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Hal Stern interview on Solaris & Linux Datacenter

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the for-the-biz-folks dept.

m3ntos writes "Hal Stern from Sun gets interviewed on Solaris and Linux pricepoints in the datacenter, among other things. What is going to replace the margin included with all those unused cycles in the datacenter?"

3 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Hal Stern has been around for a while ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For those that don't know him, Hal Stern has been associated with Sun for a long time and is one of the "sharp good" guys IMHO. He's written several Sysadmin related books including the classic "Managing NFS and NIS" and here's a 1995 Sysadmin article where he dives into adb - clearly a technical guy who knows his stuff ... although the article is more about marketing and pricing.

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    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  2. Most popular UNIX in business by mnmn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Articles like these really show what Solaris is all about, it is a corporate UNIX. The N1 grid, all the virtualization technologies (zones for ex), the advanced storage management, java application servers, all are about making management of large-scale technologies easier. This is where Solaris really shines, and thats why they cannot just take Linux and start using it. Linux's SMP is less scalable, threading less mature, and is a target moving too fast. It has major benefits on embedded systems, desktop systems, and a wide array of cpu architectures, but Solaris shines on its own turf.

    I however disagree that firewalls are obsoleted with stronger authentication. A firewall protects a network from the 'outside world'. Such an outside world is extremely hostile and will take advantage of ANY bugs, some unknown to you. I've seen attacks on sendmail, ssh, samba, windows netbios protocols, bugs in ipv6 implementation, dictionary attacks on telnet and ssh, all kinds of buffer overflows etc. These problems arent miraculously fixed when your authentication goes 512-bits and requires a password at least 12 characters long. Software will always have bugs, and to protect them, we'll need firewalls which will present a face with far fewer possible bugs than the network inside it.

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    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
  3. Re: Usefulness of a firewall by uid100 · · Score: 3, Interesting


    I agree, a firewall will have a place for the forseable future. The mail point however is to protect against mis-configured equipment or old, unpatched equipment. Most big Oracle shops I've known like to run at least one major version behind on their OS platform and don't patch the OS regularly. It's not uncommon to see new implementations of Oracle going in right now with Solaris 8 or even 2.6 running Oracle 8i. They don't even touch the /etc/inetd.conf.
    This is where firewalls become very useful.

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    ...yup...