Why OpenSolaris Failed To Build a Community

xtaski writes "Ted Ts'o, one of the earliest Linux developers, points out some serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop! Ted also points out some other flaws which make it clear just how disconnected the executives at Sun are from what's really going on in their 'open source communities.' He notes, 'It was never ... Sun's intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.'"

Comments

mirror

[asv108]

http://tytso.livejournal.com/

Re:mirror

[tytso]

Yeah, sorry about that. Thunk.org is a rather ancient machine (> 5 years old) living in a colo facility, and this is how I figured out I had been slashdotted. (The two uptime commands were about two minutes apart):

    14:21:06 up 121 days, 16:47, 2 users, load average: 40.47, 12.41, 4.55
    14:23:05 up 121 days, 16:49, 2 users, load average: 81.43, 36.97, 14.52

  Fortuantely I'm still mirroring my blog onto my old Livejournal account; please read it there for now! The two articles that you want are this one: What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris and this one: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source, if you can't get through to thunk.org.

Re:mirror

[tytso]

Not so ancient Chinese saying: "It is not enough to install wp-cache2 and activate the plugin; you must go to options->wp-cache and press then "enable" button to REALLY enable wp-cache."

Doh!

(Once I actually really enabled wp-cache, my server seems to have been able to keep up, for now...)

Re:mirror

[mrsteveman1]

I've never seen the load on a Linux machine rise above like 6, and by then its unresponsive to anything.

How's it get up to 80?

Re:mirror

[tytso]

How's it get up to 80? Lots and lots of apache daemons. :-)

I've never seen the load on a Linux machine rise above like 6, and by then its unresponsive to anything. I was disk-bound, because wp-cache wasn't enabled even though it should have been, so it didn't take me that long to recover once I managed to run shutdown the apache server. Then it was just a matter of setting up a firewall rule to only allow access from my home IP address, restarting the server, figuring out that I needed to enable the wp-cache plugin, then remove the firewall rule, and pray.... :-)

But yeah, I was pretty impressed that my 1 GHz Pentium III with only 512 megs of memory running 2.6.16 linux was able to not only survive, but recover from a slashdotting without needing to reboot. If I had only checked earlier to make sure that wp-cache really was enabled, but as the old saying goes, "no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Re:mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

I was really following along with you until you did the "kiss a girl" quote. I followed the link and noticed the email is from 1996. That sort of destroyed your credibility about the OpenSolaris development right there.

Re:mirror

[ATMD]

Dude... have you actually heard of Slashdot?

Re:mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

It's working now ;-)

WP-Cache should be renamed "In-case-of-/.-Cache"

Re:mirror

[mrsteveman1]

You mean this isn't the old folks home?

I figured since everyone wanted me off their front lawn and all....

Re:mirror

[cheater512]

I've seen a eight core server hit hundreds.

Mind you that was after I made a mistake on a production server which essentially caused all the site's traffic to turn in to a DDoS attack. :)

That was fun to clean up.

Re:mirror

[ta bu shi da yu]

Actually, to my mind it just shows how things haven't changed in over a decade. Sun is still the same old Sun, no matter how "open source friendly" it makes out. Just look what they did to Kohei - ignored his efforts and duplicated his work.

Re:mirror

[nareshov]

A bluehost machine I have a shell on was loaded to 160 yesterday. Apache and MySQL methinks ;/

Re:mirror

[xSquaredAdmin]

I'm involved with a group which runs one of the official Ubuntu mirrors, and some days our load hovers around ~300 on that machine. Luckily we're getting a new machine to replace our mirror soon.

Severe lack of...interest?

[digitaldc]

...serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop!

No developers or any tools?
At least we won't have to blame another Solaris bomb on George Clooney this time.

Re:Severe lack of...interest?

[hercubus]

...serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop! No developers or any tools? At least we won't have to blame another Solaris bomb on George Clooney this time.

okay, you were going for the joke. but to quote Mr. Lem's Website:

Soderbergh's movie belongs to the category of ambitious, artistic cinema - difficult to crack for the mass audience used to Hollywood pap.

Re:Severe lack of...interest?

[mrsteveman1]

There are plenty of tools, just not the kind you are thinking of. These tools have proper names that must be capitalized.

