Slashdot Mirror
Solaris 9 Support On x86 - But With A Price
choka writes "According to this ZDNet UK article, Solaris 9 will return to x86 platform for $99 instead of being free. There will also be a $20 early access version for testing. Support and update will cost $75 per month. However there is no mention on the Solaris web site yet." There's more than just not being free -- originally, rumor had it that Sun was not going to be supporting, in a major way, Solaris 9 on x86 at all -- that decision has now been reversed. See our past article for information about the original decision.
both x86 versions and Sparc (I have an Ultra and I run x86 on a Dell Optiplex). Solaris is SLOW on x86 because of I/O. But as a server, it runs like a champ. The funny thing is, It takes a lONG time to get a usable system with Solaris. A default install is practically useless. It takes hours to install GNU tools, Apache and any other tools I need. I've been using Solaris for about a decade, and I STILL forget that you need to edit 2 files to change the IP. (/etc/ifconfig and /etc/nsswitch). I always thought that was dumb. I only remember that I screwed up when CDE no longer works. Oh well. I will not upgrade to x86_9 unless it has REAL benefits.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
You're mistaken. You can download patches from http://sunsolve.sun.com Support is for businesses who want someone to yell at or help replace machines or something like that. Realistically, you don't need to buy the support (I never have and my system is up to date in patches at least).
Patches are free. Look at http://sunsolve.sun.com
You get a ton more help though if you buy the contract.
Maybe you should do two seconds of research before you try to spread your FUD.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Here's the Heliopod blurb *cough*shameless plug*cough* from Oct 4:
By the way, TechTarget.com posted an interview with Chris Baker, Sun's Product Manager for Solaris x86. They discuss quite a few aspects of the OS, including support, driver development, and pricing plans. If you run x86, it's probably worth checking out.-- null
That is, in fact, a very good reason. Keeping current with the latest Solaris releases is quite a useful thing to do.
I also have another reason that probably won't apply to everyone here. I do freelance writing and a lot of it has to do with information security. When I need to try new tools or techniques, I never want to try them on my real computers if there's even any *chance* they might be dangerous. I use VMWare virtual machines running Linux and Windows. I'm going to be adding Solaris x86 to that mix soon, since virtually every result I'd gather from those systems will apply equally well to the SPARC systems most people have. I'm really looking forward to adding Solaris to my "virtual test lab".
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
The catcher is the support.
Why??? It is optional. Besides, there are mailing lists and documentation available for free (docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com are really very good). Formal support is really only necessary if the cost of a very quick problem resolution is cheaper than the support itself (i.e., situations where the support pays for itself).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I haven't heard "Slowlaris" since the mid nineties. I guess the System V vs. BSD debate is still going strong. Or, more likely, the poster just thinks the term has a nice ring to it.
/.'ers.
History of the term "Slowlaris" (according to me):
A long time ago there was a mobo named SUN, the Stanford University Networking board. Some folks took this tech and turned it into a product.
They needed an OS for their computer and, after losing their way initially, they eventually stopped upon unix, the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD). They used BSD as the base and created their OS, which they called, unimaginitivly enough, SunOS.
Time passed, Sun made more and more products, and eventually deciding on a multiprocessor architecture for their workstations. This decision ate up huge amounts of silicon and resulted in a dog of a machine called the sparc 10. The main problem was that there were no multithreaded applications for the multiprocessor hardware. That and the concentration on multiprocessor hardware meant that the cpus, on their own were pretty slow, AND, not to mention the fact that the cpus and mobos were so expensive, owing to the smp arch , that most clients could only afford 1 cpu.
Anyway, around this time Sun thought that, going forward they needed a better kernel to support all this smp shit, so they started on a new kernel, and, why stop there, a new layout to the entire OS.
About this time there was the BSD-SVR5 holy war going on. Most people probably don't realize that before MS, people actually used to argue about which unix was best.
So they renamed SunOS to Solaris 1 and then introduced a new SVR5 OS called Solaris 2. Nobody likes change and Solaris 2 didn't exactly make your sparc 10 run any faster, so most users kept on running SunOS (er. Soalris 1).
