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Linux to Replace Solaris at Duke
wwhsgrad2002 writes "At the end of the 2004-2005 academic year, the Sun Solaris computers available in public computing labs at Duke University will be replaced. The replacement computers in these spaces will be Dells, running a version of Centos 3.3 as supported by Linux@DUKE. Pragmatic and technical considerations have driven this change, as Linux continues to gain a greater userbase and more third-party commercial software is made available on the platform. Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?"
But my company is moving away from Solaris because the new Dell Boxes are at least three times as fast as the fastest Sun we have.
And cost one third as much!
Raydude
Not that the CentOS distro is bad, but it's really more for a server, not a user box. Since this is going in the computing labs, and presumably the students will be logging into the box(es), it would seem to me that using another distro more geared towards users would be appropriate, since the CentOS 3.3 is geared towards enterprise servers.
I'm sure it can be tweaked to be just fine, but it seems kind of an odd choice to me, for a computing lab.
Both Linux and Solaris seem to have their respective merits, and with the OpenSolaris project, it would seem that Sun might be leaning towards the open source world, but this is an interesting choice by Duke, as one might think that a large university such as Duke would perhaps go with something with more corporate backing like with Sun. But Dell also has been pimping Linux to the server market for awhile now...
The math department at University of Maryland, College Park recently decided to replace it's Sun workstations with linux computers, probably Dell's.
I for one welcome our Educational Linux using ahchchhc cough cough.
It is good to see Linux overtaking the other popular options for desktop OS, such as Solaris. Already Irix, Ultrix, and AIX have been largely surpassed. Perhaps soon Linux will be ready to compete head-to-head with Windows itself.
We have a lab full of UltraSparcs running Linux at ITESM (www.itesm.mx).
Is it just me or does centos remind you of breath mints or something?
And the cheap ass hardware will last about 1/2 as long. . .
BYU switched several years ago. By the time I took CS 240 back in 2000 what had once been the UNIX lab was full of Dell linux boxes.
http://nerdfortress.com/
I have to say, one part of me wants to scream out at the loss of such awesome hardware. (I *love* the graphical console on Suns, the coolness of OpenPROM, the finely crafted window XDMCP management, etc.) The other part of me realizes that there's no need for expensive Sun hardware for public terminals, and that PCs are more cost effective. *sigh* The end of an era.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
spookey!!
Solaris of DCU ~= Solaris of DKU
Both are done in for now.
Here at my university, UTSA, we have quite a few old solaris machines, but these machines are (mostly) being replaced with Dell or Gateway machines running dual boot Windows/Fedora Core 2 & 3 because they consider the Sun machines a little too pricey. Thankfully, linux is heavily utilized here, and all of my cs projects over the last year were in unix or linux.
The few Sun workstations we had went two years ago. The servers that run busy NFS and mail systems, on the other hand, are alive and kicking; they seem to be pretty reliable too. Evidence of a focus shift?
Centos 4 is already out and its not bad.
My father works at the Holy Cross math department, where they have their own internal network setup separate from the rest of the school. All of the math professors use Solaris, and they have been for years.
:)
Over time this has slowly changed though -- Sun upgrades their hardware and takes back the old machines on a cyclical basis, and recently all of the desktops were replaced with thin clients (about as big as a cabel modem!). And I'm pretty sure the main server was migrated to Linux.
Since all the professors have been using Solaris for probably around a decade, it's doubtful they'll change the clients anytime soon... but from what I can tell, they're slowly testing out Linux as a replacement.
I'm not gonna speculate why, I'm just answering the question
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
The CS department lab at Yale runs SuSe. Most of our public computers are either Mac or Windows, though.
I wonder how much it costed the university to outfit Dell boxes (well, AFAIK, Dell only ships Windows right?) with Linux, and if they actually paid for the Windows OS or just requested clean HDD's.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Sorry, wrong website.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
"[...]but it seems kind of an odd choice to me, for a computing lab."
/ducks
Yeah, they should have used FreeBSD!
Perhaps they feel that the older version is more stable and has more bugfixes/patches available for it...
I'm rather curious about what networked file system they'll be using. For Solaris, AFS seems pretty standard for networked school systems, but AFS support under Linux 2.6 has been sketchy (at least it was a few months ago). Any ideas what they'll be using?
Really, so that means vendors have stopped supplying new softwares for Solaris! Or does it mean that practically Solaris is not technically a viable solution?
I really don't see the need to replace an X system with Y system when the X system does the job for you more than adequately. I don't understand why people are always eager to change systems. Of course someone is going to reply to me and say - "hey universities are research institutions and they need new stuff" - too overrated. I am not trying to root for Solaris here, just don't get why you need to replace a system that can do the job that Linux can.
I agree. If you look at the CentOS forums you'll notice a lot of people are using (and Linux newbies) it for desktops. I'm not sure why they don't just use Fedora, Ubuntu or something else for their desktops, but they don't.
Either way CentOS does come with gnome, X, etc. by default so there isn't anything that stops you from using it as a desktop OS.
My take on pundits:
I love pundits for they throw light on issues that the main stream might miss.
However, my issue with [some] pundits is that some of them know nothing, and to make matters worse, they do not know that they know so little or nothing at all! Some of these pundits to the extreme, (I am sorry to say), know so little to even know that they know nothing! My former University would never have afforded a Solaris System or even Windows to do what Linux is doing down there.
I got to know that unwanted computers from the west were also being dumped there and made into useful equipment. In the early 90s, I studied Mathematics and used a 386 to simulate population dynamics in a subject known as bio-mathematics. Another win for Linux, but let's sharpen our knowledge as we prepare for the pundits.
The University of Michigan is in the process of replacing several Sun servers with servers running Linux (no idea of the hardware). That is happening in the college of literature sciences and the arts (LSA). The college of engnieering already has several servers that run Linux, but still has some that run Solaris. In engineering computing labs every Dell Windows workstation dual boots into Red Hat linux (at least for now).
In our comp sci department, many of the labs are now Dells running Slackware. Sun machines are getting old and being replaced by Dells or not being replaced at all.
Now if only we could convince the university to convert the Windows labs they operate (which are separate from the comp sci deparment) to Linux. We're working on them.
Trust me - all of the RHEL 3 rebuilds work just fine as desktop machines. We're using a mix of Whitebox 3 / Scientific Linux 4 on about 400 machines, with nary a complaint from the users.
The undergraduate computer science lab used to be populated primarily by Sun workstations, but the latest upgrade replaced most of them with PCs running Linux. The reasoning for this was that PC hardware had become sufficiently reliable that the more expensive Sun hardware was no longer cost-effective.
Most of the publically-visible servers, both for CPSC and campus IT, are also now running Linux, as opposed to Solaris and AIX. I assume that cost and compatibility reasons motivated these changes.
Of course, there are also substantial numbers of WinXP PCs around.
Here at our business we changed our OS from Sun to Linux, performance loses was not so high that bring the projects down.
http://www.michel.eti.br
Some companies have said that if Sun was doing three years ago what they are doing now (Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, free licensing), they would not have switched to Linux. Consider that Sun still guarantees binary and source compatibility when migrating to Solaris 10 from older versions, while Linux cannot. Linux is very useful, but there are still things that make long-term deployments awkward at times. Mod what you will, but it is true.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Is it odd that Duke is using a RedHat Enterprise Ripoff? You would think that being in the same area as RedHat Corp Headquarters, they would pay for the real version. Is this kind of like Lindows (now Linspire) setting up shop in Seattle, just to piss of M$?
