Michael McNamara

I thought I would take a break from my usual material and post something a little different. Please forgive me as this article bares little technical value but I just felt like posting anyway. Like every company out there we’ve been involved in evaluating the dizzying array of Thin Client and Virtual Desktop solutions on the market today.

I recently had the opportunity to evaluate the Sun Ray 270 Virtual Display Client solution from Sun Microsystems. It’s a really clean all in one solution that features a 17″ display with an integrated Smart Card reader. The solution required the use of a Sun Solaris x86 server to act as the middleware between either a Microsoft Terminal Server or Citrix Metaframe Server. Users sessions were initiated by the insertion of a Smart Card and the solution excelled at hotdesking, allowing a user to remove their Smart Card and go to another Sun Ray and pickup exactly where they left off from the previous session by simply inserting their Smart Card and entering their password (if it was configured to prompt for a password).

The Sun Ray client located the Sun Solaris servers within the same local network by use of a broadcast packet. When the Sun Ray client was outside the local network we had to configure special DHCP options which enabled the Sun Ray to “locate” to the back-end Sun Solaris servers.

We did have some interoperability issues with Windows 2008 Terminal Services Session Broker that Sun hopes to have resolved sometime in the coming year.

The only real feature the device was missing was an integrated 802.11 wireless solution. The reseller did point out that the Sun Ray can be paired with a few 802.11 bridges to provide wireless connectivity.

While we didn’t actually select the Sun Ray for the project we were evaluating I was really impressed with the solution and would advise anyone looking at thin client solutions to give their nearest Sun reseller a call. If your interested in hotdesking and/or Smart Card support in a thin client then you should definitely check out this solution.

Cheers!

I thought I would take a quick second to let everyone know that there are two RRS feeds for this blog. The first feed is for the articles that get posted while the second is for the comments made by readers like yourself and me. There are a lot of really helpful tips and information that can be found in the comments from some very insightful readers.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/michaelfmcnamara

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForMichaelFMcnamara

While there are approximately 50 readers subscribed to the main article RSS feed there is no one subscribed to the comments RSS feed.

Please feel free to comment on any article, especially if you think the article is incorrect and/or misleading. I’m also interested in soliciting information for future articles. What would you be interested in hear more about?

Thanks for reading!

Cheers!

While this isn’t generally within the realm of the topics that I discuss here I was impressed enough to give it a blurb. A few months ago I started playing around with a few of the different virtual desktop solutions available. I wasn’t really looking to spend any $$$ so I looked around at all the free and open source solutions. I stumbled across VirtualBox which had recently been acquired by Sun Microsystems and was very impressed. I had VirtualBox installed on a Windows XP desktop within minutes and had an Ubuntu 8.04 installation up and running in a virtual window within an hour.

On September 4, 2008 VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released. There’s suppose to be some significant performance increases in this release including support for SATA NCQ (Native Command Queuing) when using raw disks and Nested Paging on AMD machines. This release also promises support for 64 bit guest hosts. You can find the full change log here.

If you’re looking to toy with Linux, VirtualBox makes it really easy to install Linux on top of your existing Windows XP desktop/laptop without the worry of destroying your personal computer. While I still dual boot a number of my desktops/laptops I’ve been finding VirtualBox almost indispensable in my daily work activities. There are even a number of organizations running VirtualBox as a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution from a number of different thin clients.

You might even be persuaded to load up a virtual machine to check out an upcoming clone of Microsoft Windows called ReactOS. It’s not based on Linux in any fashion but promises to be compatible with all software that can run on Microsoft Windows. While it’s still in it’s infancy (alpha) it will be interesting to see how Microsoft will respond if it ever starts to gather steam.

VirtualBox is definitely worth the time and effort to download and install if your interested in a virtual desktop solution.

Cheers!

It appears that Verizon is going to be performing a channel re-alignment on September 11, 2008 here in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. I know there have been all sorts of discussions on the Internet about the date, some receiving notification that the date of the conversion was September 2 and some September 11. I just noticed on the FiOS TV Guide this morning that almost all the channels now list their “new” channel number along with the date that the channel will change (move).

