Take A Look At Solaris 10

SilentBob4 writes "There haven't been many reviews of the recent Solaris 10 release from Sun Microsytems, and even those which are available are thin at best... until now. Mad Penguin, normally a Linux-only site, has release the most comprehensive and well-written review of the OS to date."

Comments

Is solaris still used often?

[stuffedmonkey]

I am wondering, not to troll, but what kinds of uses does Solaris still find itself filling?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enterprise computing. The names "Oracle" and "Solaris" are often spoted together, usually in the same sentance. Oracle may have made Linux a supported platform, hell it might even be their prefered platform, but dyed in the wool DBA's still tend to stick with Solaris.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[juhanio]

maybe not "from Sun Microsytems, and" but perhaps "from Sun Microsystems, and "

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun execs use it to lead investors to believe that the company still has a future.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

but what kinds of uses does Solaris still find itself filling?

I recently installed Solaris on my 2 Laptops. Reason: testing Solaris compatibility of software that I maintain! ;-)

It has been an interesting experience anyways, because I ended up not only testing (and fixing...) my own software, but also testing Solaris' usability (or rather: lack thereof...):

• Very fragile install process (pop in the wrong CD just once, and start over from scratch...)
• Refuses to create a Solaris partition if a Linux Swap partition is present (... because both share the same partition id 82, but other OS'es at least give you the option of "ignore this partition, and create a new one instead!"
• Poor dependancy management in the installer (the Solaris installer does flag broken dependancies, but unlike most Linux distros does not have a button to "resolve" these automatically)
• No straightforward way to configure a Swiss-German keyboard
• On one of my two laptops, X Display was all messed up after install. Fortunately, there was still an xf86config-like script lying around.
• poor hardware support (on both laptops, I had to download extra drivers from the net to get Ethernet... and the only way to get these drivers on the Laptop in the first place was to burn a CD.... One of the two Ethernet cards was a via-rhine, not exactly uncommon hardware!)
• Unobvious paths for some sundry utils /usr/ccs/bin/make, /usr/sfw/bin/gcc. Find is your friend, but locate has left you stranded...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[digitalchinky]

Solaris will be used by the military for many years to come, its uses are as broad as there are uses for any operating system in existance.
Not just databases or webservers, in my tiny little world we use it mostly for processing radio signals. This also includes demodulation of 'digital' signals through software, as well as de-multiplexing, removing overhead, decryption, stripping through reed solomon, trellis, etc, etc, etc... 'Infinite possibilities' comes to mind most frequently.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

Oh, and I forgot to mention:

• On my AMD64 laptop the whole install was graphical, but for some reason, on the old (AMD 32) laptop, most of it was handled by a curses (?) base program running in a dtterm.
• The author of the review critices the reboot that happens after the first CD. This is not that bad, some Linux distributions, such as SuSE do that too. However, it could at least pop out CD 1 after the reboot, or else, it'll just start over from scratch (which is a pain if you are not near your PC when the reboot happens). And yes, I did chose the option "automatically pop out CD" at the beginning of the install, but somehow it just doesn't happen...
• There is no easy (GUI) way to install packages "after the fact" if you see that you need them. You have to manually rifle through your 5 CD's, copy the package files to /var/spool/pkg, and run pkgadd manually (or did I just miss something here?).
• The drop-down menu to chose console login is nice, except for the case where you would need it the most: what do you do if the X installation is so messed-up that you don't see the lower half of your screen, including that menu? Oh, and telneting in from another machine is not an option, if your network card is one of the many that aren't supported out of the box...
• How do you mount an USB keyfob, or similar device?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Klootzak]

Actually, there are many (mostly-legacy) applications that will ONLY run on the "older" Unicies.

I worked for a number of years doing SysAdmin/Infrastructure-Architectural work for various global banks. The majority of the niche applications used to provide complex financial services are STILL not ported to "modern" unix-like OS's.

As an example, DST International's (http://www.dstinternational.com) HiPortfolio product will only run on IBM's AIX and Sun's Solaris as it's Unix OS platform. The reason for this is the product is so damned old and ingrained into that specific industry, the company can afford to ignore their customers demands and not re-invest potential profit in expensive porting exercises... You can get away with murder by holding a monopoly on most of the large Asset-Management businesses.

If a bunch of clever programmers got together and wrote some clean, horizontally-scaling, easily intergrated applications to destroy the hold of these monopolistic "niche" software products, they could really make some money (and the world would be better off with one less monopoly market).

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

but dyed in the wool DBA's still tend to stick with Solaris.

Hey, wouldn't they tend to stick with DB/2 on IBM mainframes? At least in the financial sector they do. They wouldn't touch such newfangled technology as Solaris and Oracle with a ten-foot pole ;-)

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[aaamr]

While Solaris x86 is a supported platform from Sun, the bread and butter for Solaris has always been the Sparc platforms, so I'm not surprised the x86 version is not as polished.

What does Solaris get you?

- Guaranteed binary compatibility from the smallest SunFire V100 to the largest 96-CPU capable StarFire boxes.

- Excellent platform stability and predictiability. I have never had to recompile my Solaris kernel to support a memory upgrade. Happened to me with RHEL 2.1 on a production site.

- Excellent and consistent hardware quality

- Reasonable price/performance for some situations. Last I checked, a 4-way SunFire V440 was cheaper than an equivalent Intel box, and far far cheaper than anything from IBM.

I've worked with all flavors of Unix from AIX to Solaris, to HP-UX, to Linux, and I've been running Linux since 1998 in one form or another. My favorite production-grade Unix is still Solaris.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[fizze]

I've seen lots of FPGA related software being used on Solaris, as well as EDA programs like Mentor Graphics.
It is actually a big and vital part these products play for an electronic engineer.

Of course, some may say, these programs run on x86 and probably Windows OS as well. If you want quality, go for the Solaris version on a Sun, prefferably.

I have seen Mentor Graphics on an rather old Sun workstation behaving 10 times as fast as on a Dual Xeon opening/drawing the exact same layout.

So I guess thats kinda a nice use for Solaris. (and your (old) Sun, too)

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[aaamr]

Oh, and I forgot to mention... the GUI is just awful. Always has been. I would not choose Solaris as a workstation environment, just as an outstanding server platform.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Chris Kamel]

I recently installed Solaris on my 2 Laptops. Reason: testing Solaris compatibility of software that I maintain
That's actually a circular reference, you're using Solaris because you need to support others who use it. Still doesn't answer the original question. And I don't mean to make fun of Solaris :)

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[rcamera]

we use solaris and sybase in a financial environment, and we've been doing it for over a dozen years now. i thought this was pretty typical on wall street...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[luvirini]

Ofcourse Not. But some banks have actually modernised to really radical things called Minicomputers. Ofcourse they have to be IBM. I mean they must be daring to go to iSeries instead of the zSeries.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, I should have qualified that as "dyed in the wool Oracle DBA's".

Just plain "should be dead" beardy type DBA's are generally found chained to old Unisys or IBM mainframes. Like Gollum, but without the humour.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

Oh, and I forgot to mention... the GUI is just awful.

Which makes it even more astonishing that it is so hard to get out of it. No Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to zap the X-server, no Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch virtual consoles, etc. The only straightforward way is the "console login" drop down menu, which is kind of useless in the case the screen is so messed-up that you don't see it...

Fortunately there is another way: if you are a fast typer, and manage to log in on the console before X would start, you stay in text mode.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

While Solaris x86 is a supported platform from Sun, the bread and butter for Solaris has always been the Sparc platforms, so I'm not surprised the x86 version is not as polished.

In the past, sure. But 10 is supposed to be a properly-polished x86 release for their new line of AMD64 machines.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to say Solaris is still running strong and is not going anywhere. Most of the DOD/Federal Gov uses it. Lets face it there the ones with all the money so thats what counts. It also has alot to do with there hardware and support. If anything goes wrong you have a sun engineer onsite with in 2 hours. Now on the other side I would love to run Linux too. Hell thats all I run at home. Solaris x86 has always been crap.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

On my AMD64 laptop the whole install was graphical, but for some reason, on the old (AMD 32) laptop, most of it was handled by a curses (?) base program running in a dtterm.

Resources/memory differences on the two laptops?

The author of the review critices the reboot that happens after the first CD. This is not that bad, some Linux distributions, such as SuSE do that too. However, it could at least pop out CD 1 after the reboot, or else, it'll just start over from scratch (which is a pain if you are not near your PC when the reboot happens). And yes, I did chose the option "automatically pop out CD" at the beginning of the install, but somehow it just doesn't happen...

Probably a not-totally-conformant CD drive that may not be "offically" supported under Solaris.

There is no easy (GUI) way to install packages "after the fact" if you see that you need them. You have to manually rifle through your 5 CD's, copy the package files to /var/spool/pkg, and run pkgadd manually (or did I just miss something here?).

You don't have to copy the packages. "pkgadd -d ..." works fine.

The drop-down menu to chose console login is nice, except for the case where you would need it the most: what do you do if the X installation is so messed-up that you don't see the lower half of your screen, including that menu? Oh, and telneting in from another machine is not an option, if your network card is one of the many that aren't supported out of the box...

"boot -s" or something similar from the OK> prompt will get you to single-user mode.

How do you mount an USB keyfob, or similar device?

No idea. The Sun hardware I work on is off in a server room - and I've never used USB keyfobs or similar on Solaris.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

That's actually a circular reference,

Yes, indeed, it is. Glad you caught it. I guess that's why I put that winky smiley after that sentence...

And I don't mean to make fun of Solaris :)

Well I do. Given the hard time it gave me during the install, I gladly seized the opportunity...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[cerberusss]

All your points are a bit moot when looking at this from the [insert big Corp]'s UNIX administrator point-of-view. Solaris comes installed on their own hardware and the unobvious paths are really the result of a long history.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[cerberusss]

Big databases, for instance. Oracle often runs on a couple of Suns in RAC mode (Real Application Cluster or something). Then the Suns are connected to a Veritas SAN. The database binaries (the software itself) are intalled on the Suns and they all write the data to the SAN.

It works on Linux as well, but it's nowhere near as common as the above scenario.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

You're right, I should have qualified that as "dyed in the wool Oracle DBA's".

Hmmm, but then, "dyed in the wool MySql DBA's" will tend to stick with Linux and MySql instead... And "dyed in the wool Sequel Server DBA's" would likewise stick with Windows...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see your point, although is there such a thing as a "dyed in the wool MySQL DBA"? Is there even such a thing as a "MySQL DBA"? I don't see there being much DB to A..

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[confused one]

Solaris is(was -- haven't been there in 3 years) used as the front end for data acquisition in a particular nuclear research lab.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[FatherOfONe]

I am not trying to be a jerk, but how much memory did you add before you had to recompile your kernel?

Do you run RH ES 3.0? Would that also be a problem with it?

I run SuSE and have been up to 4GiG and haven't had a problem, and the motherboard offers up to 24GB or RAM support (Duel AMD Opteron with 64bit SuSE).

Thanks!

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[rindeee]

Solaris is THE OS in the US Federal arena. While there is a good bit of Linux and Windows in use, Solaris is the mainstay when it comes to production computing. The growth rate is also quite amazing 'round here. The raw number of new Sun boxen brought online on a weekly basis amazes me. It's a good, solid, dependable OS that runs on excellent and reliable hardware. What's not to love from the standpoint of a giant customer who wants to drop in a box and have it "just work". Also keep in mind that Solaris sells a pre-hardened version of its OS and specialized hardware to the Fed for use in high-security environments.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[guacamole]

Solaris on x86 is supposed to come from the same source tree as Solaris for SPARC with only x86 bits being different. Given my previous experience with Solaris installer on sparc, I don't find the op's experience too surprising. Try a new feature or do something "non-standard" and it often blows up in your face.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single Govt. RFP (request for proposal) I've seen this year had the boilerplate requiring Solaris compatibility replaced with a complex paragraph saying that Solaris and/or Linux compatibility was required but if it wasn't already Linux compatible, a planned migration path to Linux _must_ be provided.

With EAL4 certification for Linux, the handwriting is on the wall, I think.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[aaamr]

It was an upgrade from 2GB to 4GB, and the installed kernel did not have large mem support compiled in. Just one of the steps that was overlooked in the process. If I recall, only 3.5GB was recognized before the new kernel was installed.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Paul Jakma]

but for some reason, on the old (AMD 32) laptop, most of it was handled by a curses (?) base program running in a dtterm.

Amount of memory most likely. The installer decides which to fire up based on RAM. Below X MB (I think 128, I cant remember) you get the text-install-in-dtterm-in-X. Below 64MB (iirc) you get text install from console - no X.

I dont remember the precise MB figures, unfortunately. The 'switch points' could be 256MB and 128MB respectively, rather than 128/64, I dont quite remember.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[oldmanmtn]

You have to manually rifle through your 5 CD's, copy the package files to /var/spool/pkg, and run pkgadd manually

You don't have to copy them anywhere. Either "pkgadd -d /cdrom/..." and select your package from the list, or "pkgadd -d /cdrom/.../package_name".

How do you mount an USB keyfob, or similar device?

In theory, I don't think you should have to mount those at all. vold should do that automatically - just like it does for cds. In practice, getting S10 to recognize my iPod wasn't quite that easy. I haven't tried a USB device, so I can't say whether it will really work.

If vold doesn't automatically mount the keyfob, then try rebooting with the it inserted. Once it has been recognized once at boot, it should be recognized automatically in the future.

Oh, and telneting in from another machine is not an option, if your network card is one of the many that aren't supported out of the box.

On a real PC, you can often redirect the console to a serial line and use "tip" (or some Linux equivalent) to get to the machine's console. That also gives you a way to get a network driver onto the machine without burning it to a CD. uuencode it to ascii, and then use ~> to copy the file over. Since console redirection often isn't available on laptops, this may not work for you.

You can also try PXE booting your machine. Since the boot/install image is on a server, you can easily insert your driver into the image so it is available at install time.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[AKnightCowboy]

I am wondering, not to troll, but what kinds of uses does Solaris still find itself filling?

When you need a system to stay up for years at a time, you run Solaris on SPARC hardware. When you need UNIX on a simple server that can be rebooted from time to time to correct errors then you can run Linux. As usual someone will stroll out their Red Hat 5.2 box that's been up since they installed it, but that's the exception to the rule. Every single one of my Solaris servers has been up at least 2 years straight without a reboot.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[oldmanmtn]

Which makes it even more astonishing that it is so hard to get out of it. No Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to zap the X-server.

This is available if you use the Xorg server instead of Xsun. I thought Xorg was the default in s10? If ctrl-alt-backspace isn't working, try using the crtl and alt on the right side of the keyboard. I don't know why those are different than the equivalents on the left side, but they seem to be a bit more reliable in this situation.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. How about the uses that nearly ever Fortune 500 company has? Slashdot whiners may cry "Open Source it!" and "Who needs Solaris when you have Linux?!" but clearly most large corporations find it a very good solution for their needs (at least, those that aren't inherently Microsoft outfits).

I love Linux, but if I were a major corporation, I'd go with Solaris all the way. It has a 25 year history, a large development and support division within Sun, great support contracts, tied-in hardware to eek the most out of your system . . . And most of all, you have someone to blame if things go wrong. You have accountability. You have massive QA and R&D put into it.

If your billion dollar corporation uses Debian, what happens when something awful happens? Who sucks it up and bites the bullet for things fucking up? And while Debian (and other distros) have plenty of people working on the development and testing side, how much time, effort and MONEY are put into R&D? Simply put - they don't have it. It's companies like Sun and Microsoft that foot R&D, which Linux later benefits from by copying and implementing the general idea of that output R&D.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

Resources/memory differences on the two laptops?

Could be. The old has 256 MB, while the new one has 512MB, IIRC.

But is the Solaris installed really that bloated that it has to drop back into a text-mode installer if it has "only" than 256MB ?!?

Probably a not-totally-conformant CD drive that may not be "offically" supported under Solaris.

It's a plain ATAPI drive... What happened was that after the boot the installer asked for CD #2, and I accidentally inserted #3. Of course it complained, but it refused to eject it! Even the button on the drive was ignored. Typing eject into a second dterm didn't do anything either. Time for a paperclip. After putting CD #2 in, it didn't recognize that one either. Eventually I clicked skip, then the installer asked for #3. After putting that in, it got ignored. Rebooting (without a CD) brought me back (after a while) to the installer asking for #3. No way to convince it to go back to #2... Eventually, I had to start over. There goes a Saturday afternoon!

You don't have to copy the packages. "pkgadd -d ..." works fine.

I noticed this option, but pkgadd seemed to consistently ignore it...

"boot -s" or something similar from the OK> prompt will get you to single-user mode.

Didn't try that one. This will be useful for the next time. Thanks.

No idea. The Sun hardware I work on is off in a server room - and I've never used USB keyfobs or similar on Solaris.

Keyfobs are handy to transfer the network driver to the Solaris box if you don't want to burn a CD (which is still slower to burn than simply write the stuff on the fob)

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[loony]

> - Excellent and consistent hardware quality

Your writing sounds good - but if anyone puts "quality hardware" and "sun" in one sentence they show that they have never working with any of it...
RSC resets for no apperant seasons on v480s, v20zs that don't open, split expander issues on F15k, memory issues on a v490 that took 4 service calls (on premium support level), v440s that overheat at an amazing 42 degrees celsius... that's just a few examples of the issues that we have had on the last generation of sun gear...

Peter.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

if you use the Xorg server instead of Xsun. I thought Xorg was the default in s10?

It is... Although, ironically, in my case the Xorg was the one with the messed-up display: the fix (on the old laptop...) was to change to Xsun. Weird...

If ctrl-alt-backspace isn't working, try using the crtl and alt on the right side of the keyboard.

Didn't think about that one. For some reason, I always use ctrl and alt from the left side. Thanks.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[aaamr]

Well, your mileage may vary.... we've had about a dozen Sun boxes that have been running flawlessly for several years.

Admittedly, I haven't worked extensively with the latest generation, so you may well be right there.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: both posts;

sounds like Solaris is more trouble than its worth, i will stick with Linux...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[billysara]

I admin over 100 sun machines and I can assure you that both the quality of the hardware, and the support are going rapidly down the pan.

No more sun machines for us.... :-/ Shame really as they used to be really nice machines.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ChairmanMeow]

I think it's probably 256/128, because when I installed Solaris on my 256MB desktop computer, it gave me the text-install-in-X.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

You don't have to copy them anywhere. Either "pkgadd -d /cdrom/..." and select your package from the list, or "pkgadd -d /cdrom/.../package_name".

Yeah, tried that, but made one small error, and specified base directory and package as separate params, and then gave up on it.

[keyfobs] In theory, I don't think you should have to mount those at all.

Hmm, this sounds interesting, never did actually try...

On a real PC, you can often redirect the console to a serial line and use "tip" (or some Linux equivalent) to get to the machine's console.

On a real PC. On a laptop without a serial port, this is somewhat harder, if all you have is a USB-to-serial cable, which would itself need a special driver...

You can also try PXE booting your machine. Since the boot/install image is on a server, you can easily insert your driver into the image so it is available at install time.