Because Centos is based on RedHat Enterprise the support lifecycle will be much longer.
I don't know much about CentOs, but I would guess that proprietary apps built for RH run on it without major tweaks to the CentOS file system.
Most Solaris labs are used for engineering and similar technical work, often on proprietary apps distributed in binary for for only 1 or 2 major linux distros. This probably makes support a breeze compared to all sorts of tweaks and hacks to make these apps run under Unbuntu or others.
How about just using Red Hat or Fedora (or Ubuntu or Gentoo for that matter)? I don't see the point of using a distro that bites off another without contributing back in a significant way.
Where I teach, the tech people are linux-phobic. They are adamant about "keeping linux off the network" yet aren't so pissy about OS X (which probably means they've been reading Gartner). Of course, the highlight was a few years ago when I was running linux my older laptop, surfing the net, and doing my grades (through wine no less), and the school's distrtict tech guy asks how I can do this since "novell doesn't support linux." I guess our network admin never heard of, what's that thingy called? oh yeah, TCP/IP.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
My university has switched everything (desktops, servers, etc) to OS X. Not only are the machines faster, but the operating system is more secure, more advanced, easier to use and suffers none of the significant drawbacks of "open sores" software. We do not worry about being sued for stealing intellectual property and we do not have to worry about recompiling kernels when we plug in a USB mouse. Truly, OS X is the os of kings and gods.
Yeah, what are they going to do when CentOS falls out of fashion. Linux distros: here today gone tommorrow.
My company is doing the opposite. We're moving from RHEL to Solaris 10...
Will cost us half as much, provide us with functionality and documentation RedHat didn't provide and overall has been very positive experience so far...
CentOS is just re-compiled RHE - as such, you can be assured that the kernel and patchsets it comes with is rock-solid and tested through and through. You can not say the same thing about Fedora and Ubuntu - no matter how good you perceive them to be, they have simply not had the same rigorous QA cycle.
When you are talking about deploying an OS onto a crapload of workstations at either a University or company, it is not important if they support the latest USB doo-dads out of box, or that they have the fanciest desktop effects. What is important is that they are stable and solid, because you as the administrator don't want to be messing with them all day.
My first year at the UW(1997), the CS school had four solaris labs. They are all linux now.
TJHSST has a full lab of both Linux computers (Debian!) as well as another, much smaller, lab with Solaris thin clients. We plan to move to Linux thin clients, as they offer both increased customizability as well as speed.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Umm...CentOS is based on (rebuilt from) redhat enterprise linux. It is very unlikely that this will 'fall out of fashion' anytime soon.
Worst case scenario, they switch to a similar product like WHiteBox or even pony up to educational discounted version of RHEL, should they really have to.
But don't feel bad; it'll be at least 10 years before we give our students iPods.
here
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The CSE department at Ohio State University uses Solaris 8 and is planning on migrating to Solaris 10 in a couple of years. But there's also a RedHat Enterprise site license available and a lot of reasearchers are running Redhat (ranging from 8 to Enterprise 3) on the machines in their labs.
We are using hundreds of FreeBSD machines at WU. It's rock solid, and we have any app we need. One of the reasons for our switch was the fact that FreeBSD is far less popular than Linux (and of course Windows), so security problems are far less common (fewer trained crackers).
I'd say cost of upgrade due to needing faster computers. As for needing new stuff - a university does it's students no favours by training them in obsolete packages on a now obscure operating system.
Sun will sell x86 kit cheaper than Dell.
Sun's Opteron servers/workstations fly.
Solaris 10 is free to download & use.
Sun sure went through a phase of crappy bang-per-buck, but those days are over.
They choose CentOS because it is the stable version of the Redhat ES/AS server software. So, in effect, they are getting the same stable version as Redhat is selling minus the logo and copyright material.
Redhat still distributes the entire source code via the GPL. The volunteers at CentOS remove the copyrighted material and then release CentOS.
The reason why they use CentOS over the other distributions is that in a production environment you do not want to use anything potentially unstable (i.e., fedora) or anything constantly updated (i.e., the others). Rather than spending their time tinkering with the OS (i.e., upgrading or bug fixing) they concentrate on what the OS is supposed to be doing which is producing results for the department.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Linux on Intel... the VHS of the computer world.
Already we have an OS X zealot.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
Rumour has it that The University of Lethbridge in Alberta is also considering dumping its solaris labs in favour of the cheaper, faster bells running some flavour of linux, There is currently 1 Lab running fedora core 1. How many other universities are making/considering this change?
Sad that Duke is just outside of Raleigh, NC, the HQ of DeadRat.
It would have been nice if my high school would have at least set up a Linux lab or something to get people exposed, and to have an alternative to the mostly all-Windows environment. (We have a handful of Macs in the music lab, but for some reason the teacher refuses to use OS X.) At least with companies like RedHat offering educational discounts on support the tech department would have a bit of an easier time integrating things.
Several of the colleges I looked at have at least one or two Linux labs, which is nice. It's good that, if nothing else they're providing exposure to something different.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
In three days time I will no longer work for Sun since I have been made redundant.
During my time at Sun I was part of the Companion CD team. We built on x86 and SPARC. For x86 builds we had a Dell 6400, Dell 6600 and finally a Sun V40z (4-way Opteron 246). For SPARC we built on E450, E4500, and V880 (8x900MHz UltraSPARC III) and V880 (8x1200MHz UltraSPARC III).
Now, I will not go into a long spiel about the realtive merits of the various hardware platforms, and I have no axe to grind now since I get my lasy pay cheque in a fortnight but:
Why the heck are you buying (32-bit intel) Dells when you can buy (cheaper and faster 64-bit) Opteron boxes from Sun? If you are a Linux fanboy, Sun will sell you one with DeadRat or SuSE. They are Windoze certified in case you have had a lobotomy, and you can run the free (as in beer) 64-bit Solaris 10 on them.
pBut hey, it's cool to hate Sun on slashdot.
Stick Men
Yes, freeBSD would ensure that the majority of their unix based programs would carry over well.
Behold, another webcomic!
Out of respect for the Fark community. Duke Sucks.
I was at Duke in November to participate in the ACM. My team got stuck in a room with a Sun terminal. Oh boy did we get screwed in that regard!
The only window manager that worked on it was CDE which was butt ugly and difficult to use, vim was configured in a way that was completely different from anything we had ever used, and the Sun keybaord had many keys in different positions! Not that we would have won, but the High Point University freshman team may have done a little better.
Since Duke doesn't want them, I'll gladly take them off their hands.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It's a month old already!
Are you really this retarded or are you pretending?
my school is replacing its solaris machines with DELLs running fedora core2
Tampere University of Technology (http://www.tut.fi/) has already replaced Digital Alpha unix servers with RHEL, and lots of Solaris workstations have been converted to G3nt00 GNU/Linux.
I thought Duke sucked...
Oh sorry, this isnt Fark
Surur
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
Swarthmore College's computer science department moved from Sun Solaris to Dells running Debian a year or two ago.
Curious. That's pretty much what they did at Edinburgh University, Scotland, 5 years ago...
