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I'd say Sun looks favorably upon this.

Remember when third parties were going to buy computing time from Sun?

There turned out to be no third parties who wanted that. What is Sun's answer? Do the exact opposite.

That's right! Sun is going to buy computing time from other people. Their HQ is going to be like a giant Net PC or something. It'll be frickin awesome! And just as profitable as the last initiative was money-losing.

Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact?

WTF?

Maybe you've heard of VMWare?

Or, perhaps, Wine?

Or maybe you've noticed that software like Open Office and FireFox is cross platform, running on Win/Mac/Linux ? Toolkits such as GTK Java, Flash and QT allow for easy, straightforward cross-platform development?

Or, perhaps, that there's a whole operating system being put together utilizing all these parts?

Get your head out from under that rock! (or is it... Mom's basement?)

Have a look at Clean (http://clean.cs.ru.nl/) for a use of pointers (internally) that makes for efficient execution. An interesting read concerning the subject is found here:

http://clean.cs.ru.nl/contents/Addison__Wesley_book/addison__wesley_book.html

Actual benchmarks to show the efficiency can be examined here (note the comparison is with C-versions of the same algorithms compiled on gcc):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clean&lang2=gcc

Here's Java 6 (server version) for comparison:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gcc

You'll notice that differences are mainly in the memory footprint, already known to be attributable to the large number of libraries (classes) loaded into the vm at start-up, something the Clean runtime isn't quite as encumbered with:

(Java) http://java.sun.com/docs/books/performance/1st_edition/html/JPRAMFootprint.fm.html

So, the difference in speed is often-times negligible, and it's been shown that the memory footprint can be reduced to a size where you can run an embedded jvm in a mobile phone (really!), and rumour has it that someone even wrote an operating system in Java, but the memory footprint still seems the biggest culprit:

http://www.jnode.org/node/573

In other words, it's not Java - the language, but Java - the massive OO-framework, and JVM - the specific implementation, that's the problem. Even C++ or C with an OO-framework can be made into a large memory footprint, if you can believe it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx

Then, of course, memory is cheap:

http://www.simmtester.com/page/memory/memprice.asp

But, the over-use of which, sometimes stays with us as itching bugs for too long:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/11/firefox-3-add-o.html

If memory serves me right (http://www.google.com), there's something to be said of the virtues of garbage-collection applied to systems programming:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

and the actual (memory and) time efficiency of such an attempt:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php

But I could be wrong. After all, no-one in their right mind would ever attempt to write an operating system in something like, say, Lisp:

http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisposes.html

- let alone design an actual computer around it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

It simply wouldn't run. No, the skills of an engineer depend solely on the language he/she speaks, not on the abstract concepts he/she masters, applied to whatever tool he/she chooses to use/create.

That is why I propose we all forget about abstraction all-together, and revert to coding like this:

010101100001111010110101101101111101111...

But wait, that is itself an abstraction - Turing must have suffered from premature abstraculation. No, let's hear it for using copperwires instead of silicon, so we can attach some large, hand-

Most high-paying corporate jobs are C# or Java, essentially coding database backed websites but often using lots of buzzwords and acronyms and toolkits and whatnot. The skills that pay the bills are basically: Knowing how to use SQL & databases, and developing in an object oriented language with a large support API. Most corporate work at the end of the day is pulling info from a database and slapping it onto a web page. Learning how to quickly teach yourself how to work with somebody else's code based on nothing more than some simple API documentation (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/ and/or Google and approach it from a goal-oriented perspective: How do I sort a list of names? How do I encrypt a credit card number using a standard encryption library?), and understanding basic concepts behind the internet, will pay the bills. Also, read a book or two on 'design patterns' so that it's easier to talk to other programmers and so that you won't constantly be thinking you just invented the wheel.

They'll say all sorts of other buzzwords: in Java, it's Hibernate and EJB and XML and Tapestry or Spring... they're all fancy apis that make your life easier in some way and harder in others and the only school related skill that is relevant to them is being able to learn from a book and/or the published APIs. You expressly do _not_ want your school to give you a degree in one of these things, because they come and go every few years as the Next Big Thing reinvents Smalltalk, again. Instead, learn how to learn them.

