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Previewing the Next Solaris OS

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the bill-and-scotty's-operating-system dept.

Eric Boutilier writes "Amy Rich has written an excellent Solaris Express (Solaris 10) how-to and general overview. It covers how the program works, using the community web site, and what's new in Solaris Express." Among many new features, the TCP/IP stack has been redesigned, IPv6 support improved, and both NFSv4 and USB 2.0 support added.

11 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Solaris doesn't suck... by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    (In case the first post is modded down to hell, that's what it said :-)

    The market for Solaris is very different from Linux, it's datacentre-land, not home user. I still don't see it lasting too long though... One of the microsoft lines that really is true is that Linux is a larger threat to Unix than to MS, at the moment (MS forgot the 'at the moment' bit :-)

    Two wars: The desktop and the datacentre. Despite the cliche of fighting a war on two fronts, Linux is porbably uniquely positioned to fight a war on N fronts (where N is a positive, large integer). The way it's set up is to leverage groups of people whilst folding the advances back into the core.

    SGI are turning to Linux, Sun will too. There'll be a few releases of both OS's first, though, IMHO.

    Simon.

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
    1. Re:Solaris doesn't suck... by jadel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Note the following is my opinion, I don't claim to have all the answers or any more insight than regularly reading IT news...
      The biggest difference (IMNSHO) between the open source community (including what is commonly referred to as the Linux community) and Microsoft is cultural. MS is a marketing driven organisation - features are chosen and development is directed based on what will shift boxes - even the current security initiatives are aimed at minimizing the amount of damage the reputation of the company was incurring due to its repeated and high profile security problems.
      OSS projects seem to come in a huge range of styles and with a similarly huge number of objectives, however there is a larger emphasis on technical merit. Linus has a reputation for being draconian in what he will allow into the kernel, he is entirely willing to throw patches away that don't meet his standards no matter how wonderful the functionality they provide may be.
      The result of this is that although OSS is generally not as "shiny" as MS products tend to be, it seems to be built on a much more solid foundation. Whether that is enough of an advantage for it to take a sizeable bite out of MS' market share remains to be seen.
      Of course MS also seem to be their own biggest enemy. The new licensing arrangements and product activation seem to be designed to make life difficult for businesses. Likewise the way they seem to alternate between smear campaigns against Linux and running scared any time a business talks about moving there desktops over to an OSS solution has been raising the profile of alternatives to people who would not have otherwise heard of them.
      Truly we live in interesting times (in both senses of the phrase.)

    2. Re:Solaris doesn't suck... by chthon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Anyone needing more than 8 CPU's ? Seriously, go to IBM/HP/Dell and then try to configure a system that has the same capacity as something from Sun. When you reach the same specs, you will most probably have the same price.

      The only place where Sun is really threatened is in the real low-end, and for that space they also have now x86 based systems.

      Is the Unisys/W2000 a contender with Sun in the 8-32 CPU space ? Not really, because all W2000 processes run in their own small protected space, whereas one application on Sun can take advantage of all CPU's on the system if necessary.

      A happy Linux user, which happens to work with Solaris on his job.

    3. Re:Solaris doesn't suck... by I_am_the_man · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Those companies willing to spend a few million do not care as much about speed as they do about their application being able to run on future versions of a vendor's processor with no recompile (and garanteed). They want to make sure that the OS they are buying with their million dollar setup is supported by the vendor for at least 10 years. They want to make sure that when the next version of the processor the vendor designs comes out that they can put it in their existing box; replacing the present processors or along side of them (without having to bring the box down). If raw throughput was Sun's only goal they could make Sparcs as fast as anybody else. But binary compatibility, open architecture, mix and match and endless support cycles for the OS is what makes million dollar companies say no to raw speed and yes to Sun. Oh and Sun's machines have incredible throughput and perform very well in real world scenarios.

  2. Re:Hopefully by fr0dicus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, apart from the much larger breadth of GNU tools, ssh and much higher performing threading model, 9 really sucked.

  3. Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL by larien · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hrm:

    # pkginfo SUNWbash
    system SUNWbash GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash)

    Perhaps not always installed by default, but it is available. That's on Solaris 8, BTW. As for other stuff, check out www.sunfreeware.com

  4. Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.

    We keep a local sunfreeware mirror for new sunos installs. Bash, updated Perl with modules, wget, lynx, openssl, bzip, sudo, lsof, openssh, and ncftp. (no gcc) If it wasn't for sunfreeware, I'd go nuts using Solaris. Anyone that has to move/push/alter data, needs common tools on all platforms, thank god for Sunfreeware.

  5. more power to them by nuckin+futs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any OS that is out there that can take away from the 90%+ market share that Microsoft holds is a good thing.
    Of course Microsoft's market share won't go down if this OS just replaces one *nix variant with another, but that's another story.

  6. Re:SunOS, anyone? by chegosaurus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > And when they finally got them here, one of
    > the V100s did not boot.

    > That's it, we almost ended up with a
    > network-enabled FORTH compiler that cost us
    > $1500.

    My friend bought a new car, and the dealership accidentally gave him the wrong set of keys. That was it, he almost ended up with a sealed glass and metal box that cost him $35000.

    One little tiny, easily rectified mistake does not mean the product sucks. If someone dismissed linux because they bought a preinstalled box which didn't boot because of a wrong jumper, would that mean linux was crappy? No. Of course not.

    > I'm still glad we didn't wait for tech support
    > to react (and I'm pretty sure it would take
    > them several more weeks)

    Have you ever *used* Sun support? To answer your later question, that's one of the reasons Sun are so expensive. They have great support. If you were on a decent support contract there could have been a guy with you inside an hour with a bag full of V100 parts. If you don't need support, go with linux/bsd or buy Sun kit off ebay.

    Once more, FUD-ish Sun-bashing gets modded up as interesting/informative. Replies which dare to defend Sun are usually modded down. Flamebait, troll, whatever. (They should have a "-1 heresy" tag.)

  7. Fire Engine by zz99 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The register has an old story about the new TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10, that is good reading.

    A quick summary of the story:

    The new stack has:
    - Efficient at handling multiple NICs
    - Low CPU usage (30% lower than Linux)
    - Build for targeting 10/100 Gbps in the future. Has a new construction where it is possible to offload the cpu by routing packet to dedicated packet processing processors.

    The last part seems like a preparation for the Sun hardware of tomorrow.

  8. cool feature i am using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    i try with solaris express and I find a cool feature called "ppriv" like this:

    gta3# ppriv $$
    1124: bash
    flags = 0x0
    E: all
    I: basic
    P: all
    L: all

    Ok, so I am root I have all privileges I think

    but now look at rpcbind, it is runnign as daemon but has less priviliges even than normal processes

    gta3# ppriv 100182
    100182: /usr/sbin/rpcbind
    flags = 0x2
    E: net_privaddr,proc_fork,sys_nfs
    I: none
    P: net_privaddr,proc_fork,sys_nfs
    L: all

    see, it does not have privilege to do 'exec'... there are 30 or more privileges and it has only 3. So i guess this means some stack attack will not work against it like exec shell

    also i can run and see privileges like thids

    gta3$ ppriv -D -e cat /etc/shadow
    cat[100619]: missing privilege "file_dac_read" (euid = 77293, syscall = 225) needed at ufs_iaccess+0xd2
    cat: cannot open /etc/shadow

    not sure what this means?