This is interesting. How exactly would you set it up? I know how to do this with Linux, but Solaris is mostly new to me (only used it as an unpriv'd user eons ago, when I was a student, but never admin'ed it). Where on the tftp server do you put the kernel, where do you find the kernel on the install media, how do you make the equivalent of the initrd, what is the Solaris equivalent of pxelinux, etc?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare the install process for Oracle 9i on Redhat Enterprise 2 or 3 against that for Solaris 9 (on Sparc) and you'll see why Solaris still has a real future. To get Oracle to install on Redhat you have to downgrade libraries so that Oracle can link its executables and during this stage your machine is in an unbootable state until you upgrade your libraries.

I've programmed professionally on Unix since the late 80's and been an admin on Solaris since the mid 90's. During this time I have seen the evolution of Linux and been a Linux user/admin since 1994 so I feel that I speak about both Operating systems from real experience.

My conclusion is this: In a professional environment run Solaris unless you have a compelling reason to run Linux. Quite simply Solaris is industrial strength OS and Redhat (I can't speak about other distros) is not there yet.

At home I run Linux because a couple of emulators (hercules and qemu) are only available on Linux (my compelling reason) and there is better device support.

My prediction is that Linux will be a major force in the low end of the market but pentration into the higher end of the market will be limited because factors other then the cost of the OS become more important to the decision making process.

Many Linux users have a PC-centric view of computing that leads to the rather naive question that started this thread.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[bbuR_bbuB]

Very fragile install process (pop in the wrong CD just once, and start over from scratch...)
That's funny, I install Solaris from a Jumpstart server, and it installs fine every time. What are these CDs you mention?

Refuses to create a Solaris partition if a Linux Swap partition is present (... because both share the same partition id 82, but other OS'es at least give you the option of "ignore this partition, and create a new one instead!"
Once again, I never had this problem installing Solaris on top of linux on my Sun Blade 100, Ultra 60, or Ultra 5/10.

Poor dependancy management in the installer (the Solaris installer does flag broken dependancies, but unlike most Linux distros does not have a button to "resolve" these automatically)
Do you really feel comfortable having a program automatically installing packages for you on an ENTERPRISE system? I know exactly what packages I want, and when I want them installed. Having a package manager 'know better' than me would be a huge mistake when people actually rely on your services.

No straightforward way to configure a Swiss-German keyboard
These people would probably beg to differ. Also, I think Java Desktop works wonders. Honestly, I know nothing about internationalization, so I'll shutup now.

On one of my two laptops, X Display was all messed up after install. Fortunately, there was still an xf86config-like script lying around.
Good for you! Where's the problem here?

poor hardware support (on both laptops, I had to download extra drivers from the net to get Ethernet... and the only way to get these drivers on the Laptop in the first place was to burn a CD.... One of the two Ethernet cards was a via-rhine, not exactly uncommon hardware!)
A laptop is obviously not the intended installation target machine for Solaris. Please stand by while I cry you a river that you had to install drivers. Don't like it? Use MacOSX or something.

Unobvious paths for some sundry utils /usr/ccs/bin/make, /usr/sfw/bin/gcc. Find is your friend, but locate has left you stranded...
They make sense to me. /usr/sfw -- sunfreeware. It's a pity that Solaris isn't set up exactly like Linux, isn't it? What's stopping you from installing your own Gnu Make (which is better than sun make) somewhere that you'd like?

I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion -- Solaris IS NOT Linux. You're not using it in the way it was intended, so it seems clunky and difficult to manage. Your complaints mostly revolve around the fact that since Solaris is not set up exactly the same, and is not as easy to administer than Linux, that it's unusable. Solaris is a really crummy desktop system. I would say that if you went from Linux to Solaris with no training, reading, or prior preparation, you would probably find it quite unusable.

Solaris is ornery on Intel hardware. Linux was pretty ornery too in its first few years on x86. I run a fairly large Solaris setup (15k+ users) and when we've looked at Linux, it takes a lot more work on the part of the sysadmin to ensure that the system doesn't flake out. Solaris on Sun hardware kicks ass for us. It may not kick ass for you. That doesn't mean it's unusable. I bet a tractor trailer would be unusable at first to your everyday SUV driver!

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ChairmanMeow]

It is... Although, ironically, in my case the Xorg was the one with the messed-up display: the fix (on the old laptop...) was to change to Xsun. Weird...

Exactly the same thing happened on my desktop computer... No matter how many times I ran xorgconfig, Xorg refused to run. I switched to Xsun, and it has worked just fine since then.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[multipartmixed]

>> You don't have to copy the packages. "pkgadd -d ..." works fine.

> I noticed this option, but pkgadd seemed to consistently ignore it...

Works fine on other versions. Did you specify the directory where your packages are stored [right], or did you specify the directory where your package is stored [wrong]?

Oh, and as for the installer. Again, on other versions, if you install from the "Install" CD with a supported video card, you get an X installer (actually, I think as of 7 or 8 it's a nasty java->X installer). If you toss that disc and just shove in Software 1/1, you get the good (curses) installer.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Listen Up]

You are complaining about the x86 version of Solaris. Hardware problems are non-existent on the Sparc platform. And you are complaining about features that have NOTHING to do with Enterprise Server computing. USB keyfob? WTF? If you want Linux, then install Linux. Linux is slowly reaching perfection one day at a time. But, if you want almost limitless power, scalability, reliability, and security on huge SMP systems and distributed networks today then you choose an OS like Solaris. If you are someone looking to use Solaris to play MP3 files then you have no idea what you are doing.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[freminlins]

Refuses to create a Solaris partition if a Linux Swap partition is present (... because both share the same partition id 82, but other OS'es at least give you the option of "ignore this partition, and create a new one instead! I've seen this with Linux the other way round. Mandrake insists on selecting a Solaris partition as swap and won't let you change it. Brain dead Linux.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ArsenneLupin]

Mandrake insists on selecting a Solaris partition as swap and won't let you change it. Brain dead Linux.

Not "brain dead Linux".

Brain dead Mandrake! (hint: there are other distros around, which are less brain dead...)

ObTrivia: In some rarely spoken European language, Mandrake literally means "my trash!"

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dknj]

well played troll... i'll bite.

I am going to assume you don't use solaris on a daily basis. If you think solaris is going to work like a redheaded stepchild, you are wrong. you seemed to have come across a bug in the installer, which didn't instruct vold to eject the cd. Because of this, the cdrom drive will remain locked by the volume manager. Forcefully changing the cd will not change anything because the drive never opened, according to vold. I would frequently find solaris machines with nonfunctioning cdrom drives in our datacenter because others that have no solaris experience would paperclip the cdrom drive to get their cds back. Very annoying.

next, don't trust solaris x86 on any hardware that doesn't say sun on the outside. simple as that. solaris is not what is special, its moreso the hardware it runs on and the sparc platform is what solaris is tuned for. yes, x86 may be supported but they don't support every single device created by man.

pkgadd does not ignore -d. get over it.

the install process will also drop you to a text-mode installer if your video card is not supported (a minor problem on our ultra 10s) or don't have a mouse setup. on that note, to fix your X display problem, try disabling it (if you can't figure out how, solaris is definitely not for you yet)

Look at what google turns up about your usb storage device

When you try a new OS, you have to get rid of the mentality you're used to. Solaris != Linux, therefore "features" that you normally expect aren't there because the path Solaris takes is different than other OS'. Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc which means, there generally aren't other OS's using the same partition id. Maybe Sun could update the installer, but they didn't. Deal with it. Install everything+oem and lock down the machine with jass, or know what you are doing before you start picking and choosing your packages. Finally, the paths are as they are for historical reasons as well. Solaris didn't always have gcc, they have a much better compiler. GCC was added to the companion cd later since it was publicly available on many sun freeware sites. All non-sun software goes to /usr/sfw.

Welcome to Solaris, if you don't like it, leave and keep preaching for -insert your favorite os here-. If you want to actually do something productive with Solaris, harness it's real power. Like Zones, ZFS, SMF, etc. Quit bitching about how it doesn't perform like Linux.

-dk
btw, to revive a zombie cdrom drive, stop vold, eject the cd manually (using the button on the cd/dvd drive), start vold

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[oldmanmtn]

This is interesting. How exactly would you set it up?

This is one place you really do need to read the docs: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5504/6mkv4nh8 g?a=view

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[grigori]

I put it on 2 laptops. No problem with ethernet. X is fine now that its on Xorg. what release are you trying?
IIRC, Solaris had partition id 82 before Linux grabbed it without asking "may I". Solaris 10 now uses partition id bf because of that.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Foobar of Borg]

I am wondering, not to troll, but what kinds of uses does Solaris still find itself filling?

Well, ever since the station left orbit, Solaris has mostly been trying to figure out the remaining details of the nature of the universe that it has not yet determined. That, and ejecting the occasional plasmic pseudo-pod from its surface.

Seriously though, were the writers of the Solaris operating system thinking of something like the Sun God, were they just crazed Stanislaw Lem fans, or did something else cause them to give the operating system this name?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[defMan]

He does know what he is doing. We hold Solaris to the same standards we hold other operating systems. We want it all, that is drivers for all sorts of old, new and exotic hardware + the scalability + reliability, etc.

That is what i expect from Linux and i have the same expectations from Solaris. Linux might (!!) not be there yet but when it gets there it has the reliability/scalability and it can still play mp3 files and drive silly old (and new) hardware that isn't supported by Solaris.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ek-1000-ek]

till rcently the only unix host vxworks developers could use was solaris!

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[smkndrkn]

Then you will be disapointed. Solaris isn't for your home desktop to play movies and listen to music.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

Solaris 10 now uses partition id bf because of that.

It does on any new partition it creates. But it still manages to become confused if a 82 partition happens to be already present during installation.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[chthon]

I have been in a financial environment where they used Oracle on HP/UX (and IBM DB/2, and even Bull).

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Metzli]

"Veritas SAN?" Do you mean "The the Suns use Veritas and are connected to a SAN?" Veritas doesn't make SAN hardware. Their software is normally used with storage from EMC, HP, Sun, Hitachi, etc.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Metzli]

So, your Solaris servers haven't been patched in at least two years? Long service/application uptimes is great, via HA clusters, load-balancing, etc. IMHO, long server uptimes means that the admin hasn't done his duty to keep the machines updated. My servers (Solaris and Linux) get quarterly patches, so that they're relatively up-to-date on security fixes, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Leo McGarry]

Interesting piece of totally unrelated trivia: Do you know what Oracle is running their in-house database on? A cluster of Xserves. There was a press release a couple of months ago.

I found that amusing.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Leo McGarry]

The raw number of new Sun boxen

For the love of all that's good and holy, tell me that was a typo.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[leonbev]

"Reasonable price/performance for some situations. Last I checked, a 4-way SunFire V440 was cheaper than an equivalent Intel box, and far far cheaper than anything from IBM."

Umm... According to Sun's web site, the cheapest 4 way SunFire V440 that they offer is $24,000. You can get a 4 way Intel Xeon server for MUCH cheaper than that from a variety of vendors.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[CptNerd]

The raw number of new Sun boxen

For the love of all that's good and holy, tell me that was a typo.

"Boxen" is old hacker-speak for the plural of "box". Uses the same pluralization rule as "ox - oxen".

You're not from around here, are you? ^_^

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[grigori]

Yup that's true. Naughty Linux for stealing the id in the first place! Speaking of partitions it is confusing that Solaris has its "slices" within a single partition that fdisk sees. Not bad or dumb, just different.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

pkgadd can be finiky sometimes depending on the package type you are installing. Try doing a 'pkgadd -d .' in the directory where the packages are located.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[joeljkp]

"They make sense to me. /usr/sfw -- sunfreeware."

Sun newbie here, just curious: what does the /usr/ccs/* stand for?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

Works fine on other versions. Did you specify the directory where your packages are stored [right], or did you specify the directory where your package is stored [wrong]?

Actually I did pkgadd -d directory package, in two separate parameters, where directory was the where the packages where stored. That would be right?

However, oldmanmtn has pointed out a different syntax, with one argument after -d, namely the directory of the package. I haven't tried that one. Well, I'll have to do some further tests this evening, to see which variant works, and which doesn't...

if you install from the "Install" CD with a supported video card, you get an X installer

Actually, during install, X was just fine on both laptops. The messed up display happened after install was finished. The text installer on the "low memory" laptop was running in a dterm, under X.

If you toss that disc and just shove in Software 1/1, you get the good (curses) installer.

The CD used on both laptops was CD 1 (of 4), I didn't download any special CD with drivers for my graphics card.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[oldmanmtn]

well played troll... i'll bite.

No need to be a dick. He ran into reasonable problems with some of Solaris' rough edges.

next, don't trust solaris x86 on any hardware that doesn't say sun on the outside

Bull. S10 is humming along just fine on my 2 CPU Dell, my Thinkpad T42 (modulo the Centrino-based Wifi), my homebrewed Epia file server, and my homebrewed 2-way Opteron system. Solaris doesn't have the driver support of Linux, but it still runs on a ton of different hardware.

Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc

No. Solaris is Solaris. The Solaris running on your x86 machine is exactly the same as the Solaris running on your SPARC. Obviously there is some platform-specific code, but it is _not_ a port. They are built from the exact same source tree.

All non-sun software goes to /usr/sfw.

Or /opt/sfw.

Welcome to Solaris, if you don't like it, leave and keep preaching for ...

Again, don't be a dick. He was trying to use Solaris and ran into trouble. It happens. If you look at the rest of the thread, it's obvious that he is looking for suggestions, and is willing to try them out. Do you actually think your semi-informed arrogance is going to make anybody more interested in using Solaris?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[freminlins]

Yes, sorry, that's what I meant. Debian works fine.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Disoculated]

Aw, that's not really fair. You're trying to paint Solaris as a server only operating system, when it's definetly part of Sun's strategy to use it as a workstation OS. What about Sun Blades? Or Tadpoles? Obviously they'd like part of the desktop market.

And they play movies and music just fine too. Heck, you can even get a USB player/drive fob for solaris at nextcomeurope

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

He does know what he is doing. We hold Solaris to the same standards we hold other operating systems. We want it all, that is drivers for all sorts of old, new and exotic hardware + the scalability + reliability, etc.

No, he doesn't.. nor do you. Solaris (like Apple) PROPERLY supports a FINITE set of hardware. This grabastic "support everything under the Sun " (ack) attitude is not appropriate for what amounts to a server OS.

Go back to chipping your game console or whatever lameass stuff you do in your spare time.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Just Some Guy]

If you are someone looking to use Solaris to play MP3 files then you have no idea what you are doing.

What's wrong with that? I haven't touched Solaris since I put v7 on an SS5 I had lying around. I'm perfectly happy with my BSD ("Dying!") servers, but I wouldn't mind playing around with Solaris on a spare desktop machine just to see what it's all about. Am I a bad person because I don't care to benchmark Oracle on it, or because I might want to compare it to my Linux desktops out of curiosity?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 entries found for duel.
To select an entry, click on it.
duel[1,noun]duel[2,verb]

Main Entry: 1duel
Pronunciation: 'dü-&l also 'dyü-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Medieval Latin duellum, from Old Latin, war
1 : a combat between two persons; specifically : a formal combat with weapons fought between two persons in the presence of witnesses
2 : a conflict between antagonistic persons, ideas, or forces; also : a hard-fought contest between two opponents

6 entries found for dual.
To select an entry, click on it.
dual[1,adjective]dual[2,noun]dual carriagewaydual citizenshipdual-purposedual-energy x-ray absorptiometry

Main Entry: 1dual
Pronunciation: 'dü(-&)l also 'dyü-&l
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin dualis, from duo two -- more at TWO
1 of grammatical number : denoting reference to two
2 a : consisting of two parts or elements or having two like parts : DOUBLE b : having a double character or nature
- dually /-&(l)-lE/ adverb

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Bad-JuJu-Man]

Well, I can only speak for where I work. EVERYTHING that manages, provisions and monitors every DSL line in 13 states is on a Sparc server running Solaris. Thats quite a few boxes. I also happen to know that many systems run by a local D.O.D./D.O.E laboratory are Solaris on SParc.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[randallpowell]

I tried it on my PC. It couldn't run the GUI installer, just Bourne shell. I was going to get the commands for the install but I found that my nVidia GeForce 2 card isn't fully supported. So I'll stick with Linux till I can afford a SPARC PC with Solaris for my next PC.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dknj]

No need to be a dick. He ran into reasonable problems with some of Solaris' rough edges.
let it be known that i did not try to be a dick, but lets not ignore the other side of this.. s/he was testing solaris' usability based off of the install process. if you want to judge a book by its cover then i will do the same...

No. Solaris is Solaris. The Solaris running on your x86 machine is exactly the same as the Solaris running on your SPARC. Obviously there is some platform-specific code, but it is _not_ a port. They are built from the exact same source tree.
lets take an example here. gaim is gaim. the gaim running on linux is exactly the same as the gaim running on windows. they are built from the exact same source tree. gaim was ported to windows in the same manner that solaris was ported to x86.. by writing platform-specific code.

Again, don't be a dick. ... Do you actually think your semi-informed arrogance is going to make anybody more interested in using Solaris?
Pot, kettle, black?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[randallpowell]

I'd take Sun over Microsoft any day. Afterall, Sun supports Unix, Oracle makes software for it, and, from what I heard from a member of a local church, the tech support is great but they rarely call. Yes, a church here uses it for their Web site. Solaris with Apache.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[megarich]

I, for the most part, agree with what you said but why wold solaris even bother coming out with an x86 version? I don't know. Is the x86 version targetted for business' as well or possibly home use?

Your right about very little if any hardware problems with sparc platform but sun's hardware is too expensive. I started disliking sun when the cheapest replacement network card i can find is $150 for an old ultrasparc workstation.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[glasn0st]

No Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to zap the X-server

That was the first thing I googled after switching over a workstation to Solaris. This blog post may be helpful.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[jericho4.0]

The OP contributed some usefull opinions of Solaris, from the POV of most of us dabblers without sparc boxes lying around.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[cayenne8]

"Your right about very little if any hardware problems with sparc platform but sun's hardware is too expensive. I started disliking sun when the cheapest replacement network card i can find is $150 for an old ultrasparc workstation."

Remember...eBay is your friend. You can pick up older Sun hardware there for next to nothing these days.....

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[abigor]

Do you work for Apple or something? Just curious. You seem pretty knowledgeable about the innards of OS X, and downright fanatical about defending/promoting the company. Now don't get all defensive; I'm just asking.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[owlstead]

I bet a tractor trailer would be unusable at first to your everyday SUV driver!

You go all the way in defending Solaris and then you compare it to a tractor trailer?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Oracle may have made Linux a supported platform,

Oracle made Redhat Enterprise a supported platform, and then it's only supported on RedHat AS/ES (Server versions), not on WS (Workstation version).

This is very different then saying that Oracle considers "Linux" a supported platform. Oracle on Debian or Suse is not well supported by Oracle at all.

And consider that Solaris has actually been cheaper then RHEL in many respects, and you'll see more reasons why Solaris is a common platform for Oracle in a large installation.