I run Tao Linux on my laptop, which is just another RedHat Enterprise clone like CentOS is. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "geared toward servers" though. Previously I had Fedora 2 on the box, and I see little difference between the two installs beyond age of the underlying apps.
To answer your question though, they probbably want a stable, low cost distribution that's going to be supported several years per release. That's Centos. What they don't want is a cutting edge distribution that's going to be supported for 6-12 months, and then out the door. Ubunutu is another possibility, but it's still catching on, so it's not a particularly conservative choice at this point.
AccountKiller
Solaris is dying
MiT is currently ditching all of it's high end Dell-based linux lab workstations in favor of ...brand new sparc IPXs. Apparently they can fit an entire server cluster into the sysadmin's backpack.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
Of course they aren't exactly using best management practices IMO but OIT never really took care of the Sun boxes either.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
My university uses mostly solaris for the central servers, and they still have a lab of solaris 8 workstations. Nobody uses those, however, because most departments have their own labs, mostly using Dell/Linux. The CS department was using Redhat and FreeBSD for years, but they just switched to Mandrake when Redhat changed its license.
I'm one of the two people here at UMBC who run the core servers for the campus.
;)
We use AFS here for everyone's home directory, mail spool, web space, and other things. To maintain this, we currently have about 6 servers with direct-attached storage serving everyone's AFS home directory volumes. These servers are a mix of Dell and Sun gear running Linux and Solaris. Both platforms have run well over the years, but each server's direct-attached SCSI storage is limitting and, well, aging.
So we can better use our storage and improve things for everyone in general, I'm in the process of rolling out a fiber channel SAN with new servers and RAID arrays to replace what's currently running. The new server gear we chose? Sun's V20z Opteron server running Solaris 10 . Linux is right out.
Why no more Linux, or rather, why Solaris? A few reasons. Solaris's storage management is TONS easier to deal with and do interesting things with than what is available in Linux. Namely, we've found and have been fustrated by Linux's software RAID. Yeah, it works... but that's about it. Weee look, I can make a mirror! Solaris's SVM (aka DiskSuite) is no VxVM, but it does allow us to do things such as disk sets to share between hosts and monitor our metadevices in detail. Linux's raidutils on the other hand are poorly documented and toublesome (usage options don't match reality, etc)
Another aspect on Linux vs. Solaris in mass storage is (as far as I know) a lack of multi-pathing in Linux. Multi-pathing is a no-brainer especially in the context of Fiber Channel networks and Solaris's MPxIO is in-built and works quite well.
But I'm just poo-pooing Linux here on this specific point. We offer Linux workstations in every one of our computing labs. Linux replaced SGI/IRIX workstations there many moons ago and work well for that purpose. Linux servers also are used for our general shell login servers. But on the backend, where we need reliable features, consistency, and heavy-lifting... we're enthralled with Sun x86 servers and Solaris 10. The V20z Opteron hardware actually is cheaper (for us) than a Dell 2650 and offers a ton more features all-alround.
There is an irony, though. The service processor on the Sun V20zs run Linux. Ah well
The University of Warwick's CS department replaced its last lab of general-use Sun machines with Red Hat machines from RM a year or so ago.
Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?
Here at UNC, the Solaris machines were replaced last year with some flavor of Red Hat Linux. As usual, Duke's trying to catch up with us.
For those of you who don't know SUN=Stanfod University Network. There are still at least a thousand Solaris boxes on campus, but the main centralized servers (web, AFS, etc.) are moving towards Debian. See http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.stanf ord.edu.
Drexel University did this same thing two years ago. However, Drexel's distro of choice is/was Mandrake.
There are currently two CS Sun labs here; the machines are SB100s and U5s running Solaris. We will most likely be upgrading both sometime soon - one with SB1500s that will run Solaris and the other with Sun W1100zs running Red Hat Linux.
We are also increasingly using Linux in place of Solaris in the datacanter. The switch is mainly because of cost and saturation; we can provide more services at the same price and can get help from the community if we run into any problems (of course we have enterprise level support, but thats been around for awhile). Another big part of this decision is AMD's HyperTransport. We don't run Linux on the Intel architecture due to the I/O limitations. AMD can handle high loads and get throughput almost as good as SPARC.
Yes, freeBSD would ensure that the majority of their unix based programs would carry over well.
You can get Maple, and Matlab for BSD without Linux emulation? StarOffice even?
Yes Sun boxes will last forever, but who keeps them that long? I would rather have a box that will work reliably for the expected lifespan before it is reasonable to upgrade.
The Opteron 64-bit version is compiled with GCC by the way.
It really looks to me like they are going to support Opteron in a big way, they can read CPU/$ as well as anyone.
I think they are trying to pull an Apple turnaround and they have a shot. Hopefully it won't be DEC, the sequel.
If you want to dismiss Sun after running Solaris 10 x86 (for free, any number of CPU's) that's fine but at least boot it first!
I work for a large private university, Brigham Young University (30,000+ undergrads). Our CS labs have used Redhat for years, always supported by the lab and teachers assistants. What we need it to wean the public university computer labs from windows and we may have some news.
The article says nothing about what these computers are going to be used for. Just the fact that they're going in a "public computing lab" doesn't tell us much. All of the "public computing labs" that I've seen have Windows computers with MS word for students to type/print out papers.
So what is there to say? A lot of "maybe"s, that's what. Maybe they could benefit from 64-bit machines, maybe they could't. Maybe they want Linux because it's familiar to the sysadmins, maybe they want it because it runs apps which don't run on Solaris, maybe they want it because it's cheap. Maybe their main concern is how cheap it is to replace the hardware (students are often careless/in a hurry/clueless).
Continue reading the comments on this article if you enjoy speculation. If you prefer facts, go somewhere else.
that there are Universities that haven't replaced all Solaris with Linux yet.
At Aalborg University, Denmark the server platform is also migrating to Linux. When I started there 4 years ago there were only Sun servers obviously running Solaris.
At the moment our second Dell server running Redhat has been set up, not as a replacement for the Sun servers, but as an optional "other choice". The tendency is that more and more users have shiftet over to using the Linux servers. Now also only large time and memory consuming jobs are run on the Sun maskines, since the hardware specs are quite a bit higher (8-way 900 MHz with 32 GB RAM).
do students massively prefer the PC's to the sunblades and sunrays? sure. many professors care less. but do we want to limit any of them to a single platform? definitely not.
Universities (well, any large organization) tend to get long term contracts on software they choose to purchase, so they will be issued regular updates...which makes binary support sort of implicit. For the rest of the linux world, sources tend to be available, so once again, binary compatibility is not much of an issue.
CentOS is based on the RHEL sources. It is geared towards Enterprise use, but not necessarily server use.
Red Hat Desktop
Workstation
Enterprise Server
Advanced Server
Advanced server has the functionality (read packages) of all the ones below it. That includes Evolution et cetera.
If there is a reason for them to use that, it is because every ISV that supports Linux (and I mean most every ISV) supports RHEL 3.x.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
At Hopkins, we're changing the Sun side over to Fedora Core 3. Right now, there are only two test machines for people to use. There's a form online to submit bug reports, so it's a pretty smooth transition that everyone seems to be in favor of! Couple problems here and there, but nothing serious that can't be fixed!
AccountKiller
The University of Florida has Windows, Mac, and Linux (vanilla Debian, I believe) computer labs depending on what building you're in. Each school is responsible for its own computer labs should it want to have them, and so the different schools build different labs for their needs.
