If you're not aware of what a SunRay is then check them out. They are so-called thin clients that are diskless and fanless, providing a very clean solution to not wanting a noisy machine that can break. They're not invincible of course, but my recent experience deploying a few of these had made me just love 'em to death.
Despite the glamour of a silent desktop PC, there are some other requirements. The main one is you need a server for the SunRay to connect to, and get the actual session from (whether it's CDE, Gnome, or windows via RDP). Given the SunRay is essentially state-less it needs a way to figure out where the server is. One method is to modify your DHCP responses to include some special information the SunRay's understand. This works well, but in some cases isn't possible. The older SunRay 1 model would then default to broadcasting on the local subnet (or VLAN) to see if a server would respond. If so, then we're all set and things work.
So what's my issue? Well I just got one of the new SunRay 2FS models and I expected it to just broadcast on our VLAN to find the server. Well it did find a server, but it was on IP 68.178.232.99, which is not in our local network. I was a bit puzzled by this because, well, this didn't make any sense, until I learned something:
The default firmware on a new SunRay 2FS will try to use DNS lookups to find a server, only broadcasting should that fail.
This small point has big implications for anyone wanting to rely on broadcasting for their SunRays. The specific method it uses is the following:
- Look for sunray-servers.my.local.domain.com
- Look for sunray-servers.local.domain.com
- Look for sunray-servers.domain.com
- Finally look for sunray-servers.com
See the problem? Of course someone registered the sunray-servers.com domain and gave it the magic IP of....68.178.232.99! Apparantly this issue has been resolved in a newer firmware revision, but this will cause problems for anyone hoping to use the SunRay 2FS out of the box with broadcasting as the server resolution method.