In a recent post I mentioned how Verizon was doing away with all the analog channels. They were doing this for a number of reasons, one obvious reason was to meet the government’s mandate of going all digital by February 2009, and another was to help free up “space” for additional HD stations. I believe there are suppose to be quite a few new HD stations added in the channel re-alignment.

I’ve also heard quite a bit of discussion about the terrible compression that Comcast is currently inflicting on a great many of their HD channels. If you have FiOS TV/Internet service available in your area I would suggest you strongly consider making the switch. I’ve been very pleased with the service and reliability to date.

Cheers!

Update: Wednesday September 10, 2008
I’ve managed to locate the new TV channel lineup for Southeastern Pennsylvania on Verizon’s website.

Update: Thursday September 18, 2008
The channel re-alignment occurred just as promised. I’m fairly pleased with the new channel lineup and I hear that there are going to be quite a few new HD channels added in the coming months so I’m really excited.

A few weeks ago a few friends approached me about Internet based VoIP solutions for their home phone. They were fed up with the $100.00+ phone bills and weren’t really excited about giving any more money to the local cable television company(Comcast). I’ve been an AT&T CallVantage VoIP customer for the past 2-3 years so I was obviously ready to recommend AT&T CallVantage until I discovered that they are no longer accepting new customers. While I wasn’t ready to recommend Vonage or any of the other solutions out there I did comment to them about the recent buzz around a product called MagicJack. The MagicJack USB adapter itself costs approximately $39.95 and includes the first year of service free while subsequent years are $19.95 a year (yes you read that right $19.95/year). The solution requires a Windows XP or MacOS desktop/laptop and utilizes your broadband Internet connection. I personally know of two folks that are currently utilizing the solution and they absolutely love it and they are admittingly not very technical or computer savy. However, they simply love the solution and they both estimate that it’s saving them between $75 and $100 a month in long distance phone charges. The solution has scored numerous product awards including PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice award.

So while I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do myself since it’s probably only a matter of time until AT&T pulls the plug on CallVanage it seems like MagicJack could be a great solution for those teenagers heading off to college. They’d no longer have an excuse for not calling home every once-n-while. :)

Cheers!

It’s closing in on two months now since I migrated my content from Blogger over to my new WordPress installation at GoDaddy. I must admit that I’ve enjoyed the entire process, from researching the different hosting providers to actually migrating the content and publishing the site.In short I’d have to say that I’m pleased with GoDaddy. I know there is a lot of “hate” out there directed at GoDaddy but the solution has been on par with my expectation of what a $6.64/month hosting plan should provide. It’s no where near as fast as the servers I have at work or home but it works fine enough, what do you want for less than $10/month? The install was as simple as clicking on the “Install WordPress” icon within the GoDaddy hosting connection control panel. Although I did need to fix up the configuration after the installation since I wanted to use the hostname “blog.michaelfmcnamara.com” as opposed to just “michaelfmcnamara.com”. I should probably let folks know I also used GoDaddy to register five different domain names along with their “Deluxe” hosting plan. I should point out to those that are interested that customers automatically get an “Economy” hosting plan with each purchased domain. I only signed up for a single year and didn’t mind spending the extra dollars to try out the upgraded hosting plan.

With respect to WordPress I have just one word - AWESOME! I’ve spent quite a bit of time sifting through the cascading style sheets of the themes and dissecting the PHP code trying to understand all the ins and outs. There is literally a dizzying array of plugs-in and add-ons out there for WordPress that extend the solution’s functionality ten fold. You may have noticed that I’ve been adding a few of the more mainline plug-ins every week (don’t want to overload the site and/or detract from it’s main purpose - educating the readers).

As a side note this blog was recently reviewed by Blogged and received an 8.3 rating. If your interested or just bored why don’t you wander over and post your own review of this blog.

Cheers!

Update: August 19, 2008
I thought I would just post an update with respect to my experiences with GoDaddy. I’m happy to say that I haven’t yet had any issues or problems. The traffic to this blog continues to grow daily but the site still feels fairly responsive. I’ve also added quite a few different WordPress plug-ins and just can’t say enough good things about WordPress.

Cheers!