For those too lazy too read the article:

[SatanicPuppy]

The answer is: "They acted like a bunch of dicks."

OSS is a labor of love. You've got to want to work on the project, and you've got to be able to work on the project.

If you put a big chunk of your time into something and get rudely dismissed, then its hardly likely that you'll continue to contribute.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

Speaking as someone on the inside -- you're right. There are a lot of big egos here.

I didn't come to Sun because I like the Kool-Aid, I came by acquisition. I haven't decided yet whether or not this whole "we love Open Source" thing Jonathan keeps plugging is real or a charade. I'm optimistic, but we'll see.

On better days, I like to think that the people way up at the helm really "get it" and are just waiting for the rest of the ship to slowly (slowly!) turn. On not-so-good days, I start to wonder if maybe someone's trying to pull a fast one.

There are lots and lots of people here who really and truly believe that Linux is just an upgrade path to Solaris. In other words... Once people start running Linux on Sun hardware, they'll "want more", and "step into the big league" with Solaris. It's kind of sad, when it's not irritating.

Anyhow... I could bitch for a while, but I won't.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[devjj]

This isn't specific to OSS, obviously. Apple dismissed (arguably rudely, given how poorly worded the rejection email was) many would-be iPhone developers. Who wants to invest time into a platform with no guarantee when or even if you'll be able to sell your product?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[SatanicPuppy]

The problem with Sun hardware is that it's too awesome. Where I work we have two sun mainframes; nice and all, and I can occasionally blow peoples minds regarding the things that you can do with the system, but they cost more than all the rest of the crap in the server room combined, without providing the same level of performance.

I once applied for a job whose sole perk was that the site was a huge testbed for Sun hardware, and I'd have the ability to just play with it...To play with big iron.

But I can't imagine trying to cost justify it for anything other than a mission critical financial application. Even there it'd be hard; you really need to be dealing with more than 7 figures a week to justify that sort of system...Even our antiquated Sun servers run almost 6 figures a year between software and hardware support.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[turgid]

On better days, I like to think that the people way up at the helm really "get it" and are just waiting for the rest of the ship to slowly (slowly!) turn. On not-so-good days, I start to wonder if maybe someone's trying to pull a fast one.

You're still waiting for the ship to turn after 3 years? Big egos eh?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

The thing is, Andy's back, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't give a rat's ass about Solaris. He just wants to make interesting hardware. That's where the money is, after all. Software is a pathetic fraction of corporate revenues here. All the more reason to be mystified about the internal hostility toward Linux.

So, for example, the Thumper is one of Andy's creations. It's pretty hard to beat the storage density you get for the price. Put a mess of those under a Lustre filesystem, and people start to take notice of Sun as a player in HPC. The recent TACC Ranger system is all Sun gear: storage, compute, and network (with sun-built Magnum switches). The OS? Linux.

There's more interesting stuff coming down the pike, and from my perspective, it seems that there's a shift toward making money on volume rather than margins. In other words, somewhat less awesome, but more of it.

I dunno. I don't profess to have much more special knowledge than anyone outside of the upper echelons. I'm hopeful, though. I read somewhere that many of the big Solaris egos were hired away by teh google. Hopefully they keep going. They can have our kool-aid-drunk sales and marketing people too. :P

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[nigelo]

> our antiquated Sun servers run almost 6 figures a year between software and hardware support.

Well, the problem is that they are antiquated, probably, and therefore cost significantly more to support than new products. Sun doesn't want to continue manufacturing replacement parts for old designs, so they raise the price as the equipment ages.

It's not just Sun that has this pricing strategy on hw & sw support, either.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[afabbro]

Where I work we have two sun mainframes;

Um, no you don't.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Kent Recal]

There are lots and lots of people here who really and truly believe that Linux is just an upgrade path to Solaris. In other words... Once people start running Linux on Sun hardware, they'll "want more", and "step into the big league" with Solaris. It's kind of sad, when it's not irritating.

Funny. It has been exactly the opposite for us.
We're running a bunch of xfires (14 boxes total, 4100, 4200, 4150) here
and initially started out with solaris because the wise guys said it's faster,
more stable, oh and no least you get that shiny "platinum support" badge...