Beyond that, learn what interests you. There is all sorts of fascinating fun and specialized stuff to be learned. I know a guy who animates explosions. I know a guy who writes genetic algorithms for game playing. I know a guy who works on an MMO. None of them need a whit of database or web page experience or knowledge for these things, but it's sometimes hard to pay the bills fulltime with the fun stuff, so the database backed websites is a useful fallback. Hopefully you can get into something that fascinates you, but if not, you can always bank a good salary with a day job in the corporate world and tinker on your nights or weekends until you can afford to retire and do whatever fascinates you fulltime.

OutOfMemoryError is not an exception and thus is not required to be caught. In fact, Sun recommends that you don't try to catch errors.

You just need to use Java 6

java.io.Console

We've heard this before. There's a presentation in AFIPS 1966 in which someone from Control Data was saying that each metropolitan area would have one giant, shared supercomputer.

"Grid computing" was a flop commercially, once the vendors started charging for it. Sun's service is still around, but they don't talk about it much any more. That was more like an effort to find something to do with their unsold server inventory. ResPower Render Farm has a real but very specialized business, quietly rendering 3D frames for the film industry.

Amazon has been making some noise lately, but they don't promise much: "Without limitation to Section 11.5, we shall have no liability whatsoever for any damage, liabilities, losses (including any loss of data or profits) or any other consequences that you may incur as a result of any Service Suspension." Clearly they're not serious about offering a service to businesses.

There are successful services, like Salesforce, but those offer more than raw compute power.

Dude, there's no need to imagine any longer!!

Here you go

If you're any sort of a system administrator and you haven't heard about OpenBSD or Trusted Solaris, then you're incompetent, plain and simple. You can read up about them at the sites below.

OpenBSD: http://openbsd.org/
Trusted Solaris: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/trustedsolaris/

User Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future; Good, Bad, and Ugly is from last year's JavaOne, but isn't really Java specific. The slides are available to everyone, but I highly recommend you sign up for a free Sun Developer Network account if you don't have one and watch the multimedia version. Also, the whole Desktop development category may be of interest.

User Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future; Good, Bad, and Ugly is from last year's JavaOne, but isn't really Java specific. The slides are available to everyone, but I highly recommend you sign up for a free Sun Developer Network account if you don't have one and watch the multimedia version. Also, the whole Desktop development category may be of interest.

It's irritating to have links on words if the href has nothing to do with the anchor text .

the desire to reimplement everything from the ground up using 'new technology' but this really falls into the trap of thinking that new is automatically better.

From the sounds of it, Jaron Lanier really wants to start from scratch. A quote from an interview with Sun:

Interviewer: Maybe we need to go back and start all over again?

Jaron: That's what I've been thinking lately. Tracing the history of programming, we can see places where it went wrong, based on the limited experiences and metaphors that were available at the time. It's possible to imagine a different history. Let's go back to the middle of the 20th century, to a very brilliant, first generation of serious hackers that included people like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon. Their primary source of coding experience involved coding information that could be sent over a wire. They were familiar with encoded messages on the telegraph and telephone. Everything was formulated in terms of a message being sent from point A to point B, with some advance knowledge on point B about the nature of the message. Or if not that, at least an attempt by point B to recreate that knowledge, in the case of hacking.

...So much for standing on the shoulders of giants.

Wow, they've invented a neutered version of RBAC.

way to be innovative.

Booting Solaris Systems to Either the 64-Bit Kernel or the 32-Bit Kernel

http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/64_bit_booting.html

This document provides answers to frequently asked questions about booting the Solaris Operating Environment (OE) to either the 64-bit kernel or the 32-bit kernel. Booting the 64-bit kernel has been available on Ultra workstations with UltraSPARC processors (Sun4U systems or higher) since the first release of the Solaris 7 OE.

Macs have a large corporation backing them. With the partial exception of Red Hat, any given flavor of *nix doesn't.

While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such?

HTML CSS and Java? I put together a web interface recently using Java. Sure I could have gone through the pain of exposing the Java backend I was working via some intermediate protocol/whatever and present a UI through a CMS implemented in something other than Java, but at the end of the day, why would I want to do that? There are plenty of excellent libraries in Java that do all the work for me without the need for me to install a whole new backend.

