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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.
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.
We have a lab full of UltraSparcs running Linux at ITESM (www.itesm.mx).
The CS department lab at Yale runs SuSe. Most of our public computers are either Mac or Windows, though.
If they're thin clients and the hardware is supported by Sun, they are probably using SunRay clients which implies a large Solaris system hiding somewhere.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I work as a Unix admin at a major school of medicine in the midwestern US. We have a pretty large amount of Sun equipment on campus, and also a lot of Linux on Dells.
Sun's hardware, especially the old SparcStations, are nearly indestructible. We literally have old Sparc 5s plugging away still. Dells are, as others have pointed out, inexpensive to buy and run pretty well.
Basically, the way it works around here is, if you can afford it, you buy a Sun. If you don't, you buy a Dell and throw Linux on it. With NIH funding slowing down in general, buying cheaper hardware for use now makes sense to me. But basically anything serious (that I have seen) is done on either Solaris or Linux. We'd also be interested in Xserves, but we do a lot of statistics, and that means SAS, which isn't available on OS X.
As of the last release the sunray server software also runs on linux meaning it could very well be a large linux system hiding somewhere.
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
"well, AFAIK, Dell only ships Windows right?" Well, actually, that would be WRONG. Even for small accounts, Dell is very willing to ship a variety of workstations and servers with Linux or even NO os. Ya' might want to look at their web site before making such a readily-verifiable (incorrect) statement.
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.
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.
Yeah, just like it's cool to make fun of Red Hat and Windows on Slashdot...being a little bit of a hypocrite aren't you?
I remember as undergraduate CS student looking for a summer internship going from booth to booth looking for a good company to work for. The first question Sun asked me was "Are you comfortable working for tech support?". I just laughed at them and walked away. I am sure there are some good reason they would want interns to start there...but give me a break. Why go with Sun when there are 100 other companies that will give me practical experience in programming?
Really, that was my first bad impression of Sun. But when I entered the real world, and was doing a fresh install of Solaris...I discovered that they don't include a freaking compiler. How the hell can you be a unix OS and not include gcc? Maybe it's juvenile, but I swore off Sun at that point.
Sun had a vision. A server in every neighborhood. Everyone just power ons their monitor and they had everything they need, without a box sitting in their home. Well, they failed to make the vision a reality and now are dying. They support the SCO bullshit....really, give me a reason not to hate them. I don't care if it's "cool" on here or not. Sun made me hate Sun...not Slashdot.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
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
I can see you don't have much of a relationship with Dell. We go to their page for a ballpark price, and phone them up for our 'special' price.
Dell has also sharpened their pencils in the past when motivated properly.
Oh, and I've never bought Sun stuff in my life.
Er, um, well...
Did you look on the Companion CD that comes in your media kit?
Well did you?
Did you look on www.sun.com?
Did you hell.
But you still get modded up.
And for what it's worth, if you are running the 64-bit AMD Solaris 10 kernel, you are running a Solaris kernel compiled with gcc 3.4.x
Stick Men
there is (was?) a unix cluster in carr too, but nobody liked to use it because of solaris.