Yea it was all that and the zfs hype, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing much to be honest. We fell in love with the hardware immediately
and the machines hummed along without too much trouble. Postgres performs
well, java performs well, and ZFS snapshots are a blessing.

Despite all that superficial happyness we switched most of the hosts to linux
(and aim for 100% linux) after a few months. We still love ZFS (and can't wait
for a linux equivalent) but that alone couldn't justify sticking to solaris for us.

What broke it for us is the userland with all its subtle differences
to linux, or in other words: the learning curve. This may sound strange when
talking about a UNIX OS but as a linux shop we're spoiled by the GNU toolchain,
by dead-simple package management and all the little everyday things that just
work a tiny little bit different under solaris.

I'm not saying the linux-UI is better (actually, it is in many
places, but that's not the point here), it's just that we all grew
up with linux, so the solaris CLI "felt like a really old version of linux"
(to paraphrase a coworker) from the start.

We didn't slack, mind you. We tried hard to make that feeling stop. We read the
books and collected bigadmin bookmarks like trophies. We changed the default-shell
to bash and installed the GNU tools to keep our sanity but otherwise did our best
to treat solaris with respect and resisted the urge to dress it up to look more
like linux.

It didn't work out.

I could rant for days about the many little things that drove us away but
I'll try to focus on a few of the most significant points here:

1. Package Management (the lack thereof)
Pkg-add is bad joke when you're used to apt-get and emerge. JumpStart feels
like an insult when you're spoiled by FAI. I can only guess how Sun expects
us to keep our multiple solaris boxes in sync. Maybe they sell that as
one of their many enterprise service?

2. Google doesn't work well for solaris
Not really something we can blame on solaris or Sun but time after time we
were astonished as to how hard it is to find useful help for specific solaris
problems via google. Howto's and Tutorials about all things solaris are generally
very sparse. Due to this "learning by doing" doesn't work as well for solaris
as it does for linux.

3. The sun website SUCKS
Sure there is a lot of documentation, if you can find it in the pile
of rubble that sun calls a website. But even the stuff we found was
not always helpful. Sun documentation tends to be very verbose while
still often glossing over important details. Sun docs often feel like
they expect you to print them out and put them under your pillow.
We don't work that way. We're spoiled by straighforward howtos,
examples, stuff that gets us going fast. We're the impatient
youngsters.

Well, this got longer than I intended. I'll close with saying that
we'll keep buying sun hardware. The xfire series is the best piece of kit
(at a very competitive price) that I have ever seen and it runs linux
like a champ.

But linux as an "upgrade path to solaris"? Ha. Good joke.
In my world solaris has it's place on big iron and in areas where
the last bit of performance really matters. For everyone else the
natural choice is what they're familar with. And who grows up with
solaris these days?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

You're still waiting for the ship to turn after 3 years? Big egos eh?

HUGE egos. And remember, we're talking about a multi-national company with over 37,000 employees. There's a lot of Kool-Aid (getting sick of that term yet?) to dilute.

I am hopeful, though. I'll be hopeful until I'm successful in effecting changes, or until I give up.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[1lus10n]

Two problems about that, the first being that HPC is more about cheap low power hardware and density neither of which the thumper provides.

Second hardware is commodity now. Thats something Sun has been struggling with since I was there 4 years ago. The t1000 and t2000 did a good job of bringing TCO in line with the rest of the universe except the fact that solaris is running behind linux in terms of admin awareness & love.

How many SA's do you know who would choose solaris over linux ?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[1lus10n]

I've worked at a few different 'named' companies in IT. Including Sun. They are doing FAR better than when I was there, but they still do a piss poor job of making people choose their stuff.

The two things missing are: 'ooh thats cool' and 'ooh thats easy'. ZFS alone doesnt cut it, I have storage gear for that. What else can you do for me ?

Package management is still a joke. Package/software availability is even worse. The hardware is great, but its all designed for solaris, and the new hardware (ultrasparc T1) takes a serious performance hit when you run linux or bsd on it.

That being said, I'm not horribly impressed with RedHat ... which has made what advancements lately ? ext3 still ? rpm is still crap. Now they appear to be adding more random useless cruft (a la network mangler) to the install.

Microsoft is clicky clicky crap that doesnt make my job easier when were talking hundreds or thousands of servers.