Maybe this has changed since 9i. If so, please feel free to enlighten me.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but it was adopted heavily by geek chic wannabees in the late 90s. Boxen, virii, das blinkenlights, bofh, $foo, lart, and other old bits of hackerspeak now make you look like a poser.

Not only does it make you look like a poser, but a poser of a lifestyle now only glorified by the userfriendly web comic and the sort of people who use anime emoticons and spout japanese every chance they get.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh please, you are such a dick. typical zealot behavior.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ShyGuy91284]

I'm in college, so I haven't really seen it used in the workplace, but where I go to school, the CS department uses Solaris SPARC machines (and seem to be upgrading them still), IT uses primarily Linux I believe, and SE uses Windows. So Solaris most likely still has a presense on academia, since our school isn't bound at the hip with SUN or anything.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ultranova]

Sun newbie here, just curious: what does the /usr/ccs/* stand for?

"Carboncopysoftware", of course. Sun, being enterprise-class server OS, also has enterprise-class warez tools. A home user might be willing to wait for a few days as an app downloads, but in a large datacenter, the download must be complete NOW !

"/usr/ccs/" -folder includes enterprise-class Gnutella- Edonkey2000- and BitTorrent-clients. They all strictly enforce the client-server model by using a built-in webserver as user interface, are written in Java, and support such essential functions as replication (to allow a secondary warez server to immediately take over if the primary fails) and IP addres spoofing (by dynamically reprogramming random routers in various backbone networks) to both protect against hostile copyright enforcement and to "listen in" on other people getting the same file.

Yes - Solaris, the right tool for enterprise class copyright infringement !

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[PCM2]

I, for the most part, agree with what you said but why wold solaris even bother coming out with an x86 version? I don't know. Is the x86 version targetted for business' as well or possibly home use?

Sun's business in SPARC-based workstations, which used to be one of its mainstays, has dropped to almost zero. Notice that Sun's new workstation class machines run on AMD x86 processors and other commodity hardware, in order to be price competitive. It makes sense, therefore, for Sun to produce an x86 version of Solaris.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[AFCArchvile]

agreed, CDE is fugly, but it's functional. Even after a bit of kicking around in Java Desktop a bit, I like CDE on my Ultra 2 because it loads a lot faster, and doesn't take up the huge amount of memory and CPU time that GNOME does. Desktop wallpapers got old on about the fourth time I logged in just to do a few console things, and speaking of console, gnome-terminal's antialiased fonts are worthless when using a 1152x900 display; I was opening rxvt more often because it wasn't a resource hog.

After a while, I saw that Java Desktop was a lot less appealing on a low-end machine like the Ultra 2. I mean, I can still run XMMS and The Gimp in CDE just fine, even though I can't use a custom wallpaper.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dotgain]

Not booted in Solaris ATM, so this is from memory, but I think the

disks

command created the necessary links in /dev for me, after which vold worked with my keyfobs every time.

That was what you do if you add disks to the system, and forget to do a "boot -r", or "touch /reconfigure; shutdown ...".

Hope this works for you, I remember being stumped for just a few seconds after putting one of these keyfobs in before the disks command came back to me. While I don't run Solaris much these days, I still regard it as an excellent and mature OS.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[bheading]

Solaris on SPARC is a rock solid heavy-lifting production environment that doesn't break. End of story. 6 year old Ultra 60s can take the latest Solaris OS and run to provide a perfectly usable environment for coding and development work. Linux's SMP support doesn't even touch the kind of scalability that you'll get on a big Sun box.

Sure, I wouldn't want to run Solaris at home. It's not for doing leisurely stuff or for playing games, it probably won't support your video card, never mind talk to your PDA, and a lot of your USB devices won't work and so on. But that's not what it's for.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[georgewilliamherbert]

So, your Solaris servers haven't been patched in at least two years? Long service/application uptimes is great, via HA clusters, load-balancing, etc. IMHO, long server uptimes means that the admin hasn't done his duty to keep the machines updated. My servers (Solaris and Linux) get quarterly patches, so that they're relatively up-to-date on security fixes, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.

You can patch most stuff without a reboot, though the kernel jumbo patches and libc are exceptions.

In most cases those are not mission critical; there are occational kernel or libc security patches, or you sometimes are running the hardware or app that needs that particular patch, but most of the time you can safely defer those if you want to.

Services patches, app patches, may be more time critical, but usually don't require reboots.

With many Solaris server installations, if you have properly minimized the system and just aren't running extra services and apps, it may be years between hitting a critical security or performance bug in the stuff you have turned on. Minimized systems allow you to skate some on that stuff... but you have to pay attention to what you left running, and patch releases.

Quarterly patches and associated maintenance windows and reboots are probably an excellent best practice. I really don't want to sound like I'm harshing on you for that... making that practice stick is great for you and your organization.

But it's neither uncommon nor necessarily unsafe to (with a little bit of care) leave a Solaris box which has been minimized for what it's actual functions are running for a year or more.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use any commodity NIC with an older PCI UltraSparc machine. If it's Sbus, well... Yeah. eBay has le's, hme's and bme's on the cheap, all the time.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, if you accidentally (or purposefully :) boot from the "Software 1" disk, you will always get the X/curses based installer. It will only install the basic software from the first disk, and WebStart will pop up and install the rest on the first boot.

If you're booting off of the "Installation" disk, I don't believe that it even supports X/curses based install anymore. It's either WebStart, or console, period.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dotgain]

Yes, I'm glad I foresaw this back before my first Sol x86 install. Given the quality of your average linux dist installer, I changed the partition id to something linux wouldn't recongnise, and in turn, spacker.

It's one thing I wish one of Solaris or Linux would change. i.e. choose a different value to identify their partition, maintain compatibility with the old one but proceed with caution, rather than just saying "82!? excellent! /sbin/mkswap /dev/xxxx"

Because your average schoolboy linux install script writer is bound to think "serves you right for running Solaris, you old git", I think the change would better come from Sun.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dotgain]

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. My comment earlier is redundant. In trying to protect myself as much as possible, I created the Solaris partition myself, with id 82 before even running the installer. Had I have known Sun have already picked up the ball and cleaned up the toys baby Linux threw out of its cot, I'd have let the Solaris installer go its own way.

Thanks again, my friend.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[freminlins]

Who used it first?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dotgain]

Anything that is NOT a DOS partition table is certainly NOT bad or dumb. Like the 640k base RAM crap, the DOS partition table is just another hangover from a myopic design.

Get any of a Mac, Sparc or Indy. Things seem alien and peculiar at first, even unnecessary. Until about six months later when you realise all the troble that you've had on x86 boxes just can't be had on anything else.

Getting Solaris to run on an x86, when it's so used to running on real hardware, must have been quite a challenge. Thanks and well done, Sun. On behalf of my forebearers, I apologise for the existence of the x86.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Leroy Brown]

Enterprise computing. There's something to be said about the vendor of your server being the same vendor as your operating system, not even accounting for how well it performs.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[zonker]

i've never installed solaris before so i'm in no way experienced with it, but i had a copy of 9 (their free student thing) and tried to install it under vmware. i ended up giving up as i couldn't figure the stupid installer out even after perusing the documentation. i probably won't bother with looking at 10...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dotgain]

See below. While I'm not certain it's the truth, it shouldn't really be a matter of "who used it first". Imagine if things like PCI device ID's, ethernet MAC addresses etc. were available to the first person to use it.

In any case, it seems Sun have changed the partition ID they use to another one, which is good of 'em, even if they did "use it first".

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[j-pimp]

Uh minicomputer is an antiquated term from the days where mainframe wa synomous with computer, and a system/38 (the predessor to the iSeries) was considered small being it was the size of a large desk. We call iSeries class machines midranges these days Justin Dearing Midrange/Unix admin PS Midranges arent; all green screens and dumb terminals these days. They even have this new fangled thing called apache where you can write applications that run in a web browser.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[CptNerd]

Nan desu ka?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

This blog post [+kb mode and Terminate_Server]may be helpful.

Yep, that works. Only sore point: the needed +kb option also has the side-effect of disabling Alt+Gr... But using Shift+Delete instead of AltGr+Delete solved the issue.

Of course, in the case where you'd need it the most (messed up X install and no network), you'd have a hard time to set it up in the first place...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Redhat is a distribution of Linux, so I'm perfectly correct in what I said.

Oracle don't support it, but with a little trickery it is possible to get Oracle 9 & probably 10 to install on something other than Redhat AS & ES. I've got a production server running Oracle 9i on Fedora Core 2 (We were too cheap for a Redhat AS or even a Solaris x86 commerical licence). Client only, but our DBA did install Oracle 9i on another Fedora machine and successfully create a small test database. I don't know how many shops would want to trust production data to a non-supported setup like that, though.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

Sun's business in SPARC-based workstations, which used to be one of its mainstays, has dropped to almost zero.

We are still a Sun shop with SPARC servers, SPARC workstations for development and remote deployment, and SunRay thin-clients combined with Citrix servers for when we need windows in some of our classrooms and simulators (we do a mix of government and education work).

We're about to buy a new round of SunBlade 2500 workstations but in the back of my head I can't help but wonder if we should consider making the jump to their AMD x86 workstations (and servers). The main thing holding us back is binary compatibility (we would need to rebuild our in-house apps for X86 Solaris) plus I'm still not sure where Sun is heading. They seem more serious about x86 than ever before, but I still get mixed messages.

And finally, as a hedge we've also been playing around with Linux ports of our apps.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously to protect my job.... I work in one of the world's top ten banks and I can confirm that we have a lot of important stuff running off of Sun, HP and IBM Unix kit (including all the top-end stuff like Superdome, F15K and p690) with Oracle (and other application code). True, the really important stuff runs off DB/2 & CICS on the mainframes, but we do use Unix on stuff which is relatively important and, in general, it's fairly reliable.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

[keyfobs] In theory, I don't think you should have to mount those at all.

Hmm, this sounds interesting, never did actually try...

Tried it, there was indeed a /dev/usb/mass-storage0 entry that appeared as soon as I inserted my SanDisk cruzer, but nothing was mounted (... nor was that device node readable).

After a bit of googling around, I came accross the following post: Re: LaCie disk on usb 2.0

Summary: You first use prtconf -v to find out the USB vendor and product id of your device (equivalent of Linux' lsusb etc commands) and then append the following line to /kernel/drv/scsa2usb.conf (or /kernel/drv/usba10_scsa2usb.conf, depending on your kernel patch level):

attribute-override-list = "vid=0x781 pid=0x8888 rev=* subclass=ufi protocol=cb modesense=false reduced-cmd-support=true";

If you have more than one USB storage device, add a vid=... clause for each of them, separated by comma:

attribute-override-list = "vid=0x781 pid=0x8888 rev=* subclass=ufi protocol=cb modesense=false reduced-cmd-support=true", "vid=0x54c pid=0x10 rev=* subclass=ufi protocol=cb modesense=false reduced-cmd-support=true";

After addding this, I rebooted, and as soon as I plugged in the SanDisk Cruzer or my Sony camera, they were automatically mounted on /rmdisk/noname and /rmdisk/unnamed_rmdisk. Cool!

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[BlueUnderwear]

This is interesting. Thanks. Just wondering though whether you can set up that install server on any Unix box, or whether the server already would need to be a Solaris box. In the latter case, you might have a chicken and egg problem...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ArsenneLupin]

You go all the way in defending Solaris and then you compare it to a tractor trailer?

Ha, and he compared Linux to a SUV... Now, fellow penguinistas, before you scream, consider this: if Linux has become so easy that even a soccer mom can use it, it has effectively won the desktop war! But unlike its real-world counterpart, it does support ACPI and other power-saving features. Moreover it stays virus-free by being secure itself, rather than by pre-emptively flattening the Windows boxen around it...

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[chegosaurus]

Not to troll (seriously) but what kind of uses does linux fulfill? Anything you can do with Linux, I can do with Solaris. Well, apart from all the weird hobbyist stuff, but you can keep that. I do rather envy you a few of your device drivers though.... ;-)

You know all that cool stuff in Linux? Linus didn't think of it. It's been around for years.

I'm typing this on KDE-3.4rc1, running on Solaris 10, on a brand-spanking new Vaio. No effort required to install, to build the GNU stuff, to get anything working (no support for the built in Wireless, but I don't mind that, and hopefully it will come in time.)

Solaris is a fine desktop OS - I wouldn't recommend switching if you already enjoy using another OS though, but in real-life people shouting, critical server environments, I'll take Solaris every time. Solaris has robustness, predictability, reliability, debugging and monitoring tools that most of the linux community don't know exists.

10 is the first new version of Solaris I've really got excited about (I've been using it professionally since 2.4.) The big new features (DTrace, Zones, the smf, the new TCP stack, ZFS, which we haven't seen yet) are all super-cool and, so far as I know, unique. There are so many other smaller enhancements too, like the resource management, improved process monitoring tools, kmdb etc. etc.

And you linux people wouldn't believe the amount, or coverage and quality of the documentation. The support's not bad either, and there's a much bigger and more supportive user community than you might think. Your average Solaris admin is a lot more seasoned and a lot less leet than your average linux "guru", and it all goes to help us get our problems sorted out more quickly.

Solaris is everywhere, goes deep, and is respected and liked by a lot of people. It's going nowhere fast, and I can only see 10 making further inroads.

The Unixes are all great in their own way. Take a look around, don't be shortsighted. Computers don't start and end with Linux.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to call them "behind the times"....
IBM 360 - VSAM files

a cutting edge shop will use IBM 370 and IMS for the database. IMS is a hierarchial database that will blow away any RDBMS for transaction speed, but they are a bitch to program correctly.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Keith Maniac]

There are two types of packages on Solaris. "datastream" packages are a single file, and are installed with

pkgadd -d "package"

packages may also be a directory named something like FOOpkg, which are installed as so:

pkgadd -d /path/to/parentdir FOOpkg

The confusing part, of course, is that many people name their datastream packages FOOpkg, making the distinction less than obvious. Datastreams may also contain more than one package, and individual packages may be installed from a datastream by naming them on the command line.

Also, datastream and directory package types can be turned into each other with "pkgtrans". Enjoy.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb fuck attitudes like yours are why Sun and Apple are doomed to niche market and eventually to die out and be replaced by cheaper, more powerful x86/64 machines.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

> > Very fragile install process (pop in the wrong CD just once, and start over from scratch...)
> That's funny, I install Solaris from a Jumpstart server, and it installs fine every time. What are these CDs you mention?

Jumpstart is a nice piece of technology, but it still doesn't compare to the AIX stuff. And the config files are still a bit wacky -- there's no easy way to specify packages to install on re-imaging. You have to do a fair amount of grunt work to set it up to whatever you want it to be. (Of course, YMMV depending on what you want to do! :)

[ ... ]

> > Poor dependancy management in the installer (the Solaris installer does flag broken dependancies, but unlike most Linux distros does not have a button to "resolve" these automatically)
> Do you really feel comfortable having a program > automatically installing packages for you on an > ENTERPRISE system? I know exactly what packages > I want, and when I want them installed. Having a > package manager 'know better' than me would be a > huge mistake when people actually rely on your services.

Egads! You can't be serious about that! Have you tried installing Solaris patches, which *DON'T* enforce dependencies? It's just plain madness! Sanity checks ARE A GOOD THING!!!!

To me, it's like saying that differently shaped power plugs to easily differentiate between different voltages/amps/cycles are a bad thing because you should be testing the power cord with a $5 Radio Shack voltmeter every time. Have you ever tried to open up a pkgadd package in vi and try to figure out what's going on? It's just nasty!

To take your argument further, the only thing you should get is a tar file with (maybe) a README file in it. In that case, you wouldn't have to rely on some commie-loving piece of software that "knows better than you do" about how to deal with the software. Yeesh! The stone age was thataway!

Package management is one of the most poorly developed areas in Solaris -- and in an OS almost famous for its lack of administrator support, that's quite impressive. As a recreational impossibility for the reader, how do you find out which package 'pstat' is in? I tried to do something like that once, and from that point forward just gave up and started installing absolutely everything on the CDs. If you ever miss installing a program, trying to put it onto the system using pkgadd is an experience you will always try to forget.

Yes, there are downsides to using tools and trusting that the tools work. Having had to recover from some totally berked AIX software installs/upgrades ("It's *SUPPOSED* to take care of this!!!! AIIIIIIEEEE!!!!") it can be a pain to put the damn thing back to a consistent state. But, since I've had a total of three bad software installs (not counting OS installs) over an eight year period, it's not a big deal. (Each time took me about half an hour or so to recover.)

I've lived through some pretty bizarre stuff, and most of it hasn't been self-inflicted. When good tools go bad, it's bad. But the 99% of the time that good tools are good, life is REALLY good BECAUSE you don't have to deal with a lower level of complexity. I know how to program in assembler, but I almost always script in Perl because it gives me higher level ability to "just get things done".

[ ... ]

> > Unobvious paths for some sundry utils /usr/ccs/bin/make, /usr/sfw/bin/gcc. Find is your friend, but locate has left you stranded...
> They make sense to me. /usr/sfw -- sunfreeware. It's a pity that Solaris isn't set up exactly like Linux, isn't it? What's stopping you from installing your own Gnu Make (which is better than sun make) somewhere that you'd like?

Oh dear...

To be fair, the Solaris path structure does make some sense, it's just that it's not exactly a glorious place to wind

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[seachnasaigh]

I've been working with Solaris10 for a week now. It's like riding a new Harley after not having touched my Triumph Bonneville for 10 years. I grew up (in my 20's) working in Vax and Sun datacentres, later a Solaris guru working the web ... I got real used to Solaris 5, 6, 7 ... stopped at 8 switched to Linux (RH, SuSE) and wow, what a worldshattering difference. Felt like an 11 year old with his first woodie. Since, I've learnt the ins and outs of Linux server, desktop, struggled mightily with where pkginstall stuck things, the /root, loads of quirks. Now, back to Solaris and wow, I'm home, but someone really redecorated. I cut my teeth in kshell; bash was a real comeuppance, and the new Solaris is like a little of both. Lighten up; I've learnt German, and Dutch, and listening to the two is like very nearly understanding but NOT QUITE. That's kind of what coming back to Solaris 10 is like. It's not quite the Sun I'm used to, but more like it than the Linux I've learnt. If you grew up in Linux, this is going to be kind of like my journey. Give it time, the differences are not bad, they're just different. I'm impressed so far, but not overwhelmed.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Brandybuck]

Solaris makes a great workstation... but only if administered by a competent sysadmin. It was never meant to be a "download off the net and install onto random laptop" type of operating system. If you want that then stick with Linux or BSD.

p.s. While the manual install process is very fragile, the remote/automatic install process is extremely powerful and no Free operating system comes anywhere close.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Brandybuck]

At home I run Linux because a couple of emulators (hercules and qemu) are only available on Linux...

Actually, both hercules and qemu are available on FreeBSD, and probably the other BSDs as well.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[JonAnderson]

Sun's business in SPARC-based workstations, which used to be one of its mainstays, has dropped to almost zero.