There are plenty of people building and maintaining web sites in Java. That's why there are jobs advertised for IBM Websphere developers, that's why knowing JBoss, Tomcat etc. is handy. And so on and so forth.

Oh and by "Java" I'm assuming you actually mean Java and not Javascript. If not, please hand in your geek card at the counter.

Why don't you Google it? :)

http://research.sun.com/people/william.woods/

am I the only developer thats sick of this html / css / javascript mess??

No, you are not the only one. Check out Java FX if you haven't already.

I think I found what you want.

NexentaOS includes an OpenSolaris kernel in its installable images,
which means it must contain some proprietary code as far as I
understand.

See the OpenSolaris README:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/20071203/README.opensolaris

I quote the relevant part that makes me think that:

[quote]
The encumbered binaries tarball contains
complete binaries (libraries, kernel modules, commands) that are
compatible with the source. These are binaries that cannot be built
using only the source tarball for one reason or another. If you wish
to build the kernel (or some portion of it), or if you wish to build a
complete set of installable archives, you will want the encumbered
binaries.
[/quote]

Your lack of perception of humor in specific fields is a reliable indicative of social inadequacies. You must be glad you posted as AC.

Of course, a simple hello world can be built in few lines and Java would allow such a program to be written in one line if you really push it (as would C, C++ and many others). What I was thinking was more in the lines of the sample Swing hello world program in http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/examples/start/HelloWorldSwingProject/src/start/HelloWorldSwing.java which is 37 lines long, including a bunch of comments.

Less than 50, sure, but, anyway, you can quickly get to that if you decide to ask for a name in order to say hello to a person instead of the world.

Java was never meant to be concise. It's foolish to try to pass it as so.

And, BTW, a language that requires you to define a class with a static method (we may as well call them functions) in order to print something to standard output is something vile.

Note - OpenSPARC T2 currently does not include PCI-Express and 10Gigabit
Ethernet design implementation due to current legal restrictions. Equivalent models
may be available in the subsequent releases of OpenSPARC T2.

Sun is definitely opening up their hardware specs / documentation to the public. All you have to do is ask. A lot of documentation is out there already. See the following for details:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home This is their FOSS Open Hardware Documentation information that has all the info OpenBSD and Linux developers have been asking for about the processors and supporting chipsets for things like Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe root complexes, PCI bridges, UPA bridges, and even their brand new 10 Gig Ethernet Chip, Neptune.

You can request more docs on this page. So if there's any Sun hardware that's not supported in your favorite open source *NIX, request the hardware docs there!

2.6.23 or 2.6.24 has a Sun Neptune Network driver added to it (presumably coded using these docs).

http://www.sun.com/processors/documentation.html (sun.com) This is more Hardware documentation on their chips some of which is linked from their wiki

http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/let_there_be_docs (blogs.sun.com) Here is the background information on the OpenDocs Project.

Sun is definitely opening up their hardware specs / documentation to the public. All you have to do is ask. A lot of documentation is out there already. See the following for details:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home This is their FOSS Open Hardware Documentation information that has all the info OpenBSD and Linux developers have been asking for about the processors and supporting chipsets for things like Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe root complexes, PCI bridges, UPA bridges, and even their brand new 10 Gig Ethernet Chip, Neptune.

You can request more docs on this page. So if there's any Sun hardware that's not supported in your favorite open source *NIX, request the hardware docs there!

2.6.23 or 2.6.24 has a Sun Neptune Network driver added to it (presumably coded using these docs).

http://www.sun.com/processors/documentation.html (sun.com) This is more Hardware documentation on their chips some of which is linked from their wiki

http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/let_there_be_docs (blogs.sun.com) Here is the background information on the OpenDocs Project.

Sun is definitely opening up their hardware specs / documentation to the public. All you have to do is ask. A lot of documentation is out there already. See the following for details:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home This is their FOSS Open Hardware Documentation information that has all the info OpenBSD and Linux developers have been asking for about the processors and supporting chipsets for things like Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe root complexes, PCI bridges, UPA bridges, and even their brand new 10 Gig Ethernet Chip, Neptune.