Hey, another 5 linux installs. WOOT!
The way University of Idaho does it, is by just running both systems. They have a lab of solaris and a lab of debian. Of course this is the CS department not the IT. Other than the CS department most still run windows. There is a section in the Sub that runs linux as well with KDE, but its a stripped down version of course.
The Johns Hopkins University is also replacing its old (old!) Slowaris boxes in the undergraduate computing lab with new Dell workstations running Fedora Core 3.
:-). GNU/Linux enables commodity PCs to be useful computer science workstations. In fact, CS hired another administrator with Linux experience to set these up since the primary admin has enough work.
The old Suns run SunOS 5.6, also called Solaris 2.6. That's before Sun started really running with the Solaris trademark. They had 128 megabytes of RAM, slow-as-molasses X, and could hardly run mozilla. They had SSH version 1 installed.
The new machines have two Pentium 4 chips at 2.80GHz. They have 1024KB of cache. They have 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. I would like to emphasize, they are fast. And they have modern software, which makes life much easier.
Hooray
|/usr/games/fortune
The University of Rhode Island runs Gentoo from its Network Operations to Computer Science servers/workstations. URI for its main webserver/mail server etc. (official URI server not department servers) run custom Linux stuff and a mix of Red Hat Enterprise (hey it works).
... Duke still sucks. Oh, wait a sec, wrong site. :)
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
with nary a complaint from the users.
Besides the usual complaints that Linux sucks and they wish they could have a real OS rather than have IT force them to use the flavor of the month?
...did this about 5-6 years ago. When I started in '99, I think basically all the computing departments' labs were 100% Solaris. Towards the end of that year (or at the start of the next, I forget), many of them were replaced by Debian. By the time I left, there were only a couple Solaris machines in an obscure corner of one restricted lab.
Why do you think Sun is doing Opteron servers these days ?
My university, too, is mid-way switching from Sun to Linux. With Sun hardware you pay a premium for a slow product (at least CPU-wise, which, for the kind of stuff university people do, is the most important). Simply not worth it.
The Raven
I suppose I should refrain from commenting since I have no dog in the fight, but I am glad to see some migration away from Sun to linux since Sun helped fund SCO by buying licenses.
A Nelson HA HA to you, Sun.
In my academic lab, we will not be switching in general to Linux. The only reason we run Linux at all is to support outside Linux users. Otherwise, Solaris X86 runs too smoothly to switch, even compared to systems based on Linux 2.6.
We've been using Solaris X86 for almost 10 years now... and looking forward to running Solaris 10 soon.
The CSE department at Notre Dame phased out about 200 Solaris boxes last year in favor or Red Hat Linux Enterprise. They are still good boxes, though, and you find them scattered around the place.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
No matter what...Sun *did* open-source the only credible alternative to MS Office, and the Open Source world does owe them a debt of gratitude for that.
No matter how much you dislike their expensive hardware or how much you prefer Linux/BSD to Solaris, they did give us a very powerful weapon against Microsoft's ever-spreading barriers to entry.
At Cal Poly Pomona University, they just got through with a Windows/PeopleSoft "upgrade" from their old Solaris systems. Now the bureaucratic delays has gone from bad to "HELP!". Taking at least twice as long as it used to, to do the same stuff. The worst part about it was that there was apparently no better reason to do this other than political (there was a big stink about the money wasted at the University level). Oh well...
Here at the University of Toronto we have a fantastically (un)healthy mix of systems for public use. The general student population has consistent access to (if I'm not mistaken mostly Dell) machines running Windows on mostly NetWare, I believe.
Students in Computer Science have access to a network of UNIX machines, though I have no idea what their flavour of choice is.
Here in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering we have more than our share of networks. The central Engineering Computing Facility provides several hundred Windows boxes and several hundred RedHat machines (mostly Dell again, I'm pretty sure).
Specifically within the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the division of Engineering Science, we have the use of a whole bunch of Sun Solaris machines (aged, and not terribly well-maintained) specifically required for use in some courses.
Getting between everything isn't really the cheeriest part of my day, though I tend to avoid the campus-wide networks (unless I'm wirelessly connected), and tend to stick to the RedHat boxes, though I'll be SSHing between networks for more than my share of time.
New slang when you notice the stripes, the dirt in your fries.
Why the heck are you buying (32-bit intel) Dells when you can buy (cheaper and faster 64-bit) Opteron boxes from Sun? If you are a Linux fanboy, Sun will sell you one with DeadRat or SuSE. They are Windoze certified in case you have had a lobotomy, and you can run the free (as in beer) 64-bit Solaris 10 on them.
The cheapest Opteron box I saw was around $1800, and the parent didn't specify which Dells he was using...and they start around $399.
Where are the cheaper Opterons you mentioned, and what price were you assuming for the Dells?
I'd love to write code that runs on Unix, but by the time I've paid for a development environment and installed it, finished hunting down and installing all the extra packages I need to get something that has parity with even the weakest Linux install, then finished grabbing the source and manually recompiling the packages (and dependencies) that were so far out of date to be useless...
By that time, I've likely realized that I don't give a shit about Unix.
Well, HP-UX, at least. Trying to work with FLOSS software on HP-UX is enough to make you loath the very concept of proprietary Unix.
c.
Log in or piss off.
Presumably your purchasing people are smarter than you and compared these new Dell machines with current Sun machines. Now, Sun's SPARC-based systems are still basically more powerful than Dell's Pentium-based systems. But Pentium-based systems cost a lot less to make, so your company finds its more cost effective to buy more Dell machines to make up the difference in raw processing power.
Sun hasn't forgotten how to make powerful machines. They just don't have the economies of scale to make them cheaply.
Of course, for your place, the real way to save money would be to downgrade the Office 2003 application to Office 2000 or Office 97, because it was probably doing something gratuitously non-backward-compatible. On the other hand, that *is* the *real* hook that's kept Microsoft in business so long.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My school (the École Polytechnique de Montréal) only has one Sun Solaris lab left (for some electrical eng. app that is only available on old Unix). They moved all of their others labs to Linux years ago (like 5-8 years). They used to run Slackware and have really bad default desktop.. but they've since moved to Fedora and it works pretty well. Most Software/Computer engineering labs are done on Linux too, very few on Windows. Btw, I'm graduating as a Software Eng. from there during the summer!
solaris has been 64bit for far longer than (mainstream) linux
Linux 64 bit support is now mainstream? When did this happen. I thought there were still quite a few kinks to iron out.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Observations about the NewiSys 4300 / Sun v40z:
- Linux Kernel 2.6 is worse than 2.4 (empirically for our application here) - BAD. (less stable, slower, scheduler is less able to balance things properly)
- Scalability of Linux is highly questionable without in house guys that can make major changes to some of the bone-headed things Linux 2.6 does. Would prefer to use Windows 2003/64bit or Solaris 10 (*nix apps don't run on 2003 for crap so Solaris 10 is about it for now)
- gcc 4 needed to properly vectorize floats opportunistically, this is included but NOT FINISHED (Must use Intel or Sun compiler for now).
- NUMA is best used if programmers to try and make sure applications don't put memory on other CPUs memory banks if it can be avoided
- The 4300 / v40z has a Linux system processor that runs at all times, totally out of band. This system processor than boots the system BIOS.
