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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.
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?
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.
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?
Yep, and it'll be really outdated by then and will need to be replaced anyway.
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."
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.
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.
Hmm, 1/3 the cost, 1/2 the longevity.
Sounds like a good deal to me!
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$?
My perfect-running Dell 386DX DOS game box must be a freak of the litter, I guess.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
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.
If something's mission critical then it'll be used until it irrevocably breaks down - witness brand new IBM mainframes running executables compiled in the sixties, just because the customer wants to do the same thing, only faster.
Even VAX machines are still being used, and MULTICS wasn't finally put out of use until the year 2000.
Yes, if you're doing short-range projects with relatively trivial applications a Dell machine running Linux is better value; if you'll still be doing the same thing in a decade you'll want something more upmarket. How many people lived in shitty apartments before they got a nice house?
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.
In the days of the 386's Dell was a high end gray box maker. They produced a premium product. Today they are mainstream.
Based on the Linux@Duke link, I'd say they're using OpenAFS.
Breakfast served all day!
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
Sounds like a good deal to me!
I think you're trying to be funny, but it is a good deal - if you buy two in a year instead of one, each at 1/3 price, you pay 2/3 the price - thus saving 1/3 the price. Since failure is unpredictable even in expensive equipment, you're going to buy two of your servers for redundancy anyways (right?) - so the longevity argument doesn't even factor in.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, I think the Linux desktops really are getting there. I'm running JDS3 (on Solaris, but it's basically still GNOME/OO.org), and I really need Windows for very very few things. Given that the major Linux desktops are also much cheaper than Windows for similar capability, I'd say Microsoft is really worried but not showing it.
Just like AMD pulled a fast one on Intel, Linux/UNIX will do the same to Microsoft. My hope is that "Wintel" will be a paragraph in the history books and little more.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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
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.
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.
Ha ha ha, Betamax loser! LOSER!
Since Duke doesn't want them, I'll gladly take them off their hands.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
my school is replacing its solaris machines with DELLs running fedora core2
They produced a premium product. Today they are mainstream.
The Optiplex line has been very good to me. Maybe you are talking about the Precision, or Dimension products?
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
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.
Gah!
We had a 5 to 1 ration of Dell to Sun gear at my last job. And Sun still managed to have 3x as much hear spectacularly fail. We had no less then eight Sun 6500 machines blackbirded in 6 months. That means three Sun dudes come and live in your data center while they make sure everything is *exactly* as it should be. Net result: no change in the rate chip were blown.
Same thing at my new job. One of the two Sun V880s blows something once every other month. The fifty odd Dell servers just sit there doing their job. Other than two blown motherboards over the past two years. And those weren't even major outages since I just dropped the harddrives into the spare chassis... hell of lot cheaper than Sun maintenance.
Sun can go suck it.
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
AFS support on the 2.4 kernel is pretty stable and I believe that the last few OpenAFS have support for 2.6.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
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.
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
Our oldest sun server is 6 years of age. Our oldest HP server is 7 years of age. All of these are still running fine and reasonably fast enough for what we use them for.
Last year we finally shut down 6 entry-level HP workstations (715/50) that were of +- 8 years old at the time. These had indeed become too slow for real use, but were still being used as X terminals by students.
I wouldn't want to try any of that with our Intel based Compaq servers, because we know from experience (this translates as: yes we did try) that they are designed to last 3 years and will predictably break soon after their third birthday. The record so far is one that lasted a full 3.5 years.
Linux user since early January 1992.
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.
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
...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.
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
Did you ever think that maybe your data center isn't being cooled or powered properly? If you're having as many outages on your Sun equipment as you say, SOMETHING isn't right...
We have a Sun E220 webserver that's been running for 822 days straight... We have Ultra60s as our workstations that are working without a problem. We have several V880s that have had no problems at all (although one did have a bad motherboard at one point).
I find it hard to believe that you're having as many problems as you're saying without there being another cause.
What lingo are /you/ using!? "Hear spectacularly fail"? "Blackbirded"? What the heck is a "rate chip"?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
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.
Since failure is unpredictable even in expensive equipment, you're going to buy two of your servers for redundancy anyways (right?) - so the longevity argument doesn't even factor in.
What a load of bunk. Failure is predictable. You won't be able to point to a specific machine and say, "I decree this machine will fail!" But you can have a grasp on the overall situation, especially if you study duty cycle ratings and read tech sites.
The fact that you can make estimates on failure is why you'd chose an enterprise SCSI hard drive for your server instead of the cheapest ATA drive on the market. It's also the reason why RAID exists. You can be reasonably certain that although one drive in the array may fail, the chances are almost none that all of them will fail at once.