That leaves .... who ?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Argon]

Have you tried Nexenta (http://www.nexenta.org/)

Ganesan

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[icedevil]

How many SA's do you know who would choose solaris over linux ?

As someone who works for one of the big 3 batch queuing system providers that are not directly tied to hardware manufacturers (read: not IBM or Sun.) I can tell you that the vast majority of our customer base, probably 90% are running Linux. The rest are mostly AIX and HPUX with sprinklings of Cray, Sun, and Microsoft systems.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[SoupIsGood Food]

Umm. I'm more than a little dismayed that you gave up containers, ZFS, SMF, dtrace and JumpStart for... GNU shell tools and apt?

As a cross-platform sysadmin with a decade-plus of experience, dude. Just... dude. My "Ineptitude" sense is tingling.

I mean, how much messing around on the command line do you really need to do on a daily basis? If the answer is "A Lot" - then I can sort of see Linux taking the advantage. Kinda. Yet, most, if not all, command line wrangling on modern servers is to munge shell scripts, and that's mostly been supplanted by python and ruby these days, anyhow. You've never even heard of JumpStart? "pkgadd -d" is too hard for you? You can't find anything on Solaris administration by googling the problem keywords with "sun Solaris administration" appended after? Really? Wow.

Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game. Only OpenBSD us easier for Unix wonks to tinker with. Stuff like AIX and NonStop would =break= you into a quivering pile of goop. Based on your post, I have doubts you'd be able to hack the more challenging Linux distros, too, like Slack or Debian.

There are good reasons to go with Linux on Sun hardware - pure speed, cross-platform compatibility (esp. with LAMP stack stuff), the need to tinker with the kernel to meet project objectives, or stripping down the OS to a bare minimum for performance or security advantages, re-purposing old hardware with an up-to-date OS that demands fewer resources. Then there are the reasons you gave.

I suppose if you really wanted to re-orient your entire computing platform around the needs of the sysadmins to play with the shell rather than the needs of the project to utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[ryanov]

It was more noticeable, in fact, with sgi. Old hardware cost double to support.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[ryanov]

I would probably choose Solaris over Linux on Sun hardware. FMA, ZFS and ldoms (depending on the machine of course) are pretty cool.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[mindsuck]

The problem with Sun hardware is that it's too awesome. Where I work we have two sun mainframes; nice and all, and I can occasionally blow peoples minds regarding the things that you can do with the system, but they cost more than all the rest of the crap in the server room combined, without providing the same level of performance.

The 25k is not a mainframe. It is a high-end server. I'm sorry but it had to be said.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Skrynesaver]

I kinda agree with you, but I'm over 40 too ;)
Most of the younger staff here take a few months to get used to Solaris, it's the little things, netstat doesn't work as they expect (Why can't I just see the PID/binary name), ls doesn't have the switches they expect and to perfectly honest, while pkgtools is familiar to anyone who's used Slack etc kids today are spoiled with apt and they're right to like it, it "Just works"
We can't over modify the system as they need to be able to provide advice to clients with production Solaris environments so they have to learn for now , but I guarantee that all those shiny GNUisms will be available on Solaris in the medium term because Linux has given people an expectation of usability from the CLI that Solaris doesn't have @ the moment.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Kent Recal]

Hm, I'll go through them one by one.

Zones are indeed amazing but we don't have a use-case for them on our
production hosts. Maybe we could have used "zone-images" to deploy our
stuff but that'd really only be an excuse to use zones for a task
that seems to be better suited to apt (dependency tracking, controlled
distribution of updates etc.).

ZFS, no doubt, is something we miss.

SMF. Well, as often with solaris I love the concept but hate the implementation.
Yes, it beats sysv-init hands down. But, gah, XML, and many of the pkgs on solaris
freeware don't even support it yet. We learned how to roll our own pkgs (with SMF etc.)
but the lack of a package-manager akin to apt turned this into a time sink.

DTrace is a similar story. Ofcourse it is powerful but on a every day base we simply
don't need that power. We prefer the simplicity of strace which has, so far, been
good enough when we needed it and never forced us to wade through documentation
for supposedly "simple" tasks like dtrace did. Dtrace alone seems to be basically
useless until you wrap it up in a fairly elaborate script for the task at hand.
Yes, "DTraceToolkit" provides these scripts for many common tasks, but not for all.
Looking back at the first dtrace tutorial that I found (http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_example.html?feed=DSC)
I can still only shake my head about the effort it takes for such a simple task.