You can request more docs on this page. So if there's any Sun hardware that's not supported in your favorite open source *NIX, request the hardware docs there!

2.6.23 or 2.6.24 has a Sun Neptune Network driver added to it (presumably coded using these docs).

http://www.sun.com/processors/documentation.html (sun.com) This is more Hardware documentation on their chips some of which is linked from their wiki

http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/let_there_be_docs (blogs.sun.com) Here is the background information on the OpenDocs Project.

it's an open source library tracking system. due to a recent review where someone had a library of 3k+ books and had problems with alexandria, people on the dev list have been actively addressing some of the reviewer's concerns. of course, they are still looking for help (like any open source project), but it's been an ongoing gnome project for a while. details here.

- - CSS support - Hmm, will an integrated Silverlight plugin do for much improved web site dynamics and visual effects over CSS? No, CSS is an established and published standard. If you want to see what CSS and SVG can do visit http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/ . Make sure you have a Safari 3 beta browser ready if you can. - - DOM support in their javascript implementation - Hmm, will a .NET interface for a vastly improved integration with scripting languages do? No, because dotNet is a broken attempt to implement Java, which is a broken attempt to implement Smalltalk so it looks like C++. dotNet doesn't run on very many platforms and is way too heavy as well. - - XHTML support - Hmm, will rather supporting HTML 5.0 with Microsoft Extensions do? No, because there is already a standard for XHTWL. Why go further from the standard with "Microsoft Extensions" that don't work on very many platforms when there's a standard that does? - - SVG rendering - Hmm, the Windows Presentation Foundation already supports vector graphics as part of Silverlight, so I don't understand this demand. See my comment on CSS to see what SVG can do. Check out the radial engine demo and the rotated window in particular.

Bugs in the computer: Sun Microsystems, Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.

Ants in yer... Pants? NOT! (Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants Invade Apple iBook.

Ants In My Nokia (A Yahoo! account is required) 5210 Mobile Phone.

Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network switchbox.

Argentine ants invade a network hub.

A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his DSL connection and phone system.

IBM pSeries makes Sun look cheap.

Plllleeeeeeaaaassssseeeeee. HW's a commodity, and what's cheaper today is more expensive next week. When are people going to quit just spouting this crap and actually do a bit of research?

Now, I admit that I don't know all the details of either of these, so maybe I'm not comparing apples to apples. Having said that, they seem pretty comparable based on other stuff on the respective sites, and they're all touted as "Enterprise class"...

From Sun's web site: 4-way M4000 with 16GB of memory. Has 5 card slots, 2 internal disk bays, 2 built-in GigE ports. Takes up 6U of rack space. $79K

From IBM's web site: 8-way 560Q with 16GB of memory. Has 6 card slots, 6 internal disk bays, 2 built-in GigE ports. 4U rack space. $34.8K

I didn't even bother to price a 4-way HP rx7640. At 17U, it can't possibly be worth the space.

Then don't hold your breath; the Sun blog post linked in TFA says that this is a "multi-year award program" with "a substantial prize purse".

Presumably, this means that you're only eligible once you've already done it, and even though you've done it, there's no guarantee you'll receive any compensation for it.

(Not to denigrate Sun's efforts here--this is still much better than the status quo, where an independent developer is pretty much guaranteed to receive nothing for any work on this software.)

- RG>

Being some random griefer who sends flying phallic objects across the Metaverse doesn't make you an expert in anything except flying genitals. So let's step through your insolent propaganda point by point.

