The purpose of this document is to inform the user of how to properly connect and disconnect USB devices on Sun Ray clients. Users can now use USB "Thumb drives", external USB hard drives, zip disks, scanners and digital cameras with Sun Ray ultra-thin clients.

The Sun Ray client has four USB ports on the back of the device between the RJ45 network connection and the monitor connection. Two of these ports are used for the keyboard and mouse connection, but the other two are available for external peripherals.

If you decide to try plugging in a USB storage device there are a few things you should know as far as the method for mounting and unmounting the device(s).

Mounting/connecting USB devices:

First, this is different than the way a USB device would work on a desktop or laptop (ie: you don't use the "Disks" menu to mount the sda# device). Also, don't look for a Desktop icon, you won't see one for the device(s) you attached.

To get started just plug a USB device into one of the two empty USB slots on the back of the Sun Ray.

The examples below show two different USB drives and a MS (Memory Stick) reader, the path to the drive will be as follows:

/tmp/SUNWut/mnt/<loginid>/disk# -> <usbdevice>
--------------------------^^^^^-----^^^^^^^^^

The "<usbdevice>" mount point name will depend on the internal/formatted name of the device you are using. The disk# will depend on how many devices you have plugged in. You can then access the device, either by opening a filemanager window or from a command-line by changing directory to this path:

/tmp/SUNWut/mnt/<your_loginid>

Once there, look for a disk# link that points to your device. Mine looked like this:

% cd /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/dougc
% ls -l

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     staff         30 Jan 10 10:27 disk1 -> /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/dougc/dsc4mb/
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root          31 Jan 10 10:28 disk2 -> /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/dougc/usbdisk/
drwxrwxrwx   1 dougc    staff      16384 Dec 31  1969 dsc4mb/
drwxrwxrwx   1 dougc    staff      16384 Dec 31  1969 usbdisk/

To list the mounted device(s) you can do a regular df command or to see just the USB mounted devices in your session run the following command:

% /opt/SUNWut/bin/utdiskadm -l

Device          Partition       Mount Path
------          ---------       ----------
disk1           disk1s0         /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/dougc/dsc4mb
disk1           disk1s2
disk2           disk2s0         /tmp/SUNWut/mnt/dougc/usbdisk
disk2           disk2s2

In this case I had a two devices plugged in, the MS reader (with a 4Mb memory stick) and a 256Mb "Thumb drive". Once the device is mounted you can copy files to or from the device.

Unmounting/disconnecting USB devices:

To remove the device, first run the following command to prepare your
device for removal:

% /opt/SUNWut/bin/utdiskadm -r disk1
disk1 is ready for unplugging

This unmounts the device so that it can be safely unplugged, then just remove the device from the port.