Thats utter, utter crap. Sun is still the biggest vendor in the traditional workstation market.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[LizardKing]

So, your Solaris servers haven't been patched in at least two years?

Speaking for my own company, we have big database servers that are usually only patched for stability reasons. Security patches are much lower priority as the machines in question are thoroughly firewalled and only allow access to a handful of ports.

Our webservers are a different matter, and get all security and stability patches. However, they are a stack of much smaller machines behind a load balancer, and we can pull a few of them out of service at any time.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[dknj]

I've been working with Solaris10 for a week now. It's like riding a new Harley after not having touched my Triumph Bonneville for 10 years. I grew up (in my 20's) working in Vax and Sun datacentres, later a Solaris guru working the web ... I got real used to Solaris 5, 6, 7 ... stopped at 8 switched to Linux (RH, SuSE) and wow, what a worldshattering difference. Felt like an 11 year old with his first woodie. Since, I've learnt the ins and outs of Linux server, desktop, struggled mightily with where pkginstall stuck things, the /root, loads of quirks. Now, back to Solaris and wow, I'm home, but someone really redecorated. I cut my teeth in kshell; bash was a real comeuppance, and the new Solaris is like a little of both. Lighten up; I've learnt German, and Dutch, and listening to the two is like very nearly understanding but NOT QUITE. That's kind of what coming back to Solaris 10 is like. It's not quite the Sun I'm used to, but more like it than the Linux I've learnt. If you grew up in Linux, this is going to be kind of like my journey. Give it time, the differences are not bad, they're just different. I'm impressed so far, but not overwhelmed.

What does any of this have to do with my post? Or are you posting after any random post that is higher up so your (late) post can be seen?

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are the numbnuts who modded your post up?

You speak like your experience is the only one that is worthwhile. Of course it is...to you. Until you actually find out sometime in the future that your situation changes. But of course at that point the only situation you will think is valuable is yours at that time.

Which would be COMPLETELY fine if you only kept your comments to your situation and your experience, but you have a big mouth and a pinhead. And you piss all over someone else's experience as if it doesn't matter. Shockingly, however, since Sun released an x86 version of Solaris, and released CD installs, some people actually expect them to work.

I know, I know, such a horrible shock to your system to hear that! There, there, some day you'll move past the toddler stage.

Re:Is solaris still used often?

[seachnasaigh]

I think my intent was to take you to task, albeit gently, for being harsh with the previous poster, and to offer some sympathy to their situation. If you missed the point of that well, given your previous post, I suppose I'm not surprised.

Cheers.

releasing source code

[QuantumG]

does not an open source project make. Sun best get their act together and encourage active open development of their platform if they ever want to catch up to the momentum of Linux. Of course, maybe they're going the way of the BSD operating systems and think they can get by with a closed team of developers.

Re:releasing source code

[REBloomfield]

Or just maybe they're concentrating on their hardware like Apple do?

While the hell does every company nowadays have to release source code just to be accepted by you guys? Sun have been doing their thing, and doing it well, for years. They don't need to pander to you Open Source hippies in order to succeed.

Re:releasing source code

[CrankyFool]

Yeah. I mean, it's only by encouraging OSS development of their platform that they'll finally, one day in the far distant future, be able to say that they've got a rock-solid OS that someone chooses to, say, deploy a large enterprise CRM or OLTP project. I mean, really, right now who the heck uses Solaris anyway? Just a bunch of amateurs in their basements.

Re:releasing source code

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

They don't have to. They chose to. However, for Solaris to be considered truly open-source, they must open up development. That is what the grand-parent is trying to say.

Re:releasing source code

[Gopal.V]

> Sun best get their act together and encourage active open development of their platform if they ever want to catch up to the momentum of Linux.

What might be good for Sun isn't always good for the community. Even with just "versions" (ok, distros) of Linux (mm.. GNU/Linux), running around - we're having "Debian Rocks" , "Gentoo Rocks", "Redhat sucks" kind of rants and splits in the community.

For the sake of Linux and Hurd - I guess Solaris has to fail (or be the NEW GNU/Solaris.. RMS left enough room for that)

Re:releasing source code

[RaVPup]

Solaris is a highly advanced operating system when deployed on its native hardware. If you want to get into the nitty gritty of why you can look it up. The thread management for one blows linux out of the water not to mention their SMP capability.

Re:releasing source code

[quigonn]

FUD, FUD, FUD. Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs on real computers (SGI Altix 3700, single node), while Solaris hasn't scaled to more than 106 CPUs on real computers (Sun Fire 15K).

Re:releasing source code

[Ozric]

I would not run a F15k as a single domain. That is Suns stong point Dynamic Alocation for Boards and Isolation. But that is more a function of SMS and OBP then the OS.

OZ

Re:releasing source code

[ehack]

I think parent was trying to be funny, not troll. Of course, with the IQ on /. getting diluted down to 100, this is being read as a straight karmawhore comment :)

Re:releasing source code

[RaVPup]

Altix is NUMA and the Fire uses switched bus SMP. The only reason that Solaris doesn't scale past 106 CPUs is because Sun haven't written NUMA support into the operating system. The only two architectures Solaris supports are both SMP. With open source support this might change.

Re:releasing source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it has scaled up to 512 CPUs in specific installations (eg NASA's supercomputer) - SGI just doesn't advertise that capability to the general public.

Re:releasing source code

[ajs]

"for Solaris to be considered truly open-source, they must open up development. That is what the grand-parent is trying to say."

I suggest that unless you know the OP, you stick to what they DID say:

"Sun best get their act together and encourage active open development of their platform if they ever want to catch up to the momentum of Linux."

This is a clear statement: they must do X (encourage active development) if they want Y (to catch up to the momentum of Linux). You can argue with the specifics, if you disagree, but please don't start bringing phrases like "to be considered truly open-source" into it as if that were what the OP was talking about.

Re:releasing source code

[Decaff]

Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs on real computers

'Scales' is meaningless unless you say what it can do. Allowing a carefully-written and finely tuned application to run across multiple CPUs is totally different from being able to act as a general-purpose machine. When Solaris scales across many processors this is usually as a general-purpose enterprise server, with multiple users, multi-threaded databases and application servers. This is fundamentally different from a customised numerical computation server, which is something SGI specialises in.

Re:releasing source code

[Bert64]

Solaris also supports AMD64, which is also NUMA based, but can operate in a plain smp mode too for backwards compatibility purposes.

Re:releasing source code

[Transcendent]

Sun best get their act together and encourage active open development of their platform if they ever want to catch up to the momentum of Linux.

It's not the momentum of linux, it's the acceleration. Solaris has a larger momentum than linux as it stands, but linux's mass is growing.

Why do people use Solaris? It's supported, guaranteed to work with numerous processors in large servers, and it's catered for large scale servers. Did I mention that it is professionally supported by Sun? If you open up the development of the software, you loose control of the coding and it becomes harder to support it. It would be nice to make solaris derivitives, but for commercial use you need stricter control of a central development team.

The company that I work for uses strictly Solaris on all it's unix servers (yes, they are Sun servers too). Why? Support... Sure linux may run fine on them, but what good is it to IT if they have to spend all day browsing through web forums to fix the problem that costs our company millions per day of lost productivity if the unix servers go down?

I asked the head-honcho of Unix in the IT department about it, and he said exactly what was stated above. Though he thinks linux is great, he says it just isn't quite fit for certian industries.

Re:releasing source code

[dAzED1]

IQ measurements are meaningless when the person is no longer a child.

What you're saying is that the average /. person, who is likely approx 35, has the mental age of a 35 year old. The quotia is ((mental age)/(real age))*100.

The reason its meaningless when the person is not a child is because there's little difference between a 35 year old's "mental" age and a 50 year old's "mental" age, yet a 35 year old with a 143 IQ would be "mentally" 50. A 90 year old with a 140iq would have the "mental age" of a 126 year old - which, in my mind, would be a bad thing. Hell, I'd like an IQ of 30 when I'm 90, thank you (that would be 27).

You'll grant that the delta between the "mental age" of 6 and the "mental age" of 9 (a 6 year old with a 9 year old mind would be 150 iq) is considerably different than the delta between a 40 year old's "mental age" and the one of a 60 year old - correct? The 60 year old may have emotional/psyche maturation over the 40 year old, but he's not sharper minded than he was at 40. He's lost some of his edge. He can't learn things as quickly. He's starting down the long road of forgetfulness. So a 40 year old with a 150 IQ? A completely meaningless measurement. Once you start giving someone a "mental age" of about 30 or so (a 200 IQ on a 15 year old) the IQ system is worthless - move on to something more appropriate. GRE's, SAT's, whatver else - something not devised for 4 year olds.

This public service announcement was brought to you by: "try to know what something is before you use it as an insult. An IQ of 100 for a 35 year old person is just fine...it means they're 35."

Re:releasing source code

[confused one]

Solaris doesn't have to fail for Linux, Hurd, or BSD to succeed.

Sun as a corporation is as much about hardware and service as it is about software, inspite of what they may have been saying lately. Sun will continue to run Solaris on it's machines for the forseeable future, just as Apple insists on running OS X. (Yes, I'm making comparisons to a niche market)

Choice isn't what's splitting the community. Choice is what's driving it. Having options like FreeBSD, Debian, Gentoo, Redhat and even Solaris x86 enrichens the community.

Re:releasing source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you actually know what you're talking about wrt BSD development?

All of the (free) *BSDs accept patches from people who aren't official developers. This has very little practical difference compared to e.g. the Linux kernel - if you want to get your changes included in the official version, you need to get someone with commit privileges to include your changes, or you can just distribute and advertise your patches yourself.

Re:releasing source code

[anothy]

i agree that's what the grandparent is trying to say. and it's still wrong. who in their right mind doesn't consider the BSD projects to be open source? there's no shortage of projects with development processes more closed than linux which still manage to make a good run of open source. many (like, say, me!) would consider having a more controlled development model appropriate or beneficial in many cases. it's certainly helped the OpenBSD folks with their security goals.

Re:releasing source code

[Leo McGarry]

Linux so far scales to up to 256 CPUs

Just barely. SGI managed to shoehorn large-system support into Linux, but it's extremely hinky.

Compare to an operating system like IRIX -- from where the large-system support in Linux came --that has been scaling to hundreds of processors since the mid-1990s, and that in recent months has been scaling to thousands of processors.

Compared to a true scalable OS, both Solaris and Linux come up short.

Re:releasing source code

[njcoder]

This is a pretty interesting rebuttal from one of the OpenSolaris developers to what an HP Exec said about the system. May address some of your open development concerns. I thought it was great to see that the OpenSolaris movement already had an outspoken developer that can fly off the handle and curse. Seems like they're off to a good start to being just a regular open source joe :)

Re:releasing source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, maybe they're going the way of the BSD operating systems and think they can get by with a closed team of developers.

BSD and Solaris are doing just fine, thankyouverymuch. As a matter of fact, I run a rack of Solaris boxes and a couple of Redhat AS. At the end of this month OpenBSD replaces the Redhat.

The lack of professionalism in the linux community is so astounding that it defies words. Proof? Just run a man page on three different distros of Linux. BSD can "get away" with closed development teams just fine. Theo De Raadt forgot more about proper code than Linus will ever know.

Re:releasing source code

[ehack]

Glad to see that my core target audience is grokking my message :)

Re:releasing source code

[QuantumG]

yep, and that doesn't make you an open source project. So maybe Sun should stop claiming they are making Solaris open source.

Re:releasing source code

[SunFan]

Solaris can scale bigger than 106CPUs or even 144CPUs (E25K), it's just that Sun doesn't sell bigger computers. It's target markets are different than SGIs. Seriously, how many 256+ CPU machines does SGI really expect to sell? Sun is a volume dealer, SGI is not.

Re:releasing source code

[JonAnderson]

You shouldn't underestimate patent indemnification and guaranted binary compatibility

A nice "first look" article

[luvirini]

But I think what would be needed more is a try to do things like actual stresstesting and comparisions under load.

Re:A nice "first look" article

[hackstraw]

But I think what would be needed more is a try to do things like actual stresstesting and comparisions under load.

Yes, that would be interesting, but unless they broke something severe like they did with their TCPIP stack somewhere between version 8 and 9, handling a load is where solaris shines.

I've always said, solaris is never fast, but then again it never slows down either.

Re:A nice "first look" article

[njcoder]

I just happened to read this today... It is another review of Solaris 10 and includes some limited comparisons to RHEL. Nothing exhaustive as far as the benchmarks go, but it's a pretty good review.

Well-written?

[henrik]

Not sure I would classify this as well-written considering the author seems to have no idea of Solaris legacy nor why for example directory hierarchy is as it is. Seems like the normal uninformed Linux-is-the-real-Unix review.

Re:Well-written?

[Omniscientist]

However, I am a BSD user.

Yup, I'm sure he thinks Linux is the real Unix.

Re:Well-written?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure I would classify this as well-written considering the author seems to have no idea of Solaris legacy

I think he meant the prose/style. But I don't consider it well-written that way either, e.g. end of first page:

With Solaris 10, Sun has worked hard to make that name no longer applicable.

Too verbose, maybe bordering on pretentious, absolutely no rhythm, etc.

Re:Well-written?

[quigonn]

At least Linux uses a directory hierarchy that resembles more closely the _original_ directory hierarchy of Unix (and I'm talking about the real one, i.e. Unix V7) than any of the commercial Unix versions, _and_ it is well-documented (Linux FHS).

Re:Well-written?

[Leo McGarry]

Especially the part where he says that he wants to install an OS without actually booting it at any point. I kinda stopped reading after that, admittedly.

Re:Well-written?

[megarich]

I think half if not more of these reviews been crappy :)

But since you touch upon it can you elaborate about the legacy and why the hierarchy is as it is? This is nothing more than to fulfill my own curiosity......

Re:Well-written?

[henrik]

Well, among other things... /usr/bin contains the Solaris System V binaries, so for people needing legacy BSD stuff (for compatibility), there is /usr/ucb where you find those binaries. Sometimes the nakes clash you know. There is also /usr/ucbinclude and /usr/ucblib.

You also have /usr/xpg4 which contain other binaries, again with names that might clash with /usr. A "man pr" on Solaris 9 gives for example:

SYNOPSIS
/usr/bin/pr [ + page] [-column] [-adFmrt] [ -e [char] [gap]]
[-h header] [ -i [char] [gap]] [-l lines] [ -n [char]
[width]] [-o offset] [ -s [char]] [-w width] [-fp] [file...]

/usr/xpg4/bin/pr [ + page] [-column | -c column] [-adFmrt]
[ -e [char] [gap]] [-h header] [ -i [char] [gap]] [-l lines]
[ -n [char] [width]] [-o offset] [ -s [char]] [-w width] [-
fp] [file...]

Re:Well-written?

[henrik]

And at the end of the same man page:

ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:

/usr/bin/pr
_________________________________________________ ___________
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|
| Availability | SUNWcsu |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|
| CSI | enabled |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|

/usr/xpg4/bin/pr
_________________________________________________ ___________
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|
| Availability | SUNWxcu4 |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|
| CSI | enabled |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|
| Interface Stability | Standard |
|_____________________________|___________________ __________|

Legacy compatibility.

Re:Well-written?

[henrik]

ucb -> university california berkeley

Re:Well-written?

[henrik]

What xpg4 is:

X/Open CAE Specification Description Release
XPG4 superset of POSIX.1-1990, Solaris 2.4
POSIX.2-1992, and
POSIX.2a-1992 containing
extensions to POSIX stan-
dards from XPG3

Re:Well-written?

[henrik]

The following might also be useful:

Utilities
If the behavior required by POSIX.2, POSIX.2a, XPG4, SUS, or
SUSv2 conflicts with historical Solaris utility behavior,
the original Solaris version of the utility is unchanged; a
new version that is standard-conforming has been provided in
/usr/xpg4/bin. For applications wishing to take advantage of
POSIX.2, POSIX.2a, XPG4, SUS, or SUSv2 features, the PATH
(sh or ksh) or path (csh) environment variables should be
set with /usr/xpg4/bin preceding any other directories in
which utilities specified by those specifications are
found, such as /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/ucb, and /usr/ccs/bin.

Re:Well-written?

[Brandybuck]

For unattended installs, this is a requirement. Solaris can do this, but not the way he was doing it.

"There haven't been many reviews"

[REBloomfield]

You're right, in fact, a Google search for "solaris 10 review" only brings up 1,200,000 matches....

Re:"There haven't been many reviews"

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of that is 10 year old porn?

Re:"There haven't been many reviews"

[MuMart]

Get great deals on Solaris 10 Review!

Compare prices on Solaris 10 Review!

Enlarge your Solaris 10 Review!

Re:"There haven't been many reviews"

[Chimney Sweep]

Has anyone finished installing it yet?

Re:"There haven't been many reviews"

[Espectr0]

Learn how to search. When you want to search for ALL the words in the same order, you need to enclose them in quotes.

So the real search results for "solaris 10 review" is 3,780, which most of them are sites linking to the few sites that actually have reviews

Before you declare them "dead"...

[davejenkins]

While I wager most of the responses on this thread will be some variant on "so what, Solaris is dead", let me say that I met with a senior planner of a very large system integrator here in APAC, and he pretty much said the opposite: Solaris 10 will fill all their needs and that the whole Linux/penguin/RMS-sideshow was a distraction at this point.

Sun has spent years playing in the biggest game with the biggest boys. Their gross holdings dwarf that of Red Hat and Novell. Solaris 10 has all the core functionality that the major major banks and conservative institutions want. Sun has dedicated salespeople who know these clients for years now. Do not count them out, yet.

Sure, Solaris 10 seems like a Hail Mary, but think why the Hail Mary play is there: it works sometimes...

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[luvirini]

Indeed, one of the problems sun has is that their system and computers are "too good". A customer of ours is still running their heavily used website on a SUN from 1999. They have no plans to upgrade. Thus no need to buy new servers like you would on other types.

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[Anonymous Coward]

So what, Solaris is dead... ;)

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[tomstdenis]

It's people like these that make me wanna scream.

First I doubt there were zero security patches since 1999. Second, if you have to actually develop on boxes that old it's a pain in the arse [hello, libtool is not just a "random fancy idea"].

I suppose if all you do is serve static pages then yeah a box/install from 1999 is all you need. I'm sure you don't need the latest of Gentoo to run an echo server either...

Tom

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[luvirini]

I am not saying they have not have updated the software or such, I was talking about the hardware.

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[Capt James McCarthy]

Very true. There are many a large company who feel, either right or wrong, that an all-in-one provider of an OS written exclusivly for the vendors own hardware is the way to go. Besides, how could anyone not love dtrace delivered with Sol10. I love linux as much as the next person, but I've always liked Solaris since the days of SunOS. They just were slow to make changes when they were needed and now they are playing some serious catch up, but they will survive I believe.

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[Guppy06]

"A customer of ours is still running their heavily used website on a SUN from 1999. They have no plans to upgrade."

What's the URL? Slashdot can fix that!

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that you're saying Sun is now a niche player. I would agree.

