I'm able to get, not sure what I'm doing wrong.

What is your transfer rates for hard drives? Is it 40MBps as you suggested, is the max transfer rate?

Well, first off, I said 40Mbps, NOT 40MBps!

The transfer rate is MUCH lower over USB on a 170... It only supports USB 1.1, so you theoretically max out at 12Mbps.

My comment about data rate was specific to USB, but not specific to SunRay. External USB drives always seem to have a big performance hit over a comparable internal drive (not to mention issues with them suddenly disconnecting and reconnecting while in use). So, that makes me wonder how well a USB network interface would function...

Considering USB 2.0 has a maximum transfer rate of 480 Mbit/Sec, so, maybe it wont be muche better...

Hey kids,

I didn't follow the thread all the way through so
maybe this question is already answered.

1. The sunray interconnect requires about 200kb per user for any sort of descent speed.

2. License. The license package from Sun was basically put together for goverment deals. If you want support to get it working then you have to pay, otherwise don't bother.

3. Sunray on Sun x86. It works, the problems is
that srss server displays the server's base display package. So, if you are using Sol 10 you are
talking gknome 2.0 or so. I suggest using ubuntu and srss 3.1. There is a nice thread out
for implementing this with ubuntu and srss 3.1.
Just do a search for ubuntu and sunray (or srss).

Keller

Thanks for your reply. I have a question regarding 3, what do you mean with "the srss server displays the server's base display package"? Could you elaborate?

The surnay server package (srss) in this case srss 3.1 will display what ever desktop is loaded on the server. In this case that would be whatever
version of gnome is installed.

Aha. What is the problem with srss 3.1 displaying the desktop?

I'm unaware of a problem with it. The user isn't stuck to a single graphic environment. He can choose between the ones available through dtlogin. By default CDE and JDS/Gnome but it is certainly possible to add other ones like KDE.

Well I dont also understand the suggestion to downgrade to inferior Linux. Why downgrade to SunRay software server v3.1? Now I have v4.0 under Solaris. Everything works flawless, except streaming fullscreen movie.


DEKELLER,
Can you try to stream movie under Ubuntu and Sunray? If it works better, then it could be a reason to switch. Can you stream movie with Ubuntu in fullscreen without lagg?