HISTORY: A "USB Drive" daemon for Sun Ray sessions - AKA "usbdrived" (V2)
I decided to pull this one out of my original Oracle blog post at Oracle - this is my intellectual property and there is no guarantee that Oracle will not pull it out.
This would become one of the most popular add-ons for Sun Ray during its time, as it made the use of USB drives automatic and transparent regardless of the operating system presented on the Sun Ray client.
"USBDRIVED" (July 24, 2008)
Hopefully you are reading this because you either have a need to better present USB disks via the Sun Ray platform or because you are an "existing customer" of version 1, first blogged here.
After looooong in the making and with careful analysis of requirements and listening to useful feedback from the likes of Brad Lackey, I am pleased to announce that "version 2" of the good old "usbdrived" is finally ready (well, not really v2, it has had more iterations than that...)
Features that you will find in this version are:
Simply download it, and then execute it (chmod +x first) on every Sun Ray server of your FOG, like so:
./usbdrived install
Option 0 will give you generic install instructions... Enjoy!
TROUBLESHOOTING
I get a lot of comments telling me "it doesn't work, can you help me?" - as it turns out usbdrived is actually a pretty simple beast, and if you think it's not working, you may be looking in the wrong place. Start with some of these hints:
NOTE OF SUPPORT: This tool is provided as is. It is not supported by Oracle. If you find any issues, please contact me and will try to help!
This would become one of the most popular add-ons for Sun Ray during its time, as it made the use of USB drives automatic and transparent regardless of the operating system presented on the Sun Ray client.
"USBDRIVED" (July 24, 2008)
Hopefully you are reading this because you either have a need to better present USB disks via the Sun Ray platform or because you are an "existing customer" of version 1, first blogged here.
After looooong in the making and with careful analysis of requirements and listening to useful feedback from the likes of Brad Lackey, I am pleased to announce that "version 2" of the good old "usbdrived" is finally ready (well, not really v2, it has had more iterations than that...)
Features that you will find in this version are:
- Multiple mount partitions & drives connected to the same Sun Ray
- Mount point "unwriteability" (Yeah!)
- Address Gnome/JDS and Windows sessions from the same script, automatically
- Polished Disk icons on Gnome/JDS (instead of links)
- No stale mount points presented to the end user
- Usage documentation provided as text files on the desktop/mountpoint (this can be switched off)
- Installer for system-wide or single user with no root permissions
- Single point of aggregation for all Windows mounts (Drive "USBDRVS")
Simply download it, and then execute it (chmod +x first) on every Sun Ray server of your FOG, like so:
./usbdrived install
Option 0 will give you generic install instructions... Enjoy!
TROUBLESHOOTING
I get a lot of comments telling me "it doesn't work, can you help me?" - as it turns out usbdrived is actually a pretty simple beast, and if you think it's not working, you may be looking in the wrong place. Start with some of these hints:
- Can you see usbdrived running in your Solaris session? (ps -ef | grep usbdrived)
- Can you see a file called "Attaching USB Drives to your Sun Ray README.txt" on your Solaris desktop?
- Did you install it properly? If so, can you see and what permissions does this have:
/usr/dt/config/Xsession.d/1350.usbdrived
It should be executable by everybody, something like rwxr-xr-x - When you plug in a USB drive, does it mount in /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/<username> under Solaris?
- Under Windows, can you see in "My Computer" a Network drive (In "Others") called "USBDRVS" and is there a file within that explains usage?
- Have you hit refresh in file manager when looking at your USBDRVS mount?
- Most important and useful of all: Do any mounts show up if on a Solaris Sun Ray session you issue:
/opt/SUNWut/bin/utdiskadm -l - With Sun VDI 2.0, make sure that you have properly positioned
your arguments in the kiosk call, as "-service hostname" needs to be the
last parameter:
-t 1800 -- -m -b -r disk:USBDRVS=$HOME/USBDRVS -service localhost - With Sun VDI 3.0, this works for me:
-- -m -b -r disk:USBDRVS=$HOME/USBDRVS
where the actual vda kiosk parameters go to the left of "--" - With the Sun Ray Connector for VMware View, this works for me:
-s viewmanager-server -http -- -m -b -r disk:USBDRVS=$HOME/USBDRVS - Unfortunately, NOT ALL USB drives work. Some drives, Solaris refuses to mount (PCFS issues) either because the device is simply not "liked", or because Solaris can't read the file system. Look at "dmesg" for errors.
- Is your drive FAT16/32 or is it NTFS? The latter does not work, the formatting mut be FAT.
- Many people have asked me why passing the parameter does not work
as explained within the script... It appears that people look at the guts of the
script to understand the instructions and bump into the line that reads
-r disk:USBDRVS=\\$HOME/USBDRVS
and assume that that is the literal context. Noooooo! That "\\" is there
so that when you read the instructions offered via the command line
option of "usbdrived install" and press "0", the actual HOME directory
of the user is not displayed...
NOTE OF SUPPORT: This tool is provided as is. It is not supported by Oracle. If you find any issues, please contact me and will try to help!
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