For a time (the 90's), SunOS/Solaris was used everywhere. However, the BSDs and GNU/Linux have taken over the low to middle-end deployments. For the masses, Solaris is indeed dead.

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[Bigboote66]

In other news:

For the masses, Caterpillar is dead (Fortune 500 rank 77).

For the masses, ADM is dead (Fortune 500 rank 52).

For the masses, Boeing is dead (Fortune 500 rank 21).

There's quite a lot of money to be made in selling exclusively to the "niche" of big business.

-BbT

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[nr]

I agree with you. I have been working with Solaris everyday for 8 years. My company is one of the top ten biggest in the world and we have Sun as our primary supplier of UNIX. We have Solaris machines that process money/credit transactions of hundreds of millions of dollars every week to major international banks and suppliers/partners. We have ERP and EAI systems which some handles billions of dollars every month. This is a totaly different world from what your average Linux/BSD weenie is used to, they can not imagine what we do here in major datacenters of large multinational corporations. If I feel like it I can go and just grab a $50,000 SunFire server from one of our store shelves and throw it into a emptry rack space and have it auto deloyed via JumpStart with a pre-defined Solaris 9 build and Oracle 9i from our stageing servers in just 2 hours.

Newer Solaris has alot of heavy duty mainframe functionality like for example it allows you to add and remove hardware (CPU, memory, I/O (FC, GbE, for example) boards) under full operation without taking down the server. You can take CPU and memory online/offline via simple commands from the shell. You can attach and detatch any PCI board under full operation. That is something we cant even do on our $100,000 HP N-class servers.

Solaris has totaly unique enterprise high-availability functions that no other UNIX can fully match today, that is why we run large parts of our business critical services on Solaris.

Re:Before you declare them "dead"...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are also huge numbers of Ultras and Sun Blades sitting in racks being used as servers. These are workstations, but they're built so well that many people just use them as servers.

Solaris 10 runs my router

[Dancin_Santa]

They don't go into it in the article, but Solaris has slowly begun more and more modular (kind of like NetBSD without all that pesky hardware support).

So much so, in fact, that I have several stripped down versions running as various embedded "smart" devices around the office. One is obviously the router, but others include a firewall, file server, and PBX. The best hack I've done so far with this is the Solaris 10 Roomba, but the battery life is really bad.

Solaris is great on the server, but don't discount its abilities on the small platforms!

page 1

[Squiddl3]

Straigth from madpenguin.com page one of the review, too bad i wasn't able to read page 2 :(
-----------------c&p-------------
Sun Microsystems has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Linux advocates have been fighting Solaris advocates on forums across the Internet. The zealotry and misrepresentation from both sides has been really quite impressive. However, I am a BSD user. I am not on either side and will do my best to allow neither zealotry nor misrepresentation into this review.

Please continue reading after you have stopped laughing.

All political issues aside, Solaris 10 is a very impressive OS. It has some features no other operating system can claim and some that are not necessarily new, but have been implemented in an excellent way. This is not to say it is perfect. There are definitely things I dislike and areas that seem quite unpolished.

One of those aforementioned unpolished areas is the installation routine. It can be assumed that Solaris will not be installed by a novice. Even so, the Solaris install is painful and brings with it memories of Windows 2000 installs of old. This is not because its difficult, it is not. The installation is simply unwieldy. My main complaints are the following:

* You must partition, install a small base system and reboot to finish the install. I expect an OS to be installable without a reboot.
* For the first section of the install there is a web browser in the background, but for unknown reasons there is no browser in the second section.
* You have to switch CD's during the install, which is fine, but you can't just switch and walk away. You have to wait for it to read the CD and display another screen and then press next. There is probably a reason for this, but I just find it annoying.

Issues like these make the installation routine seem unfinished and just don't fit with the overall quality of the OS.

Upon booting Solaris for the first time, you are greeted by dtlogin. This is the default graphical login manager for Solaris and plainly has CDE roots. At this point, there is a drop-down menu in which you can choose to go back to a console login or choose which wm/dm to enter, both CDE and JDS3 are options. I am sure CDE has many great features and I know that some people love it. However, I am not one of them. JDS3 on the other hand is a nicely polished GNOME desktop. The theme and general feel is much improved over Sun's earlier versions. Nothing is very remarkable about JDS3, except network browsing. I have never seen any GNOME desktop do as well with windows and NIX network browsing.

There are things I dislike about JDS. As a media player, Sun has chosen the "Java Media Player." This program has no redeeming factors. XMMS or Rhythmbox would be much better choices. They also tapped Mozilla to be the web browser, not Firefox. With FF gaining more and more attention, this choice makes very little sense to me. However, those are my only complaints about JDS3 and they are small ones.

Nobody is considering Solaris 10 because of JDS3 or its installation routine. They are looking at it because of new features like DTrace, Zones and the new Service Management Framework. Indeed, it has been quite awhile since we have seen a release of any OS with as many large features as Solaris 10.

DTrace
One of the main new features in Solaris 10 is DTrace, a dynamic instrumentation system. DTrace consists of a scripting language, named D (not to be confused with the fledgling D Programming Language), and loadable kernel modules named "providers." When called upon, these "providers" track and report system information. DTrace has several features t

3,780 hits for "solaris 10 review"

[MauMan]

Google:

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,780 for "solaris 10 review".

Re:3,780 hits for "solaris 10 review"

[REBloomfield]

dude, I get 1,200,000!!

Re:3,780 hits for "solaris 10 review"

[Anonymous Coward]

solaris 10 review: 1,170,000 hits.
"solaris 10 review": 3,750 hits.

huge difference there.

Re:3,780 hits for "solaris 10 review"

[Lusa]

dude, I get 1,200,000!!

next time use quotes

Re:3,780 hits for "solaris 10 review"

[ookaze]

Cool,

I'm gonna spread "I want a solaris 10 review" on a max of blogs, that will increase your number of "solaris 10 review".
I didn't know it was that simple to write a review :)

google cache

[markybob]

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:ddKQV3C7eUEJ: madpenguin.org/cms/%3Fm%3Dshow%26id%3D3542%26page% 3D2+&hl=en&client=firefox

Mirror

[Professor Cool Linux]

http://www.madpenguin.org.nyud.net:8090/cms/html/4 7/3542.html

*Posted w/o Karma bouns

Re:Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Error: 403 Forbidden

Error when attempting to use the Coral Content Distribution Network (http://www.coralcdn.org/).

The hostname specified in the Coralized URL is currently over its hourly quota. Please try back later.

Server CoralWebPrx/0.1.12 (See http://coralcdn.org/) at 128.252.19.21:8090

Who said it was unpatched?

[Anonymous Coward]

And just why do you think you have to develop apps on boxes that old to run on boxes that old? Your experience with unstable operating system interfaces or monopoly pressure to upgrade?

With Solaris, as long as you're not running device drivers or going out into the esoteric reaches of POSIX conformance, you can write an app on Solaris 10 and watch it run on Solaris 2.5.

If all you're doing is running Apache, close all your ports, keep Apache patched, and you'll be secure.

I do wonder if they've closed off the syslog UDP port, though. You can fill up their root disk (or where ever they've put /var/adm/messages) if they haven't...

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[tomstdenis]

Um, I "upgrade" because the tools are better.

GCC 3.4.3 is more C99 and optimizes better than GCC 2.8.2 that most SunOS boxes I've seen come with. Why would I want to use an out of date compiler just because "it worked back then".

Libtool is meant to be a PORTABLE interface to the creation of shared/static objects...Fuck even "bash" is better now....

I'm not "forced to upgrade" I choose to. Specially given that the tools are free ... the decision isn't hard to make.

My problem with folks who use unix'es like SunOS, AIX and HPUX is that they usually don't update [or can't] and the boxes are very hard to use.

I got an AMD64... I installed gentoo using the x86_64 kernel. Whoa, a 64-bit box that I didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for... It performs very well and I get access to the latest development tools [e.g. recent GCC] ...

I'm sure there are uses for a Sun box [or Unix in general] just not sure what it is. My AMD64 box can just as easily be a web server, database server, development box or even one of those informational kiosks at the airport...

As for the uptime penis war, all a long uptime says is either you don't care for security or you're not exposed to the net [and therefore uptime doesn't matter because even a TI-82 calculator can have a 9 year uptime given enough power...]

Tom

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[rcamera]

even a TI-82 calculator can have a 9 year uptime given enough power

my ti83 can beat that any day. and this week alone, my ti89 has an uptime of 15 years!

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[Bert64]

Take a look at: http://www.sunfreeware.com/indexsparc25.html
The latest versions of gcc, bash, libtool etc are available for Solaris 2.5 which was released in 1995, which means they will run on any newer version of solaris too.
Solaris 7 will run on even the oldest sparc hardware, 8 and upwards loses support for some of the oldest sparc hardware.. Solaris 2.5 and upwards are still supported by SUN with security patches and opensource software will compile just fine, and precompiled versions are available from sunfreeware.com.
As for gcc 2.8.2 coming with solaris, that's not true, whoever setup the box must have explicitely installed it.. Solaris doesn't come with a compiler by default and sun make their own compiler anyway.
As for why people dont upgrade, if 2.5 works on your hardware and you dont need any of the new features present in 10, then you'l gain nothing from upgrading, you are more likely to lose out in terms of diskspace usage and your old box is unlikely to have very large disks. And as for upgrading the hardware, well if your current machine handles the load it's intended to handle with some room for a load increase, why waste the money?

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[Anonymous Coward]

GCC 3.4.3 is more C99 and optimizes better than GCC 2.8.2 that most SunOS boxes I've seen come with. Why would I want to use an out of date compiler just because "it worked back then".

The compiler is not the OS and Solaris 2.0-2.9 never had a compiler installed so you obviously have no clue what you are talking about. S10 comes with gcc 3.4.3.

My problem with folks who use unix'es like SunOS, AIX and HPUX is that they usually don't update [or can't] and the boxes are very hard to use.

Hey sparky, get a clue! Realy unices are not any more difficult to use than that clunky mish-mash of an OS you call Linux. People running "real unices" don't upgrade all of the time because if it ain't broke you don't fix it. You patch it for security related issues and you leave it alone.
We'll talk again when you realize that your basement is not a datacenter.

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[clymere]

I have three old Sun Sparcstations that I use daily. One runs NetBSD 2.0, one runs Splack 10, and one runs Solaris 8.

I'll admit, I haven't found a use for Solaris yet, other than to play with something different. But the other two are a webserver and shellserver respectively. They perform admirably well under heavy load, and are incredibly compact.

In other words, there are plenty of uses for Sun hardware...especially the old stuff that can be had for next to nothing(i got all three of those boxes for free!). Your AMD64 system may seem "cheap", but it costs a hell of a lot more than an old Ultrasparc. If your only requirement is 64-bits, that Ultrasparc will meet that, and be remarkably stable.

Not to knock AMD64, they are nice chips, and relatively inexpensive for what they are capable of. Personally, I have had no need for those capabilities, or at least not one to justify upgrading to one from my old P3 server and AthXP workstation.

An old Sun can do everything you listed that you're using Gentoo and Ath64 to do. NetBSD in particular runs VERY well on those things. Gentoo even has a decent sparc port.

If you were meaning to refer only to Solaris itself, I'm afraid I have to agree. My experience so far hasn't been great. It was a pain to install, bloated, difficult to upgrade, and I still have yet to find a real good purpose for it. NetBSD is running Apache so well that I see no reason to switch.

The Sun hardware is great though! I highly reccomend looking up those old Ultrasparcs on ebay :)

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[multipartmixed]

> I do wonder if they've closed off the syslog UDP port, though.

FWIW, the default configuration is NOT to listen on the UDP port. If you want that, you have to explicitly launch syslogd -r.

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[njcoder]

If the hardware supports it, and there's enough diskspace, I would think that upgrading the OS would be a good idea. Just from Solaris 8 to 9 to 10, there have been some very big performance enhancements. Could help keep those old boxes running for a bit longer or at least just improve responsiveness.

Re:Who said it was unpatched?

[Bert64]

Well, that would require downtime, Solaris is very stable and it's not unusual to see machines which have been running for years still running..
Also, newer versions introduce new features which means theres more places for potential security holes to be found.

Review text...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Microsystems has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Linux advocates have been fighting Solaris advocates on forums across the Internet. The zealotry and misrepresentation from both sides has been really quite impressive. However, I am a BSD user. I am not on either side and will do my best to allow neither zealotry nor misrepresentation into this review.

Please continue reading after you have stopped laughing.

All political issues aside, Solaris 10 is a very impressive OS. It has some features no other operating system can claim and some that are not necessarily new, but have been implemented in an excellent way. This is not to say it is perfect. There are definitely things I dislike and areas that seem quite unpolished.

One of those aforementioned unpolished areas is the installation routine. It can be assumed that Solaris will not be installed by a novice. Even so, the Solaris install is painful and brings with it memories of Windows 2000 installs of old. This is not because its difficult, it is not. The installation is simply unwieldy. My main complaints are the following:

* You must partition, install a small base system and reboot to finish the install. I expect an OS to be installable without a reboot.
* For the first section of the install there is a web browser in the background, but for unknown reasons there is no browser in the second section.
* You have to switch CD's during the install, which is fine, but you can't just switch and walk away. You have to wait for it to read the CD and display another screen and then press next. There is probably a reason for this, but I just find it annoying.

Issues like these make the installation routine seem unfinished and just don't fit with the overall quality of the OS.

Upon booting Solaris for the first time, you are greeted by dtlogin. This is the default graphical login manager for Solaris and plainly has CDE roots. At this point, there is a drop-down menu in which you can choose to go back to a console login or choose which wm/dm to enter, both CDE and JDS3 are options. I am sure CDE has many great features and I know that some people love it. However, I am not one of them. JDS3 on the other hand is a nicely polished GNOME desktop. The theme and general feel is much improved over Sun's earlier versions. Nothing is very remarkable about JDS3, except network browsing. I have never seen any GNOME desktop do as well with windows and NIX network browsing.

There are things I dislike about JDS. As a media player, Sun has chosen the "Java Media Player." This program has no redeeming factors. XMMS or Rhythmbox would be much better choices. They also tapped Mozilla to be the web browser, not Firefox. With FF gaining more and more attention, this choice makes very little sense to me. However, those are my only complaints about JDS3 and they are small ones.

Nobody is considering Solaris 10 because of JDS3 or its installation routine. They are looking at it because of new features like DTrace, Zones and the new Service Management Framework. Indeed, it has been quite awhile since we have seen a release of any OS with as many large features as Solaris 10.

DTrace
One of the main new features in Solaris 10 is DTrace, a dynamic instrumentation system. DTrace consists of a scripting language, named D (not to be confused with the fledgling D Programming Language), and loadable kernel modules named "providers." When called upon, these "providers" track and report system information. DTrace has several features that separate it from other similar systems:

* It is dynamic. DTrace has no effect on system performance when not in use. Only those providers t

Re:Review text...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also point out that Solaris is not and has never ment to be for home PC's. As for the install in any good enviroment you will have a jumpstart server and never have to go through the install with cd's.

Re:Review text...

[Anonymous Coward]

"* You must partition, install a small base system and reboot to finish the install. I expect an OS to be installable without a reboot."

What!?!?!?! there will always be a reboot... how else do you get the kernel that's just been installed onto disk into memory...

Re:Review text...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow!

excellent write-up...

i only wish we had more such +5 Informatives on /.

Keep up the good work!

More choice is good.

[MarkByers]

There is nothing wrong with having more choice. Choice is always good for the consumer.

Even though I don't plan to ever use Solaris, I think it's great that there are some people that do want to use it. This presumably means that there is at least one thing that it does better than Linux. It is OK for certain distributions to be much at one thing but worse at other things. I don't see why there needs to be one distibution that rules them all.

If a distribution really does suck, they will disappear by themselves. If they manage to hang around, then good luck to them! Even Windows! (Although please keep the business tactics legal in future.)

Rootkit?

[puke76]

Ah, Solaris 10, the rootkit writers friend.

Re:Rootkit?

[un1xl0ser]

This is interesting. Mod up. :-)

Re:Rootkit?

[thogard]

But he didn't even play arround with the new services database. What a bummer even though his code is much better than the service db stuff I've seen.

A lesson from Microsoft...
Don't keep boot status info in a binary file that also can start programs.
You can't tell if its been hacked without rebuilding it and you can't rebuild it with ease. The new services stuff for Solaris 10 is sort of a mix between init, inetd, cron and the windows registry. This is wrong and someone at sun needs to fix it now.

Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[Spoing]

Go and install Solaris 10. Use an external machine and run nmap followed by Nessus targeting your new Solaris system. Use the defaults for everything (Solaris, nmap, and Nessus).

Interesting, eh?

Note: If you don't have access to a Nessus server or Linux, you can use almost any machine to run a scan yourself. Here's a simplified version of what to do;

1. Get Knoppix and boot it; http://knoppix.org

2. When the desktop appears, run the Nessus server;

'Start' (the K in the lower left)

System (note _DO_NOT_ use the Nessus on this menu yet!)

Security

Nessus

3. Wait. This will take a few minutes and you may not see anything. If you want to be sure, come back in 5 minutes.

4. Run the Nessus client;

K

System

Nessus (note _NOT_ the one under the Security menu)

5. The username should be knoppix.

6. The password field should be blank. Enter knoppix for the password.

7. Select the Target tab. Put in the IP address or DNS name of the target machine.

8. Start scanning. Keep in mind that any firewalls or NAT devices between you and the target machine may give back bad results.

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[ashayh]

You mind telling people who cant do this experiment what happens ?

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell modded this informative?
What exactly are you on about?
What do you mean by: Interesting, eh?
Why don't you just get to your point instead of trying (poorly) to be a wise-ass?

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. You mind telling people who cant do this experiment what happens ?

If he did, you'd think he was a troll. You have to see it to understand.

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right.

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[Anonymous Coward]

here

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[dotgain]

Hmm, very interesting.
We installed SMTPd, and *shock horror*, the machine accepts connections on port 25!!
We installed fingerd, and *shock horror*, it works!
What an insecure, buggy OS Solaris must be!

Many ports a listed as a vulnerability on the grounds that some old versions of these servers had vulnerabilities. Others are listed simply because they're open, and accepting connections as they should. What on Earth did you expect?

Say Nessus found no ports open whatsoever. What use do you think that box is going to be? Sure you'll think it's uber 1337 secure, because you can't connect to it, but in most Solaris installations, the ability to actually connect to the machine is actually of some use.

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[dotgain]

Read your own comment. Then read your .sig.

Learn anything?

Consider that, if you install, say, fingerd, you'd expect it to work, right? But if you only want it work for people on your LAN, and not everybody, you'd either not forward incoming connections to the Solaris box, or at least block what wasn't necessary.

Do you seriously think a Solaris admin would install everything+OEM, and then plug the box unfirewalled on the net and give it a public IP?

Part of any servers job actually involves accepting some connections. Part of any admins job is not installing what you don't need, and allowing what you do.

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[Spoing]

1. Read your own comment. Then read your .sig.

OK. Done.