About messing on the command line often: No, we don't need that "often" but regularly.
We install stuff, upgrade stuff, like everyone does. The major gripe was: We don't want
to repeat ourselves for n hosts. Ideally we want to roll packages and distribute them
in a controlled manner. Solaris left us out in the cold here and implementing a 3rd
party framework like puppet feels wrong when linux never even made you think about that.

No, pkgadd -d is not too hard for us. But manually downloading each dependency from solarisfreeware
or whatever source and installing it on each individual host is. Not too hard as in "we can't do it"
but too hard as in "dude, that feels backwards".
Feel free to enlighten me. How do *you* upgrade curl (random example) on 8 solaris hosts?
In debian we review the distro pkg and roll our own when necessary, test it, push it to the
mirror and the nightly update pulls it to all hosts. What tools did we miss that enable
an equivalent workflow for solaris?

Generally I wouldn't say we weren't able to handle solaris. I'd say it turned out we didn't *want* to.
It's very well possible that AIX would break us into a quivering goop. For that precise reason I have
no intention to ever touch it? It has nothing to offer that interests us, so why should I even
consider it?

Well and finally, your last statement makes you sound strikingly similar to the Sun sales reps
that we had. They also kept trumping the horn of "use our modern OS with features not
yet available for linux" to "utilize our kickass hardware to the fullest".

The problem probably lies in the definition of "utilizing our hardware to the fullest".
For you and Sun that probably means to squeeze out the last 10% of performance.
For us it means being able to fluidly run and maintain the hosts (that includes
a sane update-procedure etc.) with a minimum cost in terms of manhours.

In other words: The time we saved on "solaris administration overhead" since
we abandoned it quite likely paid our last 3 xfires alone.

You may blame it on our lack of solaris expirience or even on your perceived
"ineptitude". Still it was the right decision for us.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Renegade88]

I fully agree with you with the exception of "pkgadd -d is too hard for you"? KentRecal is right about the lack of package management. Blastwave is terrible. I also believe the absence of current, sun-sponsored and daily updated package repository is completely unacceptable. The new graphic installer and supplied programs that come with OpenSolaris developer editions are nice, but the package issue should be considered the #1 problem. I don't know how Project Indiana is planning to address this, but I don't get the feeling it will be done properly.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Kent Recal]

I briefly looked into it privately and like the idea very much.
But it didn't feel mature enough (yet?) to base our business on it,
both in terms of software and in terms of "will this still exist in year?".

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[davecb]

Kent Recal wrote"

1. Package Management (the lack thereof) Pkgadd is bad joke when you're used to apt-get and emerge.

I use pkg-get, courtesy of blastwave.org

--dave

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

Two problems about that, the first being that HPC is more about cheap low power hardware and density ...

Umm... On what data/experience do you base that assertion? Maybe for the really really low end of the HPC market, where they are running beowulf on a pile of lab workstations. In the real HPC world, there is big money from governments and oil/gas companies.

Second hardware is commodity now.

Only if you don't care about getting the most performance you can out of each watt and cubic meter of datacenter space. Yeah, you could throw together a bunch of no-name nodes and string them together, but that's not HPC. I'm not talking about college projects, I'm talking about playing alongside the BlueGenes and Crays. There is still a LOT of room for innovation in the HPC space, and I expect things to stay interesting for quite a while.

What's exciting for me is that Sun now seems to have a good story here, and not just because the sales/marketing folks say so. People are buying the gear we make for HPC now, because it DOES yield the price/performance ratio that purchasers look for in this world.

Remember, I'm talking about x86_64 (amd/intel) running Linux. Not sparc. Not solaris. People in the HPC world don't want that stuff. There are internal battles at Sun over this perception. I'm hopeful that the pragmatists will win out.

Right now Sun's got two entries in the top500. The Ranger cluster missed the November list, but when the new one comes out, expect to see Ranger in the top5.