1. "...they're [sex and money] the only reasons anyone uses it [Second Life], despite claims to the contrary by media-whorish Linden Labs."
   Perhaps you're not aware of the number of corporate entities using Second Life, not even for direct profit, but simply as a platform to deliver product information, such as Sun Microsystems, or the educational institutions using it as part of a prototype distance learning initiative, such as Bowling Green State University. Maybe you're not aware of the high-profile full-time businesses in Second Life, or the many, many articles reputable business publications have written noting the unique opportunities that exist in SL. There's much more than just sex and money. As in real life, there is entertainment, education, experimentation and economy. You know little about these because you spend all your time making the experience inconvenient for others.
2. "A bank called "Ginko" that recently went insolvent sent shockwaves through the economy lately."
   This was no surprise to anyone not stupid.
3. "As the Linden (the currency of Second Life) is not based on anything, Linden Labs simply dumps currency into the market whenever they feel like it."
   A quick look through the SL Economy metrics and blogs shows you're full of it. There is an actual regulation to the currency in SL, you're just ignorant of it.
4. [Your last statements]
   Again, your ignorance shines through. Do you do any investing in the real world? Do you know what happens when you invest 100k in prime real estate in California and an earthquake devastates it? Unless you took out insurance of some kind with an organization who certainly makes more than they will ever put out (on a sidenote, there are investement insurers in SL), you are SOL. Linden is careful to use the terminology "unit of trade" for the Linden dollar, because the Metaverse is not a seperate governmental body, has no legal jurisdiction in the real world, and wants to avoid the IRS putting their grubby mitts any further in. If you are foolish enough to make an unwise investment in SL, then, just as in real life, you learn that a fool and his money are soon parted.

In conclusion, please know what the hell you're talking about before you respond. And stop griefing the Metaverse, it's obnoxious.

Being some random griefer who sends flying phallic objects across the Metaverse doesn't make you an expert in anything except flying genitals. So let's step through your insolent propaganda point by point.

1. "...they're [sex and money] the only reasons anyone uses it [Second Life], despite claims to the contrary by media-whorish Linden Labs."
   Perhaps you're not aware of the number of corporate entities using Second Life, not even for direct profit, but simply as a platform to deliver product information, such as Sun Microsystems, or the educational institutions using it as part of a prototype distance learning initiative, such as Bowling Green State University. Maybe you're not aware of the high-profile full-time businesses in Second Life, or the many, many articles reputable business publications have written noting the unique opportunities that exist in SL. There's much more than just sex and money. As in real life, there is entertainment, education, experimentation and economy. You know little about these because you spend all your time making the experience inconvenient for others.
2. "A bank called "Ginko" that recently went insolvent sent shockwaves through the economy lately."
   This was no surprise to anyone not stupid.
3. "As the Linden (the currency of Second Life) is not based on anything, Linden Labs simply dumps currency into the market whenever they feel like it."
   A quick look through the SL Economy metrics and blogs shows you're full of it. There is an actual regulation to the currency in SL, you're just ignorant of it.
4. [Your last statements]
   Again, your ignorance shines through. Do you do any investing in the real world? Do you know what happens when you invest 100k in prime real estate in California and an earthquake devastates it? Unless you took out insurance of some kind with an organization who certainly makes more than they will ever put out (on a sidenote, there are investement insurers in SL), you are SOL. Linden is careful to use the terminology "unit of trade" for the Linden dollar, because the Metaverse is not a seperate governmental body, has no legal jurisdiction in the real world, and wants to avoid the IRS putting their grubby mitts any further in. If you are foolish enough to make an unwise investment in SL, then, just as in real life, you learn that a fool and his money are soon parted.

In conclusion, please know what the hell you're talking about before you respond. And stop griefing the Metaverse, it's obnoxious.

There's an art to Java Client-side apps. Over time, the easy path is allowing larger & larger apps to run pretty close to native speed. Partially due to cpu speed increases, JVM enhancements, and better understanding of how to write responsive java client-side apps.

Honest to God, my sun ultra runs eclipse so fast it feels native.

As for Java 6, it's got it's own share of performance enhancements, one of the big ones is DTrace Support. At least we can tell why something's taking so long, and adapt the app to remove or mitigate the problem.

breedzicht:~ martijn$ telnet www.telstra.com 80
Trying 144.135.18.10...
Connected to www.telstra.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.telstra.com

HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:05:43 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Set-Cookie: SMSESSION=(long string deleted due to Slashdot lameness filter) path=/
Location: http://telstra.com/index.jsp
Content-Length: 149
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQSDRRSSS=ILGEHGFBPODHONPEHDGJGAOC; path=/
Cache-control: private

HEAD /index.jsp HTTP/1.1
Host: telstra.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:05:51 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:05:51 GMT
Cache-Control: private, no-cache
Connection: close
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Set-Cookie: SMIDENTITY=(long string deleted due to Slashdot lameness filter) expires=Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:05:57 GMT; path=/
Pragma: no-cache
Set-cookie: JSESSIONID=39606BC3B5E845B5ED4B46A280ABF628;Path=/
Via: 1.1 pitt8-tcom-nc03 (NetCache NetApp/6.0.6)

Connection closed by foreign host.
breedzicht:~ martijn$

Because Apple provide Java on Mac OS, not Sun. Remember how Microsoft provided the Windows version of Java, before Sun got pissed off with what they were doing with it and demanded it back? Same thing here, only Sun haven't got pissed off yet (hopefully soon!).