1. Part of any servers job actually involves accepting some connections. Part of any admins job is not installing what you don't need, and allowing what you do.

If you read my sig, why do you think this is even worth mentioning? There's no contradiction in pointing the results of tests out, even if there are reasons for every one of them.

Re:Suggestion: Run security scans against it...

[dotgain]

What I'm saying is that your post is not interesting, as you put it, at all.

Okay, so I might not have pointed out a total contradiction between your post and .sig. I suppose since your post lacks any point at all, there can be no contradiction.

Max Open files

[Anonymous Coward]

And you still cannot open more than 255 files at once using fopen or tmpfile or popen. How useless is that ?
Even if you open 2000 files with 'open', the next fopen or popen fails.

The docs say fixed in 64-bit apps only, but this is a stupid limit for 32-bit apps !

Virtual Machines

[rf0]

I can't read the artical as its /. but on thing that Sol 10 (and FreeBSD) can do out of the box is to split the host machine up into multiple smaller machiens using Zones (or jails). This means you can have seperate virtual machines on each machine so you can test things safely without having to keep reloading the OS

Rus

Re:Virtual Machines

[dwight_hubbard]

Solaris zones are ok, but they are significantly less flexible than virtual machines.

One Solaris 10 machine can not run multiple versions of Solaris on the same machine like a true virtual machine can.

All the zones share the same kernel and in the case of lightweight zones they also share the same OS executables and libraries. This means, you can have an application that requires a kernel patch that will conflict with another application running in a different zone on the same machine. If this is the case, the only option under Solaris 10 is pick which application to move off.

Under User Mode Linux or VMWare this wouldn't be an issue, even if the different applications required totally different versions of the operating system.

Solaris 10 zones are certainly going to be useful but they are not anywhere as useful as having true virtual machines.

Re:Virtual Machines

[JonAnderson]

Mostly agree. You are restricted to running the same kernel image. However, the goals for zones were: utilization, security and reduced admin costs. It's hard to say that zones doesn't meet these goals and meet them well. When you couple zones (which come with the OS - not licensed separately like VMWARE or upars) with dynamic system domains which give you physical separation (including electrical isolation within the chassis - something pretty unique) and redundancy then you have a very compelling solution. Running more OS'es gives you more admin costs and, in some cases, more licensing costs for that extra flexibility.

How can you argue with this?

[QuantumG]

The most interesting thing about Linux, aside from the social movement aspect, is the fact that it is the first Unix to run on x86. So we put Solaris on the x86. Now we have well over a million licenses of Solaris running on Intel and on the AMD Opteron.

- Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Wow, for some reason that's not the kind of well informed opinion I'd want to be hearing from the company I'm buying a unix solution from.

Re:How can you argue with this?

[perlow]

Actually, the first UNIX to run on an x86 platform was SCO XENIX, way, way back in the early 80s. SCO also delivered the first 32-bit Unix to run on a 386 chip as well.

Re:How can you argue with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well don't tell that to Mr. Schwartz otherwise he cannot go online and make an idiot of himself every other week.

Re:How can you argue with this?

[BlueUnderwear]

Actually, the first UNIX to run on an x86 platform was SCO XENIX,

Followed by many others, such as Minix (who can ignore with a straight face that Minix ran on the PC before Linux did?), Coherent ("first casualty"), misc BSD variants, and many many others. Linux was not the first Unix to run on the PC, it was (... and is...) merely the best ;-)

That's why the grand-parent ironized about the "well informed opinion" of that Sun CIO... I'm just wondering, wasn't even SunOs (predecessor of Solaris) itself among the many Unix variants that ran on the PC before Linux existed?

Re:How can you argue with this?

[multipartmixed]

I don't think SunOS ran on PCs, but I'm pretty sure it ran on the Sun/386 workstations.

Re:How can you argue with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so it was *almost* on a PeeCee.. I wonder if there are any sun/386's surving...

Re:How can you argue with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux was not the first Unix to run on the PC, it was (... and is...) merely the best ;-)

Um, GNU/Linux is not UNIX. It's UNIX-like.

Re:How can you argue with this?

[shieldforyoureyes]

The Sun 386i, running SunOS, was introduced in 1988. I used to own one. It was built like a tank, but... Eh. Not interesting hardware by Sun standards. It was *not* PC compatible, and would not run any other operating systems without special hardware. (Sun has always liked PC-on-a-card add-ons, even going back to 286 boards for VME Sun-3s.)

More drivel

[nemaispuke]

I read this "review" when it showed up on OSNews and thought "yet another Linux/BSD/whatever user attempts to use Solaris and fails". Everybody seems to focus on what Sun is pimping (DTrace, Zones, Predictive Self Healing), what about actually using the OS?

I have been using (and beta testing) Solaris 10 since August 2003, and there is a lot more to it than DTrace, Zones, and Predictive Self Healing. There are several password security improvements, a new installation metacluster (Reduced Networking Support), a new installation method (WAN Boot), the ability to wrap RPC connections so that connections get logged (TCP Wrappers). And so you don't have to download a ton of software, GCC, gmake, webmin, GIMP, and other tools are part of the Full Distribution installation.

The problem with "reviews" is trying to meet the insaitable demand for "information" and not actually providing anything other than a rehash of publicity materials. How about everybody being paitient and hold off for a "quality" review.

Re:More drivel

[Chagrin]

Does the cron daemon support usernames over ~14 characters yet?

Re:More drivel

[Loconut1389]

This is exactly what I was trying to say, only I didn't catch your post while I was writing mine.

On an aside, can you give a link to a manpage or other materials about the RPC wrapping? Thanks!

Re:More drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with "reviews" is trying to meet the insaitable demand for "information" and not actually providing anything other than a rehash of publicity materials.

That sounds like the presentation I got from one of Sun's "Engagement Architects". Me - "dtrace is the ktrace replacement, right?" Him - "I'm not sure, I think I have paper with some information about dtrace here somewhere..."

Sun is fscked in the head to be focusing on the operating system instead of the hardware. I'm sorry Sun, but the operating system is a commodity these days.

Re:More drivel

[allenw]

Probably not because Solaris itself doesn't officially support usernames or groupnames over 8 characters. This is a historical (read: backward compatibility) limit.

Re:More drivel

[dvdeug]

How about everybody being paitient and hold off for a "quality" review.

I think it more likely everyone will be patient and just ignore Solaris. People who care want to know now; for people who don't, this is probably the only thing they're going to hear about it.

There's another review at Network World (nwfusion)

[postbigbang]

It's short, but sweet. http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2005/022805solaris test.html is the link.

comphrehensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your definition of comphrehensive review of Solaris 10 and mine differ greatly.

Good review?

[hrbrmstr]

*That* was a comprehensive and well-written review? Bah!

Perhaps timothy should have read it before taking the poster's word.

struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[nachumk]

My own background: Written linux and Windows NT/XP drivers, and I have set up many linux (mostly debian) and windows workstatiosn

i have been assigned the job of writing my company's pci card driver for solaris 9, and for this purpose i was given an old ultrasparc IIe sparc workstation with solaris 9. After a bit of frustration with trying to setup paths for root, and login shells, and patches, and packages. I decided to just clean install solaris 10. After downloading 5 cds (not including documentation cd) from solaris, I proceeded to install the system.

Installation:
partitioning wizard sucks. defaults are fine, but if you want to change it, then it is just unpleasant.

network setup : it doesn't request a Hostname, and for the life of my system, I have hostname unknown. No big deal, except for a few errors that it prints. I have looked at sun's site, and the recommended way of changing this is sys-unconfig - with a few changes to dhcpagent in /etc/default. but that doesn't work. And i didn't feel like going like going through cartwheels changing the large number of files required to do this manually.

Configuration:
I loaded up root's profile using the Java Desktop Environment (JDE). Nice looking. But it has no link to the Sun Management Console (SMC). I looked through all the menus and I couldn't figure out how to graphically (in the solaris way) add users. Of course I could've used useradd, but i really wanted to configure the system in the solaris prescribed manner. If you use Common Desktop Environment (CDE), then you do have a link to SMC. I had to run smc from console, and then I was able to set up users.

I wanted to change root's shell from /bin/sh to bash. I tried this using the SMC, but that gave me an error, so I ended up having to do this from /etc/passwd.

I installed the solaris 10 with a full (COMPLETE) install. Yet when I look for emacs either in the JDE menus or via the a call to emacs from the terminal, i get nothing. to get emacs and a large number of the other programs including gcc ld vim ... to work, you have to set up the PATHs manually. I did this via /etc/profile, although I was surprised that none of this was already done. As there was no word on what the proper PATH should be I had to guess a bit, and finally found what I wanted:
PATH=/opt/sfw/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/opt/csw/b in:/usr/c cs/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

emacs and gcc are in /opt/sfw/bin/
ld is in /usr/ccs/bin/
wget is in /usr/sfw/bin/
i installed the package pkg-get, and that went into /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get

If you run the SMC, and you try to add patches, it won't work, it says something about installing patch pro manager. You can't install that b/c it is not on the website, it only lists patch pro for solaris 8 and 9. I finally found that in Solaris 10, the patch manager comes built in, not that there is some easy way to know this. you must run pprosvc.

Driver writing:
I did a full install of solaris, yet I didn't get the program cc, and since all of their driver tutorials refer to using cc, this created some issues for me. (cc is installed with Sun Studio). I switched to gcc, but gcc doesn't accept the same parameters as cc, but i found out after lots of wasted time, that cc -xarch=v9 is equivalent to gcc -m64 -mcpu=v9. of course you can't use the ld from gnu, you have to use solaris's ld to link.

I am now struggling to get some automatic dev links to be created in solaris, and as with everything else that I have encountered under this OS, it is being extremely painful.

I can say one thing for Solaris 10, and that is that the JDE look great. (although it doesn't have links to the apps that I installed, and is missing the SMC). Visually wise it is nicer looking than some other windowing environments I have seen, as is much better looking than CDE

nachum

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[rho]

Your experience mirrors my own with Solaris 8 x86. They had a deal where you could order it for $75, and I did. Installing to a dual P-Pro machine was pretty painful, but I managed. The real problem came when I tried to find things. Everything was scattered all over the filesystem in places that I'm sure make perfect sense to old-hand Solaris admins, but for me, coming from Free and OpenBSD where everything is lined up neatly and stored in its proper place, it was a nightmare. I eventually had to give it up because I couldn't get netatalk to compile on it. I still have the CDs laying around.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Bert64]

If your using DHCP, then your hostname will be collected from that... otherwise just create /etc/nodename with your desired hostname.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[justins]

After a bit of frustration with trying to setup paths for root, and login shells, and patches, and packages. I decided to just clean install solaris 10.

In other words, you do not know what you are doing. And you are writing drivers.

Great!

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to change root's shell from /bin/sh to bash

Careful- bash is likely in /usr/bin, not in /sbin. If you accepted the default Solaris partitioning, /usr is probably on a separate partition, and Solaris probably won't mount the /usr partition when in single-user/maintenance mode.

It can be a real pain when the system runs into a problem, drops to single user mode so you can fix it with root, and then hey what do you know, root can't log in.

You probably already know this, but don't try to address the issue by moving bash to /sbin. It's not that easy- bash needs shared libraries to run, and those libraries are likely in /usr.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Psiren]

Personally I fail to see how one has anything to do with the other. Writing a driver is system level programming. Setting up paths, shells and patches is system administration. While some people can be good at both, most people are generally only good at one. If you are one of the former, then we bow to your superior intellect.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Loconut1389]

Sol 10 has a lot of freeware apps included, but still not all. Check out http://sunfreeware.com/.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Loconut1389]

or better yet http://www.blastwave.org

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Cyn]

drop into single user mode - link /usr/bin/bash to /sbin/sh.

when /usr is properly mounted, it will cloak this symlink.

problem solved.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[justins]

Personally I fail to see how one has anything to do with the other. Writing a driver is system level programming. Setting up paths, shells and patches is system administration. While some people can be good at both, most people are generally only good at one. If you are one of the former, then we bow to your superior intellect.

Horseshit. "Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration. It is the stuff you learn on the first day or two of the job. Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.

A programmer should know how to administer his own machine.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you doing changing the root shell from /bin/sh to /bin/bash anyways? When you change the shell, you're opening up the door for problems in the event of a recovery situation. /bin/sh provides all of the functionality required of the root account, but I guess you're one of those cats that does everything as root. Gotta feel the power between your legs eh?

I don't think it is fair for non Solaris admins to bash Solaris with uneducated remarks. Everything in Solaris is where it should be. The comment is analogus to saying, holy crap I searched and searched, but I couldn't find grep anywhere on my Windows Server 2003 box, what's going on? This is a stupid OS, as nothing is where it is on my Linux distro. Solaris is NOT Linux, and so why would you expect everything to be where it is on Linux. AIX does not have everything in the same place and do things the same way as Linux. There is no smitty or ODM in linux. Be realistic about how you compare apples to oranges.

Holy crap, I also heard that HPUX does things a little different too, what are they thinking. We've got this Linux standard, that everything should be based on right?? Bah!

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Psiren]

"Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration.

When everything works as expected, I would absolutely agree with you. It's when things don't work as expected that a sysadmin excels, and a programmer has problems. Of course, I'm being pretty general, and paths and shells definately are basic stuff. Patches and packages are not so straightforward. I admined Solaris for 4 years or so. Haven't touched them in 2 years, and don't miss it one bit. Nasty system.

A programmer should know how to administer his own machine.

Hmmm. Should a sysadmin be expected to write his own drivers?

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, finally some appreciation.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[eviltypeguy]

network setup : it doesn't request a Hostname, and for the life of my system, I have hostname unknown. No big deal, except for a few errors that it prints. I have looked at sun's site, and the recommended way of changing this is sys-unconfig - with a few changes to dhcpagent in /etc/default. but that doesn't work. And i didn't feel like going like going through cartwheels changing the large number of files required to do this manually.

This threw me too. But, the sun docs made it clear how to fix:

vi /etc/hostname.interfacename

Enter a hostname into that file and save, then reboot if you're lazy like me.

So, for example I have: /etc/hostname.gani0

The file contains my hostname.

gani0 is the name of the driver for my ethernet interface device.

I am now struggling to get some automatic dev links to be created in solaris, and as with everything else that I have encountered under this OS, it is being extremely painful.

I though this at first too, then I realised it was only painful because I was used to a different way of doing things. These things were just as painful when I was first learning them under another OS.

But, between SUN's excellent documentation and a very helpful user list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/solarisx86

I've been alright so far...

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.

Yeah, and which dumbass just now said "A programmer should know how to administer his own machine." ?

So do YOU know how to talk directly to chips on the ISA bus, or when you need to disable interrupts, block the calling process, or re-schedule your bottom-half handler without causing a deadlock? That's the "idiot work" of device drivers.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[justins]

So do YOU know how to talk directly to chips on the ISA bus

Yeah, but when I do they talk back to me, and tell me to do... terrible things. :(

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[n3rd]

Horseshit. "Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration. It is the stuff you learn on the first day or two of the job.

I'll be sure to let my co-workers they are doing "idiot work", I'm sure they will appreciate it.

Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.

Then who do you suggest does this? Have you ever told your boss (if you are a sysadmin) that you won't do something because it's "trivial crap"?

Too bad you think you are somehow above things of this nature. Unfortunately they are everyday occurances and you need to deal with them.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[justins]

Then who do you suggest does this? Have you ever told your boss (if you are a sysadmin) that you won't do something because it's "trivial crap"?

Somehow you've understood my statement to mean about the opposite of what I said. Everyone who uses a *nix machine professionally in a technical capacity should be able to set the path. Everyone ought to do it when it's appropriate.

Even though it seems wacky to me personally, I would not have criticized the guy for calling a sysadmin for help solving the trivial problems. But reinstalling the OS? WTF.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[TheLastUser]

I am now struggling to get some automatic dev links to be created in solaris

# touch /reconfigure
# init 6

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone who uses a *nix machine professionally in a technical capacity should be able to set the path. Everyone ought to do it when it's appropriate.

That's not the bloody point. The point is that Solaris makes it "appropriate" to set the fucking PATH way more often than it should.

If I've just installed a bunch of Sun's own packages into /opt/sfw and the installers don't know to put /opt/sfw/bin in the PATH, then they're idiots. When you install their preferred GUI and the manu system doesn't even have links to the installed Sun applications, that's stupid.

Sure, I know how to hand-hack everything, but why does Solaris make me keep around checklists to do all this stuff after an install when they could've just done it themselves?

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Atomic Frog]

I have never, ever installed Solaris on any machine before now.
Just a while back, I popped in Solaris 10 on an old UltraSPARC box I have kicking around.

Let me tell you, it was a pretty easy and painless install (and I am definitely _not_ a *NIX guru).

I've been actually _using_ it for a while (alongside my other boxen, a PIII-800 WinXP machine and a dual PIII-800 Linux machine).
Configuration of user stuff was relatively straightforward (as far as UNIX goes), no real problems that you mentioned.

The JDE ... basically GNOME (right?), tells me that the GNOME guys are farting around. The JDE interface and menusare _very nicely_ cleaned up. Consistent menus, and stuff put in reasonable places (i.e. config and preferences aren't littered all over the menus!)

User experience wise, the UltraSPARC (400MHz CPU) is more responsive than my dual-800MHz Linux! (Also GNOME desktop).
Java seems to be used for most of the GUI configuration tools (much like what OS/2 did years back).

Overall, it's a big step forward for Solaris I think, and almost useable desktop workstation (depending on what you use it for).

I'd have to say, if I had to use *NIX and I'd a choice to download Linux for free or pay $100 for Solaris 10 out of my own pocket ... tough choice, but I might just edge over to Solaris.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[justins]

Sure, I know how to hand-hack everything, but why does Solaris make me keep around checklists to do all this stuff after an install when they could've just done it themselves?

A tradition of relying less on scripts in packages, a tradition of letting each user have their own settings, and in some cases a difficulty in guessing what the appropriate order might be when binaries with the same name exist.

If OpenSolaris works out okay, with custom distributions available, some of these problems will probably go away.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[nachumk]

If you bothered to look at my listing of where some programs were installed, you would see that it is quite a mess, and setting the path is more than trivial.
As I anyhow had the opportunity to learn more about solaris by just clean installing version 10, I chose that option. If it was necessary for me, I couldv'e dealt with the paths, login shells, patches, and packages on version 9, but WHY? And as you might have noticed if you read on, all the configuration of (again) paths login shells and patches I did with Solaris 10.
Strange that such simple things like user's default paths or better than that root's default path don't include most of the installed programs paths that come with Solaris (just /usr/sbin, and /usr/bin). Even when you add a user with the SMC, that user doesn't have a normal path.
And as I noted in previous post, the SMC gives the option of changing user's shells, but changing root's seems to give an error. Whats with that? So I did it manually.
I have no problem system administrating, but with a brand new version of Solaris, these smaller tasks should be somewhat more automated.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[nachumk]

Yes, I used pkg-get which uses sunfreeware, and installed firefox 1.0. I was unimpressed by how long it took but that can be blamed on the very old machine. But I was happy to see that after a download of a lot of packages, firefox does work. Good for solaris, and what would seem to be some community work.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[justins]

Yes, I used pkg-get which uses sunfreeware

Just to add to the confusion, you can also use pkg-get with blastwave.org, and you get yet another path you need to add to your, er, path. Blastwave is much more of a community effort, until very recently the guy who maintains Sunfreeware refused to take packages from anyone and created them all himself.