- SELinux wastes a lot of system time doing nothing useful.
- Opteron is worth talking about only at higher frequencies, cheap ass Xeons, despite having a garbage northbridge, can open whip ass on slower Opterons.
- SSE3 on opteron is not very useful, the SSE3 enhancements for Xeon are thread-locking things only useful in HT (NOT CMP) designs. SSE3 in Opteron is only for compatibility are basically nop. So don't fetish over it.
- Hot swap PCI-X (no express) 133 sweetness. 4 slots. 2 dedicated @ 133MHz, two at 100Mhz.
Just for people to know, Bechtolsheim's Opteron design isn't out yet, the current crop of Sun gear is copied NewiSys stuff. Bechtolsheim's design is due out later.
Realize that Sun doesn't ship the v40z with the 2CPU daughterboard. This is fuck-headed and asinine thing to have done because Sun wants to change $3000 for a $700 part. With the daughterboard in, there are 4 memory VRMs, 4 CPU VRMs, and 4 940 pin sockets. Also realize, if you system didn't ship with dual core support, it is UNLIKELY that a simple BIOS upgrade will support it. You need a slightly revved board to support that.
Sun / Newisys / Sanmina quality is beyond anything Dell can ever dream of.
There are over 24 fans, everything is easily taken apart, the power module comes out and there are dual power supplies in that module, the fan bank easily comes out as well.
Linux opteron 2.6.9-5.0.3.ELsmp #1 SMP Sat Feb 19 15:45:14 CST 2005 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
CentOS release 4.0 (Final)
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 844
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1794.917
cache size : 1024 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 3530.75
TLB size : 1088 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp
processor : 1
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 844
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1794.917
cache size : 1024 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 3588.09
TLB size : 1088 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp
00:06.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 PCI (rev 07)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 LPC (rev 05)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 IDE (rev 03)
00:07.3 Bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 ACPI (rev 05)
00:0a.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8131 PCI-X Bridge (rev 12)
00:0a.1 PIC: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8131 PCI-X APIC
we want code that runs on unix, not code that runs on linux, and students will matriculate hopefully with a broader sense of what that can mean with more opportunities available to them.
If that's really the philosophy, then don't forget to throw some Macs into the mix. OS X Is Unix Too. Then your students can work with a different CPU architecture, also.
btw, I work with and support SunRays, and imo for thin-client they can't be beat.
--
$tar -xvf
stanford's almost all solaris. there was rumbling that they were all going to be changed to SULinux (stanford's flavor) within a few years, but haven't heard anything about that in a while.
I'd love to write code that runs on Unix, but by the time I've paid for a development environment and installed it, finished hunting down and installing all the extra packages I need to get something that has parity with even the weakest Linux install, then finished grabbing the source and manually recompiling the packages (and dependencies) that were so far out of date to be useless...
By that time, I've likely realized that I don't give a shit about Unix.
Well, HP-UX, at least.
Well, exactly. The last sentence kind of invalidates the rest. You can't sum up all Unix from just one version.
For example, for Solaris there is www.sunfreeware.com: Loads of GNU packages, binary and source, all up-to-date, packaged up for Solaris, and ready to install.
If you need more than vi/emacs for development there is NetBeans or Eclipse - both high quality IDEs, both can be used for a range of languages, including Java and C++.
Pragmatic and technical considerations have driven this change, as Linux continues to gain a greater userbase and more third-party commercial software is made available on the platform. Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?
It happened after I graduated, over 5 years ago, but most Sun boxes were replaced with PCs running Linux. It was mostly a cost decision. Greater userbase and more 3rd party support are irrelevant since homework and projects for a computer science program don't usually need much beyond basic unix tools and apps. Ironically the idea of switching to Linux was introduced and championed by the local Linux advocates but with the switch from Sun hardware to generic PC hardware the university decided to make most of the machines dual boot Linux and Windows. Linux won, Microsoft won, Sun lost. Microsoft never even sent a thank you note to the Linux advocates.
The College of Information Technology at the Univeristy of North Carolina at Charlotte will be switching from Solaris systems to some type of SUSE/Novell Linux Desktop for Fall semester 2005. This change is as a result of separation from the College of Engineering, who manages the Windows/Solaris based Mosaic system. The university has very strong ties to Novell which is why it makes sense for the COIT's non-Windows OS to be provided by someone with whom we already have an economic relationship.
Every major Linux distribution now offering a 64-bit version does not count as mainstream? Besides, the x86_64 port can now safely be called stable. The remaining kinks, if you want to call that, concern mostly applications that do not work natively in 64-bit mode, but that is why distributions provide the 32-bit backward compatibility libraries.
The exact same process has begun at Hopkins; we're replacing our miserably old UltraSparc 5s running SunOS 5.x with brand new Linux boxes running FC3. We don't feel compelled to tell the world about it.
You can build OpenOffice native on any of the BSDs.
And as for Linux binaries, there are people who maintain that they run more reliably under emulation on (x86-based) BSD OSes than they do on a lot of the big spotty universe of Linux-based OSes.
Remember, when you run a Free/NetBSD, you're running the only 'flavor' of said OS that exists. Not a linux kernel with a 'whatever was thrown together' userland.
I've not had good experience with Sun support, especially where iPlanet Mess is concerned.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
How is this news? Is slashdot now going to report every organization that changes to an open source OS?
Or you can buy Sun's boxes from someone else for 7000 dollars cheaper for similar configurations..
Since Suns Opteron's boxes are realy Newisys Opteron's boxes.
Blastwave.org has a leg up on sunfreeware, now, but both are great resources.
Well, HP-UX, at least.
I find it interesting that the only systems to get airtime, now, are Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. HP-UX, AIX, and IRIX rarely get a mention at all. It seems we have four operating systems going forware, now, with the rest there for legacy support. For all the people who think Sun is dying, consider that Sun sells both Solaris and Linux--two of the four.
we do not have to worry about recompiling kernels when we plug in a USB mouse.
Word, like, for sure. I mean, every Mac person wants to trade in for each year's new model, right?
Never an upgrade problem with a Mac.
So I'm going to burn through twice as much power to move zeros around that will never be used?
Somehow I doubt that a doubling of pointer widths is going to result in a doubling of your power requirements.
General purpose computing doesn't need to deal with over 4 billion unique things.
Yes it does, all the time. Not all of us write webapps all day. I work in bioinformatics and hit my head on the 4 GB memory limit constantly. There are 300 billion bases in the human genome, and tens of millions of polymorphisms with information required about their names, aliases, positions, and allele frequencies. I can't store things as first class objects- I have to use RLE encoded primitives everywhere and there is no type safety because everything has to be an int. Many algorithms require repeated visits to arbitrary points on a chromosome so paging through a database is not really an option. If you have to page contigs in and out of memory, many genetic linkage algorithms will take the lifetime of the universe to complete.
The 32->64 bit problem isn't the same as the 8->16 or 16->32 problem. If it was, why not just jump to 128 bit?
The Earth weighs 6E24 kg. 0.375% of it is continental crust, roughly 15% of which is silicon. If you consider that the atomic weight of silicon is 28 g/mol and figure roughly 10000 atoms of silicon per bit, that means that if we were to mine all of the silicon out of the continents, make RAM out of all of it, and put all that RAM in one big giant computer, that computer would need to be designed with an address space 132 bits wide. So you see, even 128 bits is not enough.