Sorry to fanboy... I just want people to know that not everyone in Sun (remember, 37,000+ employees) is stuck in the sparc/solaris mindset.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[1lus10n]

How many clusters in the top500 are built using a central storage node and thin compute node model ? Most, if not the vast majority. Thumpers are a shit server for this space because in a 4U system the compute density is crap, power usage is crap and storage is easier to scale (GFS, GPFS, SOFS etc etc).

You go ahead believing that model works, you have a handful of customers who could even feasibly operate in that range, and not many outside the US gov't even bother.

When factoring in the top500, look past the top 25 on that list. There are a crap load of blade and 1/2U clusters. Getting lower down the list that percentage increases greatly. Because the largest cost of operating a large cluster is not hardware, its maintenance and facilities.

I know people who have been involved with rolling out a good number of those setups, I've seen 3 of the top 40 in person (and could go see #4 at my leisure). I used to work exclusively in that space. I am not kidding when I tell you that the vast majority of hpc environments on or off of the list are using shitty commodity (x3450 or pe1950 or lower) hardware.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[JerkBoB]

Hmm. I read through your post a couple of times, and I'm still confused.

You seem to have me mixed up with a Solaris person, or something. The whole point of my posts is that I think that Sun is poised to have an interesting place in HPC WITHOUT Solaris.

As for the Thumper, by itself, I think it's actually kind of impressive (48TB in 4U, all redundant whooziwhatsis?). However, when you put a whole pile of them under Lustre, you've got a pretty interesting solution for high-performance storage. Thumpers aren't used for compute though, just storage. The compute and other infrastructure nodes are blades.

I've seen two of the top 30 in person (one of them is in the current top 10), and had root on both of them. :P

Yes, it's a rarefied market. That's part of what makes it interesting for me. I'm not particularly interested in the junk that's farting around at the middle or bottom of the list.

That having been said, I am hopeful that we will look at those smaller customers, because there's money to be made on volume, too.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Raenex]

I started out reading your post and was really intrigued by it. Then the bad formatting made me stop reading it. My guess is that you're putting in explicit line breaks instead of just letting the paragraphs flow.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Kent Recal]

Ha, interesting note, I'll have to think about that. :-)
I'm on 1920x1200 and often browse in full width (like when I wrote that post).

You are right in that I should probably just let it flow but that doesn't work so well with a 217 chars wide input box.

Generally you should be able to get my intended formatting (without auto-wraps) by making your browser wider or reducing the font-size a bit.

Sorry for the inconvenience, I'll try to make my browser window
narrower next time.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Raenex]

Generally you should be able to get my intended formatting (without auto-wraps) by making your browser wider or reducing the font-size a bit. Consider that your post is read on thousands of different monitors sizes, resolutions, browser widths, and font sizes. What looks good to you doesn't necessarily look good to somebody else. Let the browser do what it was meant to do -- flow text.

As for your own browser, I think you should shrink the window to something comfortable when composing your message, and reset it afterwards. This also has the benefit that you can make edits without worrying about your line breaks.

One thing I can't understand: How is it that you are comfortable reading other people's comments at full width, if you can't read your own when composting them?

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Bronster]

You really think "pkgadd -d" is comparable to aptitude or even just plain old apt-get?

I pulled in a bunch of patches for our only Solaris box the other day, and they took a good half hour _each_ to apply. Ok, so we had 10 processes streaming gzip files to a ZFS filesystem on that box, so the load was up a bit - but none of them touched the root filesystem where the patches were applying. It was on separate disks.

There's no reason IO should have been an issue - and a decent scheduler should make sure it wasn't being starved of CPU by long running tasks.

I started out running FreeBSD and moved to Linux a few years ago - I don't have heaps of Solaris mojo - much like the grandparent poster. But I can tell you that all the management tools and userland feel like a huge step backwards.

Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game.

"I'm such a real man I still use ed for all my editing needs. Besides, if sysadmin was easier then I wouldn't have job security any more"

I can _handle_ Solaris, even if I have the same issue of lack of background and harder to use google to get an understanding of an area I don't know yet. I just find it takes more work and time than the equivalent task on Linux. Sure the options on Linux might be less stable, less "mature" and sometimes even less reliable, but they get you up and running quicker. That matters too.

I'm reminded of how Oracle is finding the low end of their market being eaten up by smaller database engines that don't require a full time team of 5 DBAs to tune the bloody thing.

utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.