So you get a lot of different namespaces for the solaris stuff, the legacy SunOS stuff, the sfw stuff, and the csw (blastwave) stuff. It is an ugly pain in the ass but it is a good way to keep separate all sorts of different software.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris >= 9 will start sh if the attempt to run root's shell specified in /etc/passwd failed. No need to worry. Also starting with version 10, Solaris does not provide the possibility for static linking of system libraries--sh has dynamic dependencies too.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[Ih8sG8s]

I have to agree here. I've managed dev environments for many flavours of unix like OSs for years.

One thing that is viewed as a pain in the ass about Solaris is that you need to implement what you want from a seemingly sparse base system.

One of the strengths of solaris is that if you want/need to implement your own environment from scratch, and dictate the system through your own requirements, you can do so. In fact you are expected to do so.

Glass half empty/full. It depends on your perspective. The ultra gransparent would have benefitted from the advice of a proper solaris admin.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[QuantumG]

A programmer should know how to administer his own machine.
Umm.. hell no! admin is a job for admin. As a wise man once said to me: you do your job and I'll do mine.

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[jeks]

Solaris 10 is binary compatible with Solaris 2.6, released more than seven years ago. Any OS with history and compatibility of that kind will hence have its history and antics.

The reason why paths are different in Solaris is because they were well organised back in the '90:s, when LSB was in infancy, according to a standard named System V. Paths make a lot of sense in Solaris, if you read up on them - in fact they make as much sense as they do in Linux LSB today.

To answer your partitioning and hostname "issues" it is well stated how this is accomplished in the documentation. There is a file to set your hostname, even for a multihomed site. I suggest 'man nodename', when you have the time. In fact, for a driver developer, you seem awkwardly uncomfortable with reading documentation. That is a pity, since docs.sun.com is one of the best documentation repositories for a commersial product I've ever seen. Maybe you should read up on Solaris' devfs and the Solaris Driver Developer Kit manual - somehow it seems relevant to your work?

Finally to change the login policy on any System V UNIX, not only Solaris, try /etc/default/login, where you can also modify the global path to include any csh or tcsh users you may acquire (changing only /etc/profile will have no impact on csh-users).

You're not an academic, are you?

Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week

[nachumk]

I believe you when you say that the paths make sense, but that doesn't stop Solaris from being able to set them up by default.
The hostname issue has a lot of talk on Sun's site, and also in newsgroups, and the recommended way to change it is by changing the dhcpagent file, and running sys-unconfig. That didn't work. There was then a lot of discussions about manual ways of doing it. I will try the nodename file, as you and some others have mentioned, but it really isn't that important. It just seems like something that should be done automatically.
The documentation that Sun provides is unbelievable. There is a lot of it, and it is well explained. I have even managed to fix the dev links problem I had spoken of, with the help of both documentation, and some sample drivers I found.
As a final note, I finished setting up the system with paths and login shells, and everything else I needed before I wrote my first post, it is just surprising how litte of it is done by the Solaris install when comparing it to other comparable OS's today.

No, I'm not an academic, I am a comp sci major, I have set up linux and windows servers and workstations, and I have no problem getting around an OS, high level or low. I was posting my experience with an OS that looks user friendly, but is truly far from it.

Define Virtual Machines

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, the defintion of virtual machines is all over the map. I doubt that you can run different OSes in each Zone so I suspect that Sun is using a different definition than IBM.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work at we have very good support from SUN. I got the CD's and tried to install.... man that SUCKS! No more stick it and come back later, it requires being baby-sat. Toxic waste comes to mind. Far worse than ANY Linux distro I have tried. It didn't even install correctly to boot.

Ok, so now I have a machine with all their new block buster stuff on it. They hype was worse than Microsoft for Windows XP, 2000, 2003, even the legendary NT (legendary hype for NT). It is the same old OS with a few new things that you will probably never use. They also still sell licenses so it is "open" but still not free.

Save your time, it isn't worth the 4 hours to load a machine and look at unless you have nothing better to do. I'm so dissapointed I'm decomissioning SUN's as I type this, going to RedHat Linux on commodity hardware. So far the new machine kicks my (fully loaded) 15K's ass down the street with just 4 processors.

The SUN is setting.

more stuff

[alsta]

Some good resources for Solaris X86 extras and tinkering;

http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86.html

http://www.solaris-x86.org

The author said that he was forced to use OSS to get sound to work. There are open source drivers for Solaris as well and they work pretty well. Note that they're compiled for Solaris 9, but they still work with Solaris 10.

http://www.tools.de/solaris/audio/

You are missing the point.

[jotaeleemeese]

WHen Solaris works (most of the time) it does very well.

When it does not, you are almost on your own, no matter how much you are paying for support (you would be surpirsed what companies like Sun can get away with, even when dealing with big clients).

With Linux, if the company providing support is ignoring you, you can try to solve the problem yourself (which is achievable in many cases) or ask somebody else to fix the problem.

With Sun you are lost if your problem is not one of their priorities.

Re:You are missing the point.

[elmegil]

When it does not, you are almost on your own, no matter how much you are paying for support

BS. You've obviously got a big chip on your shoulder. Sun is far more responsive than any of their main competitors/"partners" in the data center space.

With Sun you are lost if your problem is not one of their priorities.

And this is different from getting a bug fixed in firefox or Gnome how?

Re:You are missing the point.

[Metzli]

Really? For a long time, Sun's first response was "Patch your systems and apply new firmware. After that, we'll help you troublshoot." They've gotten a lot better about that, but I've had _much_ more luck getting help from IBM (AIX), Red Hat (AS 2.1), and HP/Compaq (Tru64 4.0F-5.1A), that Sun (Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, and 9).

Re:You are missing the point.

[v01d]

Red Hat? You can't be serious.I've never seen such incompetent support staff. We discovered that their support was worth absolutely nothing, so dropped it.
There was an occasion when calling the number went straight to voice mail, which complained of a full mailbox and hung up; it took several days to get a person.

Re:You are missing the point.

[elmegil]

So tell me, what vendors don't tell you to patch to current levels before they'll invest a lot of time in your problem? I have to tell you, there's no fun like troubleshooting for hours only to find if you'd applied the latest patch your problem would be resolved. It might be a good idea for someone to point to a specific bug in a patch that appears relevant, but I can't see expecting much more until you've demonstrated that you'll work your end of the problem.

Beyond that, I know personally of many cases where Sun customers provided good reasons why they could not upgrade patches, and had the field people work with them just fine. Been like that for the last 10 years I'm aware of at least. Call center people tend to be less flexible, but that is also pretty universal.

Even worse

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one of these "I'm a BSD person" types. Still uninformed, but at least they're not uninformed "Linux people". Wonderfull uninformed remarks about graphical installers, never cared to see if you can run without. Wonderfull remark about an OS that should be installable without reboot, which is nonsense, if you can do unattended aswel as attended installs you're OK who cares if it needs to reboot.

Re:Is solaris still used often? (Laptoo Installs)

[wehe]

There is a small community of people using Solaris on Laptops and Notebooks already.

Did they spend too much in the first place ?

[anti-NAT]

There are only two reasons why they would still be using their 1999 hardware, and I'm curious which one it is

Their capacity needs haven't grown since 1999, so the machine they bought then is also exactly the right size for today.

They were taken for a ride by their Sun rep, and bought hardware that had excess capacity, even for today.

I suppose 2. above is OK, 1999 was around the middle of the Internet boom, money was burning holes in peoples' pockets.

Or is your point that the hardware is very reliable ? Suns should be, for the price you pay, however I wouldn't think that property is unique to Sun. I have old Western Digital (SMC) 1992 ethernet cards that still work today.

I've also seen some unreliable Sun hardware. A few years ago in a team I worked with, they bought a number of Ultra 5s and Ultra 450s. I remember on certainly more than one occasion the sysadmin sending the box back to Sun because the CPU (or one of in the 450) had died./p.

Man, get some help.

[anti-NAT]

Cause I think you're a Solaris addict !

Resource Manager

[maitas]

The reviewer miss in his zones explanation the part about Resource Manager. This is simply a zSeries like WorkLoad Manager tool. It allows to assign processing power per process and per zone, and also physical and virtual memory per user. Simply put, if you have 3 process running, you can assign each process 1/3rd of the processing power of the system, 1/3rd of the physical memory to each process (so no process force a page-out for all the others), and the same amount of virtual memory as the hole system memory (as long as the working set for each process fits in) to avoid memory leak problems.
Other point is that the installer have a bug and although it asks if you want the 1st CD to auto pop-up, it wont work, you need to take it out before it starts the installation all over again. Some bouilds have a message reporting this error (instead of fixing it...).
Binary compatibility is withit the ABI for the same platform (obviously, you can't move a SPARC binary to an Opteron box). The good part is that source files will written using the standar ABI will recompily straight.
The main-point with any other OS than Linux is that rigth-now companies seems more likely to die than the hole Linux movement (or however you want to call it).

Re:Resource Manager

[dunstan]

It's cooler than that.

There are Dynamic System Domains: which are hardware isolated from each other, but you can add hardware into/remove it from domains. Each domain runs its own Solaris image, and its own kernel.

Then, within each OS image you can run multiple zones. You can use the resource manager to allocate shares between zones.

Then, within each zone you can use the resource manager to share resources between processes.

The granularity is pretty darned good, and you get the benefit of fault isolated domains if you need it.

who uses Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I reckon Solaris is used as the *nix of choice in about two thirds of the companies I have as clients - particularly for large web sites and web apps (the BBC for instance). AIX has most of the rest. Some (though certainly not all) are starting to consider Linux and Windows as options.

It's a good nix, Solaris. All my Solaris servers have always been rock solid and Sun have been very, very good at supplying patches and support over the years. Not sure why the get such a hard time on slashdot. (Well, OK, they're Linux policy is shall we say complicated but that is hardly surprising seeing as how it is slowly killing them).

Someone has to buy these guys out

[blackhedd]

Solaris is a very very fine piece of technology, and Sun's many enterprise customers will be installing upgrades and consuming services for many years to come.
However, Sun is not going to win any new business with this release- all the growth is above them and below them. They know they have to do something, which is why they "open-sourced" 10, but this is nothing more than a lame attempt to get some of the benefits of community development. How many of you Linux/BSD hackers out there are all fired up to start contributing features and bug fixes to Scott and Jon? I thought not. And in regard to Solaris on x86, it's completely senseless, for more than one reason.

Sun's total market cap would fit more than three times into Microsoft's bank account, and that has been true for over three years now. The problem is, no one has a need to acquire Sun, either as an accretive play (no growth) or to kill them. They're going to twist in the wind for at least another decade, but they stopped being interesting long ago.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[Decaff]

which is why they "open-sourced" 10

The way that Solaris 10 is to be open sourced was approved by the OSI under the CDDL license, so no need for those "quotes". If you don't approve, complain about the OSI. Just because it is not GPL, does not mean it is not open source.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[blackhedd]

I have no quarrel with the process or the license. (And I didn't say anything at all about GPL, so don't put words in my mouth.)
Sun can release all the source code they want. My point is that it's not going to bring them the business benefits they are hoping for, because the underlying economics are broken.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[Decaff]

I have no quarrel with the process or the license.

When someone puts something in quotes like "open source", this is usually meant to indicate that the quoted phrase is being questioned...

That's what I assumed.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[oldmanmtn]

all the growth is above them and below them

This doesn't make any sense. I'm running Solaris 10 on an Epia Mini-ITX system. You only get "below" that if you want to run something on the embedded CPU in your car. The exact same OS runs on a 72-way multi-threaded server with 1/2 TB of memory. There are machines larger than that, but it's not a "growth" part of the industry.

And in regard to Solaris on x86, it's completely senseless, for more than one reason.

OK, let's hear at least one then.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[blackhedd]

Running Sun 10 on an Epia: that's a very interesting science project. But remember that Sun is a multi-billion dollar business. They would need to evaluate the market for Sun on mini-ITX platforms and conclude that it can add at least a few hundred million per year to their top line before it gets interesting. Also, their core market is enterprise IT, and it's far from clear that this market has a great interest in mini-ITX platforms, unless you're proposing to run Sun 10 on desktop-replacement laptops.

Regarding Solaris on x86:
1) It doesn't work well enough. Certainly not well enough to displace Linux in the core market for x86-based servers.
2) It takes away from Sun's core business, which is and always been selling Sparc-based hardware and peripherals to enterprise IT.
3) It doesn't provide a compelling alternative to Linux in the application space which is targeted by inexpensive x86-based hardware. If you want to, you could try making the case that you could run Sun on all your machines from top to bottom and avoid the need to hire Linux admins, but I'd need to see the numbers.
4) I've been trying to do Solaris on x86 for 10 years now, ever since Solaris version 2.3. It just isn't stable.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[oldmanmtn]

They would need to evaluate the market for Sun on mini-ITX platforms and conclude that it can add at least a few hundred million per year to their top line before it gets interesting

If you ever have access to Sunsolve, look at bug 6212267. It's a Priority 1 bug that prevented S10 from booting on Epia mini-ITX systems. It was marked an "S10 stopper", meaning they would have held S10 until the bug was fixed. I don't expect Sun to start shipping tiny low-power systems like this, but they obviously care about them.

1) It doesn't work well enough.

Meaning what? It's not fast enough? It's not robust enough? It's not fully-featured enough? All of those are false, but you're not even being specific about your complaints.

2) It takes away from Sun's core business, which is and always been selling Sparc-based hardware

Sun's core business has always been selling networked Unix systems and the services to go along with them. Those systems have mostly been (Ultra)SPARC based for 13 years now, but that's just an implementation detail.

3) It doesn't provide a compelling alternative to Linux in the application space which is targeted by inexpensive x86-based hardware.

It doesn't have the device support that Linux does, but it runs on a huge amount of x86 hardware. I think the performance, stability, and features like SMF, Zones, and dtrace make it a compelling alternative.

4)I've been trying to do Solaris on x86 for 10 years now, ever since Solaris version 2.3. It just isn't stable.

I stuck with Linux on x86 until S10 came out, so I can't speak to Solaris' stability on PC hardware before that. As of S10, Solaris on x86 machines is just as stable as Solaris on SPARC machines (*) and certainly more stable than Linux.

(*) OK, that's not quite true. It's as stable as Solaris on SPARC within the limitations of the hardware. SPARC systems tend to have higher-quality components, better recovery from ECC errors, multiple paths to I/O devices, and so on.

Re:Someone has to buy these guys out

[blackhedd]

1) It doesn't work well enough.
>>>Meaning what?
The combination of cost, features, robustness and stability are not superior to the analogous aggregate for Linux, in low-end server applications. In short, there's not enough reason to abandon Linux for Sun 10. The calculation goes the other way in Sun's core market, which is high-end enterprise application servers.

2) It takes away from Sun's core business, which is and always been selling Sparc-based hardware
>>>Sun's core business has always been selling networked Unix systems and the services to go along with them.
I think that your statement represents Sun's core marketing spin rather than their core business ;-). But even if they believed it themselves (which they may), Sun has become a seriously risk-averse culture in recent years and I don't think they would lightly de-emphasize the decades of brand strength associated with Sparc hardware.

3) It doesn't provide a compelling alternative to Linux in the application space which is targeted by inexpensive x86-based hardware.
>>>It doesn't have the device support that Linux does, but it runs on a huge amount of x86 hardware. I think the performance, stability, and features like SMF, Zones, and dtrace make it a compelling alternative.
Remains to be seen. dtrace is interesting in low-end applications, the other two less so.

4)I've been trying to do Solaris on x86 for 10 years now, ever since Solaris version 2.3. It just isn't stable.
You're making my point with your statement about Sparc's better hardware. Plus, Solaris is seriously optimized for the Sparc architecture, and always has been.

Re:only 256k up?

[asaul]

Well, because a FILE is defined as a char in the 32-bit ABI (Application Binary Interface) as the man page tells you - you cant change that without breaking the ABI compatibility.

Unlink some other OSes, Solaris has standards and backwards compatability to maintain, which is one of its main strengths.

Whats wrong with just using open() or making a 64 bit binary?

Solaris Noob

[Zontar The Mindless]

First of all, I'm no Solaris expert. (Heck, I only switched from Windows to Linux full-time a month or two ago.) But I was curious, and thought it might be cool to run our main product on Sol-x86 along with the Linux and win32 versions.

I figured I'd be filling up an otherwise uneventful weekend, so I threw together a 433/256 out of spare parts, downloaded and burned the ISOs, and made myself a large pot of coffee. The installation took about 2 hours and pretty much everything I needed worked right the first time, and now I've got myself a nifty little SAMP server for testing. (Running Solaris 10, Apache 1.3.31, PHP 5.0.3, and MySQL 5.0.2-alpha.)

Reviewer missed a lot..

[Loconut1389]

Solaris zones are way cooler than one paragraph could explain- you can take a zone and move it to a duplicately configured machine (ala flash install or otherwise) in a heartbeat.. among other things..

the reviewer had trouble installing without rebooting part-way through.. the way it sounded, he could only install the mini root and then reboot.. I just did a solaris 10 install friday on a Sun V480 box and not only did it install all 4 cds before rebooting into the actual OS, I did all of the package selection at the beginning and didn't have to wait for anything - magic of DVDs! In any case, i'm still pretty sure that you can do the package selection in front without having to twiddle thumbs between cds (eg package selection is not on a per cd basis)..

Those were just a couple problems with the review I saw.. I don't think they really know solaris well enough to be reviewing it and have it considered worth much.

Re:Reviewer missed a lot..

[Loconut1389]

Sorry to post onto myself, but I forgot to mention something.

The author mentions the name 'slowaris'- solaris, when left default, used to be rather slow indeed- but there are pages and pages ($1,500 worth of manuals we bought at one point in time before on-cd manuals) and many many classes you can take that teach you just how tweakable solaris is. The problem is that some of that tweaking to make it fast is incredibly complex and/or hidden away and you need an expert to show you.

To the people who call it slowaris, they really just don't know how to make it work for them.

That's like buying a mazda 626 and complaining when the idle speed isnt perfect, and it won't go past 120 due to the governor. You read some manuals, and/or find a mechanic who really knows it inside and out and those problems can be fixed and itll run like butter.

In any case, solaris 10 moves just a few of the streamlining customization features to the front and makes them easier, but there are still a whole basket of easter eggs and other customizables that only someone who's spent a lot of money on classwork would probably know.

So before you count solaris 9 and before out, learn some of the behind the scenes. And as for 10, if it ain't perfect out of the box, there's probably something you can do about it.

Re:Reviewer missed a lot..

[daverabbitz]

But it's still a mazda 626 and hence total rubbish, sorry end of argument.

Zones and Xen

[Alioth]

TFA says that unlike Xen and UML, Zones have a very small overhead.