This is exactly why you need to target more than one platform. If you don't, you take a certain set of packages for granted, and you don't even know you're doing it. For instance, some Unixes don't have /bin/bash.
I know it's shocking, but 99.99% of the time,
you could have used /bin/sh instead
with insignificant
extra work (if you train yourself
not to use bash-specific features gratuitously)
and the same results (or actually better
results).
Plus, I hate to say this, but for software quality to be good, developers absolutely need to feel pain for every dependency their software has. Why? Because dependencies create pain for users and administrators. I definitely believe you should take a balanced perspective, and I don't think dependencies are bad (they prevent you from reinventing the wheel), but where the cost (in terms of code style and functionality) is low, they should be eliminated. This doesn't just make software install easier: it also makes it easier to upgrade things that are depended on by other things, because the fewer things depend on something, the easier it is to upgrade.
Dependencies are a directed acyclic graph, and generally speaking, the ease of administration relates to two things: the node count, and the ratio of edge-count to node-count. Imagine a system with a bunch of nodes (software) and no edges (dependencies) at all: that'd be a very easy to administer system.
Getting back to the original point, it's true that HP-UX and other commercial Unixes have a different set of software installed than popular Linux distributions. And yet, people are able to get useful work done on them without installing a whole bunch of extra software, i.e. without making them look as Linux-like as possible. The inability to work in the other environment without trying to make it like what you're used to means that you have been living in a monoculture.
Now, having said that, some versions of Unix do suck (like IRIX -- I could give 10 good solid reasons, but I leave them out for brevity), but it's important to understand the distinction between suckiness and foreignness.
Rs_Conqueror was suggesting that BSD would be better because it would make things easier. I'm just pointing out that most if not all of the applications in my account at school have native Linux versions available for them. Emulation does not make things easier. It only complicates things, and invalidates support contracts.
In a few public labs at the University at Buffalo, we have been replacing the Solaris workstations, and in some cases Windows PCs, with PCs running UBLinux . UBLinux is our own desktop distro based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We also make this distribution available in CD format for students, faculty and staff to install on their own machines. It has also replaced Solaris in our technology classrooms.
Just learn to spell "its", for heaven's sake.
the ultra sparc solaris boxes were used mainly at the teer (pratt) engineer building. All the other winxp boxes for non-engineering majors were at the library, dorm clusters, etc. The students really won't be able to tell much of a difference between solaris and linux. Now all the applications such as pspice/matlab/powerview will have to switched to linux binaries / licenses.
The University of Minnesota has been replacing Sun hardware with LINUX (RedHat) in their computer labs since I attended in 1997. I had no idea we were so far ahead of our time.
I'm curious. I heard years ago that it wasn't very secure. But it runs on exceedingly high-end stuff. And there was the whole excellent support for OpenGL thing. So from a completely outsider perspective, what's not to like?
LETS GOOOOOOO MARYLAND!
The computer labs I used in 97-00 were solaris boxes, when I came back from a work placement in 2001 they had replaced several labs with Linux boxes. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the labs weren't Linux by now, unless they are holding out for some custom Solaris software that hasn't been ported yet.
As a rule of thumb, if my shell script gets complicated enough that I need bash-specific features, I use perl.
developers absolutely need to feel pain for every dependency their software has
If managing dependencies is a pain, you're using the wrong tools. Modern FLOSS operating system distributions have already spent time working out that complicated dependency graphs and there's a plethora of tools out there that will help you manage packages. Point and clicky tools, even.
That said, I don't create dependencies gratuitously. When you're dealing with FLOSS software, that's just insane. I'd be doing continuous integration testing just trying to keep the O/S up-to-date. I don't fear dependencies because of the package management issues, but every minor release of ImageMagick sends a chill down my spine...
The inability to work in the other environment without trying to make it like what you're used to means that you have been living in a monoculture.
I started on Unix. HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, Ultrix, etc. But it's funny how my, and my employers, expectations and requirements grew. Or, perhaps more accurately, diverged from what Unix offered.
Proprietary Unix vendors have basically spent the last decade making better handplanes. Great handplanes, sure, and I personally appreciate a great handplane. But when the industry has moved on to the 20" helical blade planers and plywood that come standard in Linux, great handplanes are a niche tool.
c.
Log in or piss off.
The links in this post are to duke, linux at duke, dell, sun and centos. No where is there a link to anything stating the Duke are doing this.
Can someone point me at some actual info, or are the editors just trolling?
This is the most revealing/informative post regarding Sun. That desperate look is no doubt shared by Sun's entire salesforce along with the entire management. Why? Because they aren't hitting their numbers.
That was posted 11/04. Check the subsequent Sun quarter results (revenue) to understand the post.
They can't. This isn't about competing (profitably) on price with Dell. This is about propping up their revenue numbers until Solaris 10 magically lifts them back to their legendary status. After all, it's Solaris, and it's open. How can it miss?
/. comments. But the theme appears to be the same from too many people. Sun is giving away hardware at a loss.
Sun is hoping for some more million seat deals from China so it can continue the practiced illusion of revenue now, profits later, we're investing in the future of Sun.
Cutting prices to half of Dell is suicide. But it inflates quarterly revenue numbers. Wall Street has already been conditioned to expect losses in profit. So some more quarters with profit losses don't matter to Sun as much as keeping the revenue numbers inflated even if it means giving away systems at below cost if they are discounting more than 50% below Dell.
Yeah, they're
The most laughable post on this topic so far. If any company was doing what the successful company/industry was doing in its own sector three years later, with 20/20 hindsight, then no company would switch from their product or service. So what's the point? Sun fought Linux and lost. It's that simple. And Sun is still fighting Linux. And as some of the other posts including above confirm, the salesforce still has desperate looks on their faces.
Three years ago, there was no Solaris 10. Just as there was no 2.6 kernel. Nor was there OpenSolaris. So they couldn't do it then regardless of any other circumstances. In addition, as late as last year, not only was Sun fighting Linux as they still are, but they were also funding SCO. So you can dream about what if, but don't we all?
Free licensing? You're (the linked post above, not the parent post here) a Sun fan, yet you attempt to suggest that Sun is licensing something as Free Software? Unless you are talking free as in beer, there is no Free licensing. So if they had "free licensing" three years ago, they'd have something they don't even have now. No
The University of Kentucky has replaced a few Sun Labs with OSX only to build another
Sun Lab or other WS Lab... this is not news. It only says that Sun or vendor X is not giving away machines
Not many schools are going to pay market value for a lab full of Sun workstations.
Give me the choice between a lab of loaded Dell/Linux boxes or loaded Sun WS
for the same price I am goin Sun all day
projects @ http://spectechnologies.net
All your Sybase are belong to us.
Here at Buffalo we have our own distribution of Linux (RH based) that our CIT dept. gives out. Many proffessors use it in the class room for CS. Our large servers are Solaris but we do have a ~75 computer public Linux Lab.
Though when I asked to help on the distro I was pretty much shunned.
LOOP1: MOV CX,2 LOOP LOOP1
Carnegie Mellon's Computing Services has already removed all of their Sun machines from the public labs. There are still publicly accessible Solaris servers users can log into remotely via ssh, but those are going to be phased out as well in the very near future.