Ah, yeah. Big shop mentality. There will be a specialist to run each operating system. And then a specialist DBA to run the database server on that machine, and a specialist Java Sysadmin Tool person to manage the java toolchain that all the new tools depend on, and then a specialist backup manager to run the backup systems, and then...

Most small shops the sysadmins are developers too, and they probably don't need the fullest "modern OS features" for it - they need a more user-friendly userland that supports them in their jobs. If Linux is getting the job done quicker for them, then it's probably the right choice even if it doesn't have the latest filesystem.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[SoupIsGood Food]

There are small shops. Then there are small shops. The whole point is that the Unix Guy needs to be able to run everything from Juniper Netscreens to the beat up old Cobalt Qube that's been running the departmental NIS server since the first Clinton was President.

Unfamiliar, new tech happens to your server room, and some of it is decidedly user-hostile. (AIX's ODM comes to mind, or IPSO's clish) - you cannot and should not just write it off because it's not as smoothly polished for admins as it is for the developers or applications who need to make money with the damn thing. Unix wonks get paid what they're paid because this stuff is hard. Admins who 1) get to dictate the type of tech they deal with and 2) dictating the tech because it's slightly easier, or worse, somewhat more familiar, is alien to me.

Admins suggesting new tech because they know it will be cheaper/faster/more robust - this is good.

Admins suggesting new tech because they know it will be cheaper/faster/more robust because they don't know how to cope with what's already in place - this is bad.

(At least we can all agree that Debian-based Linux distros have a very nice userland.)

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Bronster]

An admin who recommends a system they already know how to use because they have experience and know they can get a solid working system within an outside imposed deadline is much more valuable to any company than one who spends months learning how to use a new technology just because it's theoretically "better" - especially if the "betterness" isn't actually required for the business to function.

I don't parse the bit before "this is bad" - but I assume you meant that recommending otherwise inferior technology (or changing to less superior technology) based purely on admin familiarity/comfort is bad. I disagree.

I see roughly three alternatives:

a) change to something your admin can support effectively.

b) have your admin spend work time (I'm assuming you're not having them give up the rest of their life to learn this piece of tech) leaning the technology,

c) hire someone else (depending on your local labour laws possibly firing the current admin in the process) and hope that the new person can integrate well into the company, spending time teaching them other aspects of the business they need to know, etc.

It turns out that changing the technology may actually be the cheapest and most efficient overall option for the business, even if you're not getting theoretical maximum performance from your hardware.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[Bronster]

Oh yes, and I object to the characterisation that to be a "real UNIX admin" you have to be willing and able to support any piece of shit that's passing itself off as a finished product, just because some company decided to ship it.

Nobody can know how to admin every piece of kit out there, and it's not a wise investment to spend your whole time learning everything.

If the great great grandparent poster looked at Solaris and said "the admin cost of (a) learning and (b) supporting this across multiple machines is more than it's worth, and the resources suck compared to this other system that's also compatible with my hardware" then more power to them. It sounds to me from reading that post that they're supporting their business' function better than someone stubbornly trying to learn the new tech - and in that shop Solaris is the new tech, regardless of the product line's pedigree.

Re:For those too lazy too read the article:

[jaxtherat]

How do you know? Do you know that he for a fact doesn't work for (just as some examples) Macquarie Bank, or some other financial monstrosity?

Just because this is /. don't assume that everyone is a young tech enthusiast starting or about to start their tech career.

Some of us DO play with shit like big iron at work...

Bureaucracy

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I think Sun underestimated the importance of casual users. A lot of times the people choosing an OS for a project (be it enterprise deployment, inclusion with hardware, or just use within IT) go with what they are familiar with and also what their current interests are. When Sun open sourced Solaris, there was a lot of interest from the Linux and BSD communities. A lot of those people decided to download a copy and give it a try. The difficulty these casual users had in grabbing an installable copy and getting it running easily were significant. A lot of people just said, "meh" and moved on. The last time I grabbed a developer preview I still had to fill out a bunch of forms with my personal data then deal with Sun's "download manager" and then spend significant time getting it to install, even within a VM customized to run OpenSolaris in particular. That is still better than it used to be. I only have a success rate of about 50% in getting Solaris to install to date.