This isn't quite accurate - Xen does NOT have a large performance penalty (UML does, especially for I/O intensive workloads). Xen domains have almost the same performance as the native OS. Additionally, Xen VMs are not Linux kernels housed in a Linux host machine like UML, every Xen domain including domain0 runs under Xen itself. The only special thing about domain0 is that Xen passes off hardware access to domain0 rather than implementing all the device drivers itself.

Xen is more like IBM's mainframe logical partitions (LPARs) than UML or Solaris's zones or BSD jails. It serves a different purpose to zones or BSD jails (but a similar purpose to UML).

And Xen has very very good performance. I've been testing it recently and it blows away any other virtualization tools I've used on x86 including VMWare and UML.

Re:Zones and Xen

[oldmanmtn]

TFA says that unlike Xen and UML, Zones have a very small overhead.

Compared to other virtualization technologies Xen has a low performance overhead, but it still isn't 0. With Zones, the performance overhead really is 0.

Was he talking about performance only, or other resources as well?

With Xen, you have to staticly partition physical memory among the domains, which can be wasteful if the domains have different workloads. With Zones, the resources can shift between zones dynamically based on usage.

With Xen, each domain has a full install of the OS, which takes quite a bit of diskspace. You can probably get around that by setting each up as a diskless client, but how many people really do that? With Zones, the bulk of the OS image is shared by all the zones, saving disk space. My local zone takes about 65MB on disk, mostly for the zone-specific files in /var and /etc.

Just to be clear: none of this is meant as a criticism of Xen. It is a very different beast than zones, so these just reflect different tradeoffs. Xen gives you better isolation and more flexibility in OS choice than Zones do, but those benefits do come with some cost.

Re:Zones and Xen

[Alioth]

My first sentence was badly written. Mea culpa.

My response was really pointing out that the author was incorrect in saying that Xen had a high overhead - it does not - its overhead is incredibly low.

Xen can also use copy-on-write (and UML can too) filesystems for the common stuff between operating systems (so if you have five identical Xen domains, they can all mount the same copy-on-write fileystem), so you don't need five installs of the same OS.

Personally, I don't think Xen (or UML) and Solaris zones are really comparable - they are different tools for different jobs (the real comparison would be between Solaris zones and FreeBSD jails). My contention is merely that it's inaccurate to say Xen has a high overhead because it doesn't. Also, the characterization of the way Xen works (i.e. a host Linux with guest domains) was also incorrect since all domains running under Xen are run by the small Xen kernel rather than a large Linux kernel. (Indeed, domain0 can be NetBSD, and the domU can be Linux if you so desire).

Actually...if Solaris does get open sourced, wouldn't it be nice to have a Xenised Solaris?

Re:Zones and Xen

[Lemming Mark]

With Xen, you have to staticly partition physical memory among the domains, which can be wasteful if the domains have different workloads. With Zones, the resources can shift between zones dynamically based on usage.

Under Xen you can move memory between domains using the balloon driver. Unlike for Zones, this won't happen automagically at the moment but it wouldn't be difficult to implement simple autoballooning.

With Xen, each domain has a full install of the OS, which takes quite a bit of diskspace.

You can share things like /usr read-only between domains. There's also the possibility of using CoW block devices / filesystems, although we've yet to find an ideal solution for this.

Regarding the article, I think it's also worth pointing out that under Linux, vservers is much closer to BSD Jail / Solaris Zones than Xen or UML and would probably be a better comparison.

Re:Zones and Xen

[oldmanmtn]

Xen can also use copy-on-write (and UML can too) filesystems for the common stuff between operating systems (so if you have five identical Xen domains, they can all mount the same copy-on-write fileystem), so you don't need five installs of the same OS.

Cool. I missed that. Thanks.

Actually...if Solaris does get open sourced, wouldn't it be nice to have a Xenised Solaris?

http://news.com.com/2102-7344_3-5581484.html

Re:Zones and Xen

[justins]

The cool thing about OpenSolaris is that people will soon be able to make really detailed analysis of the engineering tradeoffs between jails, Xen, and zones. There might end up being some other cool things you can do, with a little hacking. There is already a project out there (can't remember the name) to allow FreeBSD to run in a Solaris zone.

Remains to be seen if that will work. :)

tim bray on moving from linux/osx to Solaris 10

[cpfeifer]

Tim Bray is blogging his move from his current dev platform of linux/osx to Solaris 10. Very honest, and very interesting.

Re:only 256k up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it's fixed for 64-bit binary, but still customers and non-techies seem scared of 64-bit. The 64-bit build I tested works great and is a good solution.

But the customers want 32-bit and their app may sometimes do popen or fopen and it crashes when the underlying layers (that use 'open') have opened a lot of files. They also link against third-party binaries, so need them to upgrade to 64-bit also, etc., etc.

I think they should of allowed the fopen to have file handles 0-254 and open/close etc. to use 255 upwards.

package management

[Anonymous Coward]

This wasn't mentioned in the article-- does anyone know if Sun has fixed their wretched antique package management? Are packages finally versioned? Do they have some dependency management ala apt or yum?

Even the beta works fine

[octogen]

I am still running the beta-69 release (on x86), which required some "creativity" to install, because the install procedure was not completely finished yet. But even the beta runs fine now, and the new privilege model (instead of just root/world privileges) solved a lot of problems for me.

Market

[delirium of disorder]

Solaris 10 is a great technical computing or server OS. GNU/Linux has some advantages over it, for example debian's package system and free organisation. Overall Linux is easier to get up and running. Knoppix is trivial to boot. Paths and default executable placement are simpler in Linux. Linux is more ported. X11 support seams better in most Linux distros. Virtual consoles are a big plus when X gets messed up.

But Solaris has some cool features. Zones, dtrace, exellent SMP support, and surprisingly, a great price/performance ratio. I donno how well sun will do (I would guess they'll make some money in the short term on Opeteron systems and probably in the long term with Fujitsu massivly multi-core SPARC). But the current market for used sun workstations/servers is great because of Sun's overall decline. I was able to get (on ebay) a quad 450mhz ultrasparcII box with 2 gigs of ram, and dual 36 gig scsi drives, quad redundent power supples (800 watt), etc: for a measily $200. Solaris 10 installed great. Sun hardware is built to withstand hell and admins, students, hobbiests, or whoever, who normally couldn't afford this quality should really check it out. I also actually like CDE and the old Motief look. It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows or MacOS. SPARC hardware also has a security advantage from being non-x86, espicially if you ditch solaris and go with BSD/Linux. Most attacks are from idiot script kiddies who just use the x86 shellcode they found on bugtraq. Even if you run an exploitable version of some service, likely you will be immune due to your somewhat obscure hardware.

Re:Market

[Anonymous Coward]

- Thanks for the Tip!

Re:Market

[55555 Manbabies!]

Security through obscurity, wow just wow.

Re:Market

[delirium of disorder]

In the real world security through obscurity works. Someone running a totally unknown OS/archetecture is not as likely to be exploited as someone who has a popular OS/arch. This does not mean the the sysadmins/developers of the system should assume that their undocumented/unpublic hardware/software will remain unknown. Good security keeps only a few secrets (passwords, keys, hashes of said passowords/keys), and assumes all else is known.

For examply, cray Unicos is not particularly secure; audits of it reveal the same types of valunerabilities as other UNIX systems. However, since cray hardware is so big, loud, and expensive, few people have access to it to test valunerabilies and fine tune exploits. If you take a linux box, a windows box, and a Unicos box and put them on the net, then enable a few common services (SMTP/HTTP/SSH/FTP/NFS/NTP/etc), and leave 'em up and running for a few years without patching anything, the windows and Linux machines will most likely get 0wned as exploits become public, while the cray probably will not. Does this mean that a determined hacker couldn't break into the Cray? No. Does this mean that if the Linux and Windows boxes were patched, the cray would still best them security-wise? Probabily not. But it does provide a small practical increese in security.

A more real case study---I run a public shell server on a PA-RISC box running linux, and let people add themselves to my system. I have thousands of users and constantly find exploits in their home dirs and in /tmp. However, the exploits all use x86 shellcode and don't work. I try and keep up to date with security fixes, but I am also glad to have a somewhat obscure archetecture as another layer of protection. Maybe I am being rooted and whoever is doing it is just being stealthy enough to keep me from knowing it. That is always a possability regardless of the popularity of my hardware/software.

Security through obscurity should not be relied on, but it does exist. We shouldn't lie about that.

put Mad Penquin on a Solaris Server?

[peter303]

It got slashdotted very easily. I presume it was a Linux server.

Re:put Mad Penquin on a Solaris Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD according to Netcraft

Better Threading

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris still supports pthreads better than Linux. The Linux C runtime lib does not fully support pthread_cancel. There are a few rare cases where a cancel request is caught in the RTL (as it often should), but it does not properly clean up RTL mutexes, etc as the thread exits. The RTL is now hosed and subsequent RTL calls may crash or lock up.

The manpage for pthread_cancel hints at this issue in the "Bugs" section, but doesn't quite make it clear.

paperclip

[zogger]

use an unfolded paperclip wire "tool" in the appropriate hole in the front of the optical drive to remove a recalcitrant disc. AFAIK most optical drives still have that feature. Comes in handy once in awhile.

Re:paperclip

[BlueUnderwear]

use an unfolded paperclip wire "tool" in the appropriate hole in the front of the optical drive to remove a recalcitrant disc.

Which is what I ended up doing, and from that point on, Solaris would recognize no CD at all as correct, not even the #2 that it was expecting...

Re:paperclip

[zogger]

yes, had that happen to me before as well. The trick to me is more useful when I space out and change a drive and forget to remove the disk inside until a week later when I can't find the disk. heh.

Re:paperclip

[dknj]

if the os locks the drive, that little hole will not send a magical signal to the computer telling it the disc has been ejected against its will. it will assume the disc still exists (at least this has been the case with all of the cdrom drives i've come into contact with)

-dk

Re:paperclip

[georgewilliamherbert]

Which is what I ended up doing, and from that point on, Solaris would recognize no CD at all as correct, not even the #2 that it was expecting...

sh /etc/init.d/volmgt stop
sh /etc/init.d/volmgt start

The latter is only necessary when you really do in fact have something else expecting another disk to mount up properly in the CD-ROM, such as the installer.

I usually leave it off on my systems, as it's a PITA, and use "mount" manually. But I'm old and crusty by modern standards.

Solaris 10 adoption

[Wetwork]

I recently read this somewhere: Only 4 percent of the CIOs surveyed expect Sun to gain share of their spending in 2005. "The problem is that for many users whatever Sun does is too little too late," said Merrill strategist Steven Milunovich. i don't have the link to this anymore, but just in general, how popular does the slashdot crowd think Solaris 10 will be?

Re:Solaris 10 adoption

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve "it's late 1999 and you can't be overinvested in tech stocks" Milunovich. Thanks for nothing, Stevie

yep..

[fliptout]

hehe, i think you got trolled..Come on, a solaris Roomba? Does Dancing Santa have a solaris-enabled flying sleigh too? :)

Re:yep..

[anti-NAT]

I figured he might be. Does that mean I trolled a troll ?

seeksize.d

[CODiNE]

Anyone care to explain a little bit what the seeksize.d script really does? Also, why did he say that it was somewhat shocking?

Thanks,
-Don.

Re:seeksize.d

[WWWWolf]

(Note: I'm not a Solaris user. =)

Seeksize's home page is here. It explains that seeksize "prints the disk head seek distance by process. This can identify whether processes are accessing the disks in a 'random' or 'sequential' manner."

In other words, it shows how much the program bounces around in the file with fseek() and other read commands. If it shows a lot of 0s, the program probably reads the files in order; if other values, it probably jumps around a lot.

The site is slashdotted and I could only get the first page from Coral, so I can't see the screenshot. I don't know what could be so shocking about bouncy file access; we aren't exactly in the golden era of tape-based storage anymore, random access files tend to be norm these days anyway. =) Maybe it is shocking in case where you don't *expect* program to poke around the file.

Re:seeksize.d

[MadRaVen]

It shows a nice table per process of disk read offsets. I didn't find the info shocking, I found the speed, ease and layout of the info shocking. It was just the first script I found that made me step back and think about what this could do.

Public Linux to Solaris Switch Chronicle

[mmcshane]

Tim Bray is switching his development environment from OSX/Linux to Solaris. His diary of the switch is here (Note, as he does, that Mr. Bray is a Sun employee)

I have to second this

[nikolas]

I installed a Solaris 10 prerelease on my inspiron 8200 notebook, which is definitely not sun approved, and it (now) works perfectly fine, even with my nvidia graphics card.

I did, although, notice the exact same problems as the original poster (like "eject cd" not doing anything etc.), and it took me quite some tweaking to get X going and to configure a german keyboard. The keyboard config thing is definitely an installers job and differs a lot from linux.

There are some rough edges there (never mess up your X config with xdm login on until you know how to boot into single user mode), and some things are beautiful and quite configureable, like ksh, but not preconfigured worth a dime when they come out of the box!

A z/OS WLM primer

[Dammital]

"Resource Manager [...] is simply a zSeries like WorkLoad Manager tool"

Perhaps you meant "System Resource Manager" rather than WLM? Dispatcher controls and storage isolation (such as you describe) have been part of SRM since the birth of MVS.

z/OS Workload Manager is a higher-level layer that allocates processor, storage and I/O resources for you, based upon general goals that you set for arbitrary classes of work. You give WLM the relative importance of the applications you run, and specify your performance expectations. WLM dynamically adjusts dispatching priorities, assigns more or less storage, and generally performs the workaday tuning that a performance analyst had to do manually when there was only SRM.

(An oldie but a goodie: PDF presentation contrasting SRM and WLM.)

Xen

[lakeland]

Er, you do know the whole point of Xen was virtualisation without the performance hit, right? Now, maybe it isn't 100% successful, I can't try since it doesn't support my CPU (7447).

But my understanding from reading the tech-report is its only fault was no DRI (so no 3D acceleration).

Re:Xen

[Anonymous Coward]

DRI support seems to work OK now (Xen is bundled with a patch for the Linux AGPGART code, which is technically buggy - this has been reported recently to have fixed the problem.

Solaris x86 FAQ

[dananderson]

For more information see the Solaris x86 FAQ (which I wrote with the help of hundreds)

Solaris 10/x86 in qemu, anyone?

[hubertf]

I'm trying to get Solaris 10/x86 going in qemu on NetBSD. The installation of the packages goes well, but after the first reboot, I get an error:

...
svccfg (/tmp/kdm_svccfg_cmds, line 1): Pattern 'application/x11/x11-server' doesn't match any instances or services
Starting Solaris Install Launcher in Command Line Mode
Error occurred during initialization of VM. java.lang.InternalError
The Solaris Install Launcher has terminated unexpectedly.
Press the Return key and a system reboot will take place
on your machine.

I specifically asked for a console-only boot as I guess qemu has trouble with running X, and I imagine Solaris should deal properly with a console-only installation (thinking of some blade server with serial console).

Anyone got a hint on where to go from there?

- Hubert

Solid OS

[lgrullon]

I install Solaris 10 in my laptop and so far it seems like a very solid OS, the only thing I dind't like about the default install is that it doesn't come with a compiler, I guess SUN is giving us the option of buying the sun studio 10 or install the gcc compiler ourselves. Overall I can't complain about it.

Cut the Attitude

[Aron S-T]

I started reading this thread, because after reading the review I still didn't understand why Solaris 10 was such a big deal. The reviewer kept on saying "Solaris 10 has some really cool stuff" but except for a few cryptic sentances that probably make sense to people who already know about Solaris, it didn't really enlighten me any.

So against my better judgement (given the quality of discussions on /.), I decided to read the thread. Sometimes I do find some nuggets of additional information, and I really want to know more about Solaris. I was shocked to see the attitude of the Solaris users. Basically, they project this "you're idiots, we're gods because we do ENTERPRISE computing" attitude.

Over the years I had the unfortunate need to deal with Sun from time to time, in various business capacities. I was always put off by their arrogance. But to see that many Sun USERS also seem to be Mini McNealys -- wow, that's really something special.

At this point, I don't know much more about Solaris than I did before reading the review and the comments here. But I do know some things about businesses and how they work and think. In re: the guy who made the snide comment re: Linux and Stallman etc. What the writer (or rather the person he was quoting) seems to forget, is that Sun isn't competing against "Linux" in the enterprise. Linux isn't a company. Sun is competing against IBM. IBM has been selling into the "enterprise" market, from when Scott McNealy was in diapers. And IBM has Sun in its gun sights, and it is shooting Linux bullets and not just AIX bullets. I heard an IBM Senior VP state that IBM is spending millions helping VARs to port Sun-based applications to Linux.

Sure CIOs of big companies are conservative and don't change easily. But they also look at Sun's stock price and other financials, and when IBM comes knocking with an alternative solution which won't be all that disruptive, making the switch won't seem like a radical act.

So where does that leave Sun and Solaris? Many of you forget that Sun started by snapping at IBM's heels from the workstation market, which was the low-end of the computer world in its days. Now Gnu/Linux in all its variants is eating Sun's lunch on the low end and moving up the feeding chain. IBM is relentlessly crushing down from the high end. What's left? However superior Solaris technology may be (and I haven't yet gotten a clear picture why it is superior), Sun is certainly facing huge business challenges. It's future is by no means guaranteed. And McNealy's arrogant attitude, which seems to be part of the Sun culture, to the extent of even effecting Sun users, sure doesn't help.

Re:Cut the Attitude

[h8sg8s]

Attitude indeed. If you want to bash Solaris, then please do so. If you want to bash McNealy, then send email to scooter@sun.com. Please refrain from confusing the two.

I wrote some code on a SS2 about 12 years ago and found it recently when I was cleaning up things - just as a joke I pushed it onto a SPARC Solaris 10 system I was testing and it *ran*. It didn't whine about libc, or piss and moan about the kernel version, it just ran. That's stability.

Solaris 10 suffers from comparison with linux only in that it's not linux. It stands on it's own as a world-class platform with incredible stability and longevity. Folks, use the right tool for the job and leave the religious arguments for the trolls.
Have we all grown so polarized we can't accept a decent OS that's a bit different?

P.S.
BTW - the "review" left out most of the nicer Solaris 10 features - go read some other reviews to get a better scope of that's there, or just pull it down and play with it.

OT: Re:Is solaris still used often?

[ckaminski]

Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc

No. Solaris is Solaris. The Solaris running on your x86 machine is exactly the same as the Solaris running on your SPARC. Obviously there is some platform-specific code, but it is _not_ a port. They are built from the exact same source tree.
</quote>

An FYI. 99% of the developers I have ever worked with consider that a "port".

Peace.

Re:only 256k up?

[JonAnderson]

I think they should of allowed the fopen to have file handles 0-254 and open/close etc. to use 255 upwards.

The commond workaround for this is to open 255 files first and manage these yourself for stdio calls. Successive calls (i.e. open(2)) will get fd's over 255. It's a pain but it works and doesn't break the ABI. If you need more than 255 fopen() descriptors then you are screwed.