However, for certain servers, we're going to continue using Sun machines running Solaris. For our needs, Solaris on Sun hardware just works better than Linux servers. The number of Solaris servers has been going steadily down in favor of Linux machines over time, though.
Do you think they can get actual basketball players to replace that crap-tastic team of theirs?
-c
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
is slowly switching to Linux from Solaris. Slowly our Sun servers are being replaced by servers from Penguin Computing and the labs are all going to be Mandrake (Mandriva now, I guess :)
>> like IRIX -- I could give 10 good solid reasons, but I leave
>> them out for brevity
>
> I'm curious. I heard years ago that it wasn't very secure. But it
> runs on exceedingly high-end stuff. And there was the whole
> excellent support for OpenGL thing. So from a completely
> outsider perspective, what's not to like?
Prior to IRIX 6.5 (1998), it was a pain to maintain and secure. It was also unstable, especially on the newer/faster hardware.
6.5.x has helped a lot. It's far more secure out of the box, but an experienced UNIX administrator will still have to spend at least 5 minutes disabling accounts and services to secure the machine, but it's way easier than securing Solaris. The RedHat style chkconfig is nice too. As SGI lost their hardware performance edge, I think they started to focus on stabilizing their software.
6.5.x also has a quarterly update of bug fixes, new features, and security updates. (SGI does release interim patches for the past year's worth of IRIX versions) Makes administration much easier than the painful mess of patches that was IRIX 5.3 and 6.2.
OpenGL support is rock-solid... for OpenGL 1.2 and earlier. It's been ages since SGI has done much with IRIX graphics.
Overall I like IRIX way more than Solaris. But it's a moot point. Solaris is the dominant oldschool commerical UNIX. A modern SGI system uses Itanium2 processors and SuSE, not IRIX.
...which is known for its "Cybercorp" program (computer anti-terrorism) has recently switched from Solaris 9 to RHEL 3.x. As a CS major I for one welcomed the change, as most of the student body is much more familiar with Linux than Solaris. And the Solaris 9 GUI is shit.
blue light special in aisle Duke.
Amazing the /. gave this submission the light of day given that it is the equivalent of saying the water is wet.
Restating in one sentence:
"Univeristy buys DELL linux machines not because of linux, but because the hardware is much cheaper than overpriced Sun Solaris machines.
We are, we have been.
About two years ago, we started replacing our central web, email, and distribued filesystem (AFS) infrastructure, and sites computing services hardware to intel. We switched from Solaris to our own linux from scratch and have seen tremendous improvements - mostly due to price and performance benefits.
You may ask, how do we run 300+ linux from scratch machines without running into major software version control issues? radmind.
Our LFS is tightly integrated with radmind, which allows us to control every part of the filesystem that we choose. I can bring up a hotspare with a blank hard drive from CD, and add it to the production pool 10 minutes later, and with the latest software.
There's more information available here, unfortunately, the article is 13 months old, and doesn't show the current depth of services we offer that run on linux.
p.s. Netcraft seems to be showing our networking infrastructure, and not our webservers, or other equipment.
- passion
Duke moving to Linux .... I see another distro coming in the future.
I fully agree with you about monoculture part.
Monoculture = monopoly of a kind.
What should be given importance is that all operating systems irrespective of windows, linux or mac os, should follow open standards in communicating with each other and favour applications which save files in open formats. For example, it helps to save data in XML format instead of some propritery format thus avoiding vendor lock in.
Ultimately, it filters to having choice.
And more choice equates to more freedom.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Sun wouldn't be the biggest Opteron seller in the world if what you said was true ($7000 difference?!?).
Is this what people are referring to when they say "Duke sucks" (usually in regard to American sports, I think)?
Linux Kernel 2.6 is worse than 2.4 (empirically for our application here) - BAD. (less stable, slower, scheduler is less able to balance things properly
2.6 has several schedulers available... which ones have you used and how do they stack up?
I'm only a piddly student in the scheme of things, but at my uni we have the 'normal' ITS department. They maintain the primary servers (I'd note here that the webserver isn't properly configured and passwords are stored in plain text somewhere) and the Windows machines that run all over the campus. In the Maths and Computing department we have two labs of our own (in addition to the swag of other Windows based labs). In these labs we have one dedicated Linux room (that NEVER get shutdown, usually as they are used for some number crunching by other members of the faculty) running a version of Debian Sarge. In another room we have dual boot Debian Sarge and Windows XP. Needless to say these computers rarely use Windows. We also produce a special four CD set of Debian Sarge with specific packages that you can apt-get (ie for the unit CSC1401, apt-get install csc1401 to get _everything_ needed for that subject). We also ran an installing Debian session where students could bring in their PC's and we walked through a Linux install. I helped out, and we got all but one PC running perfect (the exception was a cheap laptop that died during boot up, I installed coLinux with a Debian image anyway. The Windows installation was also backwards, but thats not our area). In addition to all of this support, we also have our own dedicated support people (seperate to the main Uni ITS department) and our own servers. Needless to say, I haven't seen one of the Debian boxes out of order, nor has any of the support techs had a revisit after Debian has been installed on student PCs. On the other side of the fence, I have lots of complaints from people using Windows and having issues (text editors, compiling, etc). In this case, Debian is used on the lab computers and on their own PC's - lets people work much easier when they can use it at home and at uni.
I always wondered where this setting was...
We are ditching some of our linux based NFS server for sun servers to improve our i/o performance.
I agree, the economics lab runs Sun Rays at UT. That was probably the smoothest experience I have EVER had using computers. Not once did I have slowdowns, window manager issues, or anything to slow down my econometrics projects. Against the Dell boxes I had for my graphics class the same semester, ahh, that was hell.
I guess they didn't want Solaris 10's Linux compatability and new features. Like Zones, and the ability to run linux nativley. I think duke jumped the gun a bit. Or maybe they just want to get thier own distro started. But, then again Sun support has gone down hill since they shipped it to India. Nothing more anoying than someone walking you through some procedures while you already know what the problem is, but you just need a Tech to get his butt onsite and give up some parts. It used to be you call they listen they respond, none of this AOL style checklist they have now. What is really cool is (when your not in a hurry)breakout the redneck speak and as much slang as possible with the India support.
So they tried it out, and Linux was definately more popular than Sun. Seems like a valid decision that Sun is now completely phased out (saves a lot of money too - but that has been a secondary concern).
Leaning towards this way too. I'm not an admin so I don't know for sure but the once vulnerable Moss & Lichen systems used for the SunRay labs have now been replaced by Argave which is also the students mail server (POP3/IMAP, not SMTP).
It's still Solaris 10 though, but in the meantime they've setup a Fedora Core 2 image as an installable & deployable option on the [typically Windows based] Dell machines. Dell machines now account for about 10 of the 12 or so computer labs at GP South
Interesting developments. :)
Considering that Sun's Earning report comes out tomorrow. (or is it today already?)
Sun should support Linux, if they don't they will be making a similar mistake to Sony by promoting their own format despite it being the less popular format.
They should take Linux for Sparc, make it as consistent as possible with Solaris (filesystem layout etc). Document it well, use a good installer like Anaconda or YaST then offer it as an alternative to Solaris.
Their expertise and value is in producing dependable hardware, they should offer as many different OS choices as possible.