Also, I'd have a back-up server if I wanted to minimize downtime, not because it has anything to do with longevity.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
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!
Dell=cheap crappy hardware. We have 1600 dell workstations (Optiplex GX1-GX280.) Each month we replace 30 - 35 Motherboards that have failed. We never had this problem with the older Dells(GX1-GX110). We also got a bad batch of maxtor hard drives that have had about a 70 percent failure rate in our Dells. Most problems have been with the GX270 line. Out of our first 25 GX280's we have already had 1 MotherBoard failure and 1 Hard Drive. Dell has admited that they have had some problems and sent us 10 motherboard to keep on hand.(Some days we replace 5-6 motherboards) Most of our PC's are used 24/7. I am actually a Network guy buy since our Netware servers never go down I help out with the Dell hardware replacements.(we do NOT use Dells for servers) We were going to switch to IBM Desktops which in my opinion are much better than the Dell's but after IBM sold their desktops to Lenovo we sent all of our IBM's back.
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.
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.
We've got around 40 sun boxes and they need more maintenance and parts replaced than any of our dell linux boxes. We pay more in service contracts than it would cost just to replace linux boxes, not to mention they run our software at about 1/4 the capacity of the linux boxes. People buy sun for the name recognition more than any actual quality. I'll be glad when SLOWaris is no longer on our server farm at all.
How many people lived in shitty apartments before they got a nice house?
While I agree with your point in general, I take contention at your use of the above analogy, at least in respect to American architecture post 1940.
Apartments, by their nature, are most commonly found in urban (regardless of size, village-->town-->city) settings. As such, they exist in densely populated spots and were usually built pre 1940 at a point when the general public cared about quality (both sturdiness and look) of buildings. The apartment's interiors may be lacking, but the building itself has very likely stood for the better part of a century, possibly through several retrofits and extensions that enable it to be a viable living space for people for years to come. Additionally, it is probably located within walking distance of other urban amenities such as food, shopping, and employment.
Contrast this with the average American house. This house was most likely built post 1940 in the desolate sprawl known as suburbia. Like the territories conquered at the end of the expansionist Roman empire, suburbia was not planned and built with a future in mind. Instead, it is the product of supplying product for an immediate desire, in this case for "spacious country living". As a result most suburban houses are constructed of generally low quality -- with some infamous "green lumber" fiascoes -- by developers who have no interest in what the place will be like in 100 years. Even the nicest of these are simple scaled up versions of the same cheap construction with shiny fittings added; the McMansions.
Not only are the physical quality of these buildings significantly lower than those of say, most European cities, but their positioning far from all commercial and social centers forces residents of them to get in a car EVERY time they leave their home. Not only does this increase traffic and pollution, but it also creates noticeable emotional tension in residents, especially those such as teenagers who can't drive and can't therefore get out of the house.
I'm not saying that any given apartment is better than any given house, but the American dream of a "rural house with urban lifestyle"=>suburbia is more like a nightmare.
P.S. - Check out anything on urban planning by James Kunstler. He is a great lover of hyperbole, but manages to squeeze some insight into his works none the less.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
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
The dimensions are terrible. You are right the Optiplex is pretty durable. The Inspiron isn't as good as it should be.
... and this was presales stuff. Today Linux is a zillion times more popular than Dell Unix was and you would never get that kind of support.
In any case they aren't a premium company anymore. For example, in the early 90's I had a question about Dell's Unix (rebranded SCO), they actually had someone on tech support who could answer a complex question
Its hard to get them to answer the phone quickly. Their shipping times are nonsense and they are always late. Their customer support people are undertrained. I mean are really arguing that Dell is today a premium vendor?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I mean are [you?] really arguing that Dell is today a premium vendor?
Pretty much, yeah. I think there's a big difference between corporate Dell, and consumer Dell. That was basically my point. Corporate Dell has been very good to me. I've never dealt with consumer Dell though. (nor would I want to)
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.
Your generalizations (and obvious bias) are simply breathtaking.
No biggie really. I love my 105 year old house on 2 acres in northern New Jersey. I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite.
Self awareness - try it!
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.
>> 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.
We recently replaced (for no good reason) an IBM Netfinity 5000 server. Dual Pentium II Xeon, 512MB RAM, 36GB RAID 5, dual power supplies...Original cost was like $30,000
It toiled away running Exchange 5.5 and NT 4 since 1998. It still runs great. Sure, service packs have been applied, the tape drive was replaced once, and one of the hard drives was replaced, but it still ran fine. We grew from 50 to 70 users, and it sat there at pretty low CPU utlization. Various other applications (accounting, database, file sharing) were run over the years as well. But it ran 24/7 and never quit.
blue light special in aisle Duke.