Can't be bothered looking for anything to back up what I've just said, but go to http://java.sun.com/ and look for any Mac OS X download. There aren't any.

Really? Let's say you have *one* rack full of drives, let's say holding 244 drives at 168 TB. Now, as 10% of the drives fail, would users notice the 10% drop in capacity? Really? Do you run your disk array at 90% capacity without expanding?

The fact is, even small clusters run at 50%-80% capacity, and if a whole datacenter is running at 80% capacity, they'll have to expand pretty soon. With these datacenter-in-a-box, Snap, and its done.

Plus, in the event of a sudden power off or crash, software raid can corrupt your disk if you're running with a parity disk.

RAID-Z is designed to prevent this.

So far, from what little I've seen, Sun has this one pretty well covered. I'll admit that I haven't checked out the competition, but Sun has been promoting the BlackBox for a while now (check out this video of it in 6.7 magnitude earthquake conditions: http://sunfeedroom.sun.com/?skin=twoclip&fr_story=FEEDROOM198997&rf=ev&autoplay=trueProject Blackbox Test)

With everything else they are doing, I think they are cornering this market. Intel getting into it is just solidifying that it's a desirable market.

This video is also neat because of the Sun SPOTs used to monitor the conditions throughout the testing.

P.S. Can anyone tell me how to get URL's to be on just the link text instead of showing the full url? The notes on posting don't really help.

Dig a little deeper--you really think that large companies such as IBM, Sun, Google et al would spend tens of millions of dollars developing these products and not give thought to the basic issues you have raised? I know I know this is Slashdot and this sort of armchair quarterbacking is de rigeur, but still... every one of these issues has been addressed on Jonathan Schwartz's blog, to say nothing of the myriad of technical and marketing literature which I'm sure covers it in exhaustive detail. Here's a Blackbox getting hit with a 6.7 quake; here's where he talks about shipping it, and security as well (it comes equipped with tamper, motion and GPS sensors, to say nothing of simply hiring a night watchman to call the cops if somebody comes prowling;) and the answer to your last question is no, no it does not.

Sun beat them to it with Project Blackbox http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp Next!

RAID doesn't open you up to data loss from accidental deletion, it just doesn't help prevent it. ZFS, however, does. You can check it out on FreeBSD (which has much better SATA controller support than OpenSolaris).

Although FreeBSD 7.0 (the version with ZFS) is still in Beta, it's been in a feature-freeze for a long time, and it's generally rock-solid. Just read the ZFS guides from OpenSolaris and the tuning guide for FreeBSD:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide

Note that ZFS really wants to be run on a 64-bit OS, and it wants a lot of RAM. If you've got that, though, it's fantastic, and it allows for easy snapshots (which helps protect against accidental deletion.)

Buy a bog standard machine (just check you can get solaris drivers), a couple of cheap SATA drives (size doesn't matter, you can upgrade them or add more drives later), and install OpenSolaris. Mirror the drives with ZFS and you're done, or use raid-z if you have several drives.

If you've not heard of ZFS, go read this: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs.jsp. I found out about it 4 weeks ago and it's pretty impressive.

Some of the benefits:
  - Guaranteed data integrity
  - Unlimited, instant snapshots for backup & recovery
  - Samba gives access to windows users (and Sun are just adding CIFS in Samba too)
  - With Samba, and Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client those snapshots integrate straight into explorer. Just right click a file or folder to restore previous versions. It's not quite Time Machine, but it's not bad.
  - ZFS means adding drives, or upgrading to bigger drives is a piece of cake
  - You can also export snapshots to an external disk for backups
  - You can check the whole disk for errors, which will be automatically repaired