How do you consider OS X to be 'unix'? Sure, it runs an x-server, and it works like a unix, but it doesn't make it a unix. Mac users don't want programs written for X, they want native stuff that works and feels like .. native stuff.
Back when I was studying Computer Science at Essex Uni the programming labs where changed from Solaris (and other commerical Unix flavors) to SuSE Linux. This was back in '99! Shame really as I missed the chance to get some experience with other *nix Operating Systems other than Linux.
I don't have any real benchmarks myself, but find that old G4's do large compilations faster than (comparatively) newer Intel-based computers. Like I said no scientific benchmarks, but enough for me to notice and want to ask.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The University of Vermont has switched from Solaris to Linux. The engineering school previously had quite a few Solaris workstations, but those have been replaced by dual-boot Linux/Windows machines. It is a very good set up, since the students get the benefits of both Linux and Windows. Yes, Windows DOES have benefits!
We have labs for the mathmatics and computer science departments that are Redhat linux running on Dells. However for most of our major, mission critical production servers, they run Solaris. We have two VX440s and VX880 s well as some of Sun's StorEdge hardware. Can't say I like working with the Solaris crap though.
brian
Duke Sucks
So please someone at NCSU comment on the break down of OS's in labs.
Think Deeply.
I work for one of the world's largest hedge funds and we're just about at the end of eliminating alot (100's) of Solaris boxen, including some Sun Fire E20K & E25K minis, for fewer Red Hat Linux on Dell. The kicker - it wasn't entirely a cost issue. We got tired of the Sun Boxes (including the Sun Fires) going down on hardware failures (CPU & Mem), and the Dells have better performance and are more easily and more cheaply upgraded.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun.
I really think both OSes are great. Perhaps since I know a lot more about Solaris than Linux (although I use both) I like the first the most.
The point here is which have the clearest growth path for the foresible future.
I really thinks that now that the bitkeeper issue will be solved shortly, Linux have a clearer roadmap.
Although Sun is a great company (with more than 5 billion in cash), Solaris is closely attach to Sun's future, but Linux have no personal attachment at all (I really belive that even if Linus wants stop working on it, Linux will sirve and will keep improving).
I also believe that the OpenSolaris iniciative is a great way to solve this problem, but it has yet to prove itself, although adding Roy Fielding (who helped write the original Apache software) looks like a great idea.
In either case, what the Bitkeeper issue showed was that, as Benjamin Franklin said "Anyone who would trade freedom for safety deserves neither." Or put in another way, is better to use a bad OpenSoruce product than a great Propietary one.
I also thinks that Sun's have been wrongly attack for its CDDL license. It's really as close as you can get to the Mozilla license, and noone is attacking them for that. Both licenses allow the use of the software without beeing force to post improvements (what seems to be the "evil" part of Sun's CDDL). But even that wont create any problem for a user that's currently running a software release under CDDL (not possible Bitkeeper alike abuse). The only "problem" is that anyone is able to improve the software that was release under CDDL and re-release it under the license they want (exactly the same happens with MySQL and noone is complaining....).
I'm as big a linux fanboy as the next guy (well, maybe not on slashdot), but have you looked at Solaris 10? The filesystem stuff is clever but may not fly in the real world. The new DTrace system monitoring tools, however, are a huge step ahead of anything else out there. Essentially it lets you hook any system call and run a secure script in kernel space when it triggers. (Not a very clear description, sorry, but it's the first OS enhancement I've seen in years to which my response wasn't 'Well, duh, about time.' but was 'uuuuh... ooh, that's clever.')
While that Sun is selling EXXXXXPENSIVE!! Opteron-based machines (SunEVZ ???) (x10 the price) with the same performance as from Dell.
irix: http://freeware.sgi.com/ this was provided by sgi via actual sgi paid employees. it's now about a year out of date, but irix is basically end-of-lifed already by SGI (details available to the curious, but more than is relevant here). i like their inst packages because they provide the patches they needed to get the default source to build.
aix: http://www.bullfreeware.com/ this is provided by a third party hardware vendor, and looks fairly up to date. i haven't used it in years but used to about 8 years ago with reasonable success.
and as mentioned above the solaris sites are very up to date.
I really like SunFreeware. It is convenient and easy-to-use. Steve Christensen is responsive if you have any issues. And the packages are updated on a timely basis.
But Blastwave appears to have many more packages. (I will have to look through the list one of these days.)
(I am not an official University mouthpiece, so this isn't official, but it's not a secret either.)
We've got some SPARCs in labs now running Solaris. We'll be fielding some PCs running UNIX for the fall. I don't know whether these will replace or augment the SPARCs. They'll be the same Dells they're upgrading the MS Window machines to.
Some people are still muttering about dual-booting them, but I'd rather we keep them straight UNIX. We're evaluating Linux vs. Solaris x86 right now, but so far Linux is way ahead because we need accelerated OpenGL support for the coursework they want to do.
Nearly all our instructional-related non-workstation UNIX machines are SPARCs running Solaris. I've been telling folks we should be doing more of that with x86 machines too, but there's not been much motion there yet.
(Historically that's been because SPARCs could have a lot more memory than PCs, but that's less true all the time.)
ab
He said:
"2.6.9-5.0.3.ELsmp" "CentOS 4.0." which means he probably wants, like everyone else, the OS packager to take care of this crap.
The only process scheduler is O(1) by Ingo Molnar et al.
2.6 pretends to implement elevator I/O schedulers of which there are several available.
We have just evaluated their Opteron-based workstations (running RedHat, but just because my testers were most familiar with RHEL). Not even the 2100 - the 1100 was a great platform for Shake, mostly due to the great video card. We are seriously considering replacing our Dell workstations with 2100s.
In my experience, the only time I've had a Netra die, the Sun guy showed up just as quickly as the Dell (Unisys) guy. Only the Sun guy brought the right part, and left with a fixed box within an hour. The Dell guy was sent the wrong part, had to come back the next morning. "4 hour gold support" took only 18 hours. The HP guy was really thorough and detailed when he set up our rp server. But all 3 have excellent online and phone support (after Dell brought theirs back from Bangladesh or wherever).
Anyway, it's fun to bash Sun, but you should really look at their new products. I only wish we needed a bunch of dual Opteron 1U servers, because their price kills Dell all over the place.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?
Why yes, yes they are!
** Reminder **
The ITCS Login Service will be upgraded on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005.
On May 3rd, the current servers (running Solaris) will be replaced with new machines running Linux.
Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?
As a Unix system administrator at a major US research university who administers large Linux and Solaris installations for academic/research use, I can assert that the answer is a resounding YES. In fact, this process has started a long time ago, in late 90s and it is still ongoing. I have seen lots of labs switch from Solaris to Linux. I have never seen a switch happen in the other direction. The reasons are obvious. Sun is fighting an uphill battle here. Solaris on SPARC is losing because SPARC lost its competitive edge a very long time ago while Solaris on x86 is definitely being frowned upon for having a poor hardware and software support.
Where did you get the idea that Centos (or RHEL it is based on) is not a good desktop OS? It seems to run the desktop environment just fine, web browser, office suite, and tons of commercial software that's certified to run on RHEL. Plus you get other benefits like installers updated for new hardware, updates for years to come, etc. What else do you need? Seems like a fairly good setup for a workstation OS. I wouldn't expect more (in fact, I would expect a lot less) from a typical Windows XP machine in a university lab.