This is where the term "Slowlaris" came into vogue, the BSD'ers who didn't like the switch to system 5, talked up the fact that Solaris was sooo much slower than SunOS. Which was not entirely inaccurate, but the real issue was more likely the shitty software they were running on top of the OS.
And then NT and the MS marketing machine hit like an atom bomb and, if not for Sun and Gnu/Linux would probably have moved unix onto the os scrap heap with cpm, amiga, and all those other "speedy" os's loved by
So tell us again why everyone and their brother was screaming at us when we said we were putting x86 on indefinite hiatus (i.e. canning it) last year? There are a number of significant customers who use Solarix x86 to do real work, and there was a lot of hue and cry over that announcement; this was to correct that.
The real problem seems to me to be communication: someone should have done an impact study BEFORE that previous announcement, and either 1) made it clear that we shouldn't have gone there in the first place or 2) made it clear that nothing whatsoever would make it cost effective to continue. While I don't *know* that no one did such a study, behavior sure leads you to believe that they didn't.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
And don't knock knowing Solaris resume-wise.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Except that you don't have to pay for a Solaris/Sparc license.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I can build a fileserver a hell of a lot cheaper with Dell hardware than Sun hardware, and this lets me run the best OS for the job in my environment.
-30-
Who would use Solaris/x86 ? I mean, as a previous post mentioned, a default install is basically useless, furthermore there are very few apps precompiled for it (and I don't think it does well in terms of hardware support either).
It used to be effectively free back in the day, so it was good for providing developers with cheap workstations for building applications to run on real Sun servers. Maybe at a startup, maybe for students, etc. In many cases, it's more valuable to use platform-specific features than to code for maximum portability. But these days, you can get an Ultra 5 (I think it's being replaced by the Ultra 60 now) for the price of a PC, and it's a real SPARC, so Solaris x86 is less useful for that purpose.
Also, I guess people could use them for EPOS applications - loads of people ran SCO on x86 for that purpose.
The default install is "useless" because Solaris is used for so many different things. Sun's attitude is pragmatic. It's expected that anyone buying Sun kit is going to have their own strong opinions about how things should be, so there's little point in trying to shoehorn them in. You can get anything you want from the freeware CD that ships with Solaris, from sunfreeware.com, etc, then you can set up JumpStart to install all your machines that way automagically.
It's usually Linux eating up Solaris' market share, not the other way around.
Solaris shares the advantage of FreeBSD in that it's a known platform. People say "Linux" as if it's one thing, but there are a dozen or more distributions and they're all configured differently, all ship with slightly different libraries, all have different filesystem layouts, etc. If you are writing software that requires specific versions of specific things to be in specific places, then it's much easier to go with a known platform (even vendors like Oracle only support certain Linux distros for this reason). If you have your heart set on x86 hardware, Solaris can be a better choice than Linux for that reason.
The $99 for Solaris x86 isn't new. Solaris 8 x86 was also $99; I know because I bought it to upgrade my Solaris 7 x86 box (which was free because Sun was trying to get everyone to develop in Java, so they set out boxes of Solaris 7 x86 and a bunch of software like Java IDEs). And there also wasn't _any_ people-support for this unless you paid for it, as is being advertised now for Solaris 9 x86. You got free support from the web site and support sites, but not phone tech support. (Updates are no doubt free for download.) So, doesn't look like anything is new now, unless the monthly support cost has changed.
Oh, and in case people are wondering why someone might want Solaris x86, the answer was very easy for me: it's a reference platform. If your socket code works on Solaris it's pretty much going to work anywhere else just fine. If you want the real sh in an environment that actually expects sh (instead of bash, for example) then you go with Solaris. This is extremely handy for writing OS independent sh scripts. I can't afford a SparcStation, but I can afford Solaris x86, and it means I can do Solaris development and testing (okay, not really low-level stuff that is endian-important) at home.
Hrm.... no packet sniffer?
/usr/sbin/snoop
[root@localhost]$ whatis snoop
snoop snoop (1m) - capture and inspect network packets
[root@localhost]$ which snoop
And thats been there since at least Solaris 7.
Try checking your facts...
Tim Brown