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
No biggie really. I love my 105 year old house on 2 acres in northern New Jersey. I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite.
Note 1: I said post 1940.
Note 2: I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite. That doesn't sound like suburbia
The suburban life that I have witnessed (growing up in south-central Pennsylvania) was a soul-sucking existence that had many features that didn't make sense. For example, there is the characature of a "porch" and "front door" that all of the suburban houses have, but are functionally useless since the porch is only 18 inches wide and the "porch/front door" complex is centered on a large lawn with no walkway to it. The real entrance is through the kitchen/garage side-door. So why does the "porch/front door" even exist? I suggest that its function is to make a not so nice house LOOK like a nice house, since they aren't even usable.
I currently choose to live in a modest apartment in an old building right at the center of a small town. Yeah, I hear trucks on the street all night, but I also can walk across the street to the grocery store, the hardware store, and the bank. 10 restaurants and bars are with 3 blocks (8min) walk, and I can walk 15min to work. The other benefit is that I see the same people every day on my walks to and from work and the various stores. In the 8 months I've been in my current location I've met (and chatted with) more people in my community than in my previous 25 years combined.
Having a truly rural life would be great too. Some gardening, raise some chickens, do some consulting over the net from home, etc. Its the bastardization of human life that suburbia entails that I have a problem with. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong to want the things that suburbia purports to offer (large house, good schools, relative quiet, two-car garage, etc). Those things are honest, basic desires.
I do however feel sorry for those who have to live in suburbia because of the additional consequences involved with fulfilling those honest desires; reliance on a car to get anywhere, having to cumulatively waste years of one's life sitting in traffic while commuting, having to play "soccer mom/dad" and drive the kids everywhere since they can't walk home from school/practice/etc, having to drive drunk or find a DD instead of just walking/taxi home from the bar, etc, etc, etc.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
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
The Sun's come with Ultra320 SCSI, ECC RAM, redundant power supplies, lights-off management, etc. Those "cheapest Opteron" boxes don't.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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...
or
?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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. :)
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.
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.
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
I agree. Most Sun equipment I've lasts forever. If my hump were on the line for providing 24/7/365 service Sun is my 1st choice. And yes the Dells are faster, but only for low-end computing. An 24 processor SunFire will be faster and more reliable than anything else I've seen.
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.
I've got to disagree on the Optiplex's. I bought 20 of them 3 years ago for my department. Within one year, 3 had to have motherboards replaced. I've since moved on to another department so I don't know how the rest have held up but 3 out of 20 seems a bit high for failure rate.
Dell of the mid 90's reminded me of Compaq of the mid to late 80's. My first desktop, a Compaq deskpro from 1985 could have been dropped from a building and still worked.
I think all Dell's are crap now. Its the road they took to mass produce with the cheapest parts possible.
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.')
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 just love this shit. It's hilarious. And it always happens, without fail. When everybody brings out their anecdotes about hardware reliability, someone trashes on pretty much everybody's gear, somebody's worked at a place where any given manufacturer's stuff was junk, and someone out there has had any given vendor's stuff work perfectly.
At least everyone can agree that everyone's stuff used to be reliable. They sure don't meake 'em like they used to...
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
There have always been builders doing shoddy work. Older buildings are sturdier mainly because the flimsy old buildings have already been replaced or improved.
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 had an Optiplex desktop at work once. After I moved office back to my home country someone decided to send that PC over with another employee, who put it in the hold. Now this wouldn't be a great idea with any PC, but this one had an almost entirely plastic case that just broke apart at the edges. Thankfully the HD carried on working for a few months.
(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
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.
That is my definition of unpredictable - you can't predict when it's going to die.
study duty cycle ratings and read tech sites.
A hard drive with a MTBF of 50,000 hours can still die in hour 50.
My point, which you seem to be agreeing with, is that no matter how reliable your hardware may be, you have to plan for it to fail sometime. My other point was that since you're planning for it to fail anyways, if it fails twice as often but at 1/3 the price, that's a bargain (assuming you've planned successfully for hardware failures and they won't hurt you)
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.
Uh, I think he met "gear"...deal with the typos, dude.
As for "Blackbirded", it means slave labor, but I think in this context, he was meaning baked, as in "4 and 20 black birds baked in a pie". I could be wrong, but that's what I got out of it.
And "rate chip". That's a chip that handles rate. Or it's dyslexic for "chip rate". Either way, it still makes sense.
Just how hard is it to figure out what someone is trying to say? Or is it a normal affliction for you to pick out errors? Could be that you're bored.
Whatever...
So when is the Hawkeye movie coming out?
How the heck was my post a redundant comment? Has the moderation world gone mad? I posted to the story when there were barely any comments at all. Bah.