For most people I think it is just too much of a hassle and all the developer momentum is on Linux. I guess when Sun thinks about open sourcing Solaris, they see it as a way to try to stop their hardware customers from moving away from Sun, which is fine, but does little to leverage the real benefits of an OSS community such as Linux has been doing for a long time.

Re:Bureaucracy

[wildBoar]

Interesting, as I did this recently and found it to be quite straightforward.

Getting Oracle to run on it was bit more problematic.

Why do so many people dislike Solaris ? To a large extent it is just another Unix, and has done a lot to keep momentum on the *nix side of things going in the corporate world. Just to be clear - this is not a why do people dislike Sun question.

Re:Bureaucracy

[couchslug]

"A lot of those people decided to download a copy and give it a try. The difficulty these casual users had in grabbing an installable copy and getting it running easily were significant."

The baseline for Linux is now excellent live CD/DVDs with enough different boot options to ensure decent odds that they will work. They are also easy to use as rescue/recovery disks.

OpenWatcom

[optikos]

perhaps for many of the same reasons that OpenWatcom it not yet a serious competitor to the GNU Compiler Collection

OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it sucks

[Jeffrey Baker]

You have to have a good product before you can have a community. Linux built its early community based on tinkerers and hackers who found it easy to play with. Early Linux distributions, you may recall, were all inclined to integrate well with DOS. Some of them could even be installed _in_ DOS. You could install Slackware and be up and running with an editor and compiler in half an hour. OpenSolaris doesn't follow this example. Using it is a tremendous pain in the ass. Its installer runs for 2-4 hours on the midrange PCs I've tried to install it upon. Once it's "installed" you still have to grope around trying to find familiar tools, which are maybe under UCB or perhaps under GNU subdirectories. It's hard to download software from the 'net and ./configure it. Hardware support is very thin.

To get a hacker community, you have to offer fun. OpenSolaris is simply not fun. It reminds me of work.

Installation problems as well

[gearloos]

Another issue with opensolaris for me was the installation. Being a fairly experienced *nix user, years of sunos, aix, linux, bsd, etc.. under my belt and a fairly competent programmer. I tried quite a few times to install OpenSolaris and there was always some major problem. I never did get a stable system working and finally gave up. That said, this all comes as no surprise to me whatsoever.

Re:Installation problems as well

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

I haven't had any problems getting OpenSolaris up and running on anything I've tried putting it on since back around build 58. Of course I've been trying it on fairly old hardware, so there may be known drivers for this. Never had a problem with the installer. I've actually had more problems getting the latest version of Fedora up and running on the same old hardware.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Hatta]

How are the GNU distros built on the opensolaris kernel though? I'm thinking of Nexenta specifically. Seems like it would be the best of both worlds if done right. World class UNIX kernel + world class userland utils. But then if it's just thrown together, it could suck too.

Linux community

[bobs666]

Linux had a community. It was the Minux community that was starting to had problems with patches. Since the base code had a bad copyright, and thus could not be freely transmitted. And patching patches or still more patches just got out of hand. The GPL that Linux used ended all that and allowed Linux to take off.

Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out....

[GuyverDH]

The OpenSolaris development community is alive and well, vibrant and resourcefull.
There have been a lot of great development work on OpenSolaris in both the x86/x64 and SPARC worlds.

OpenSolaris (much like it's big brother Solaris) does have a list of valid / tested hardware platforms that work out of the box without issue.

If your specific hardware isn't listed and it's fairly well mainstream, document what didn't work, submit it, and it will more than likely get fixed.

I've used OpenSolaris on IBM/Lenovo thinkpads, IBM xServer hardware, SuperMicro / Intel hardware, homebrew systems with rarely an issue.

I've enjoyed the support of the OpenSolaris community as a whole, and found them to be as resourceful as any *inux / bsd community.

It all depends on what you like / want.

For me, gaining the ability to work with Solaris during development cycles to help in some small way guide / assist with the efforts is worthwhile.

Re:Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out....

[keithjr]

As it turns out, Linux development community members are critical of competing operating systems. How is this news?

The point of picking and choosing your operating system is so that you can pick the best tool for the job. If that tool is Solaris, then use it. If not, so be it.

Since Sun actively develops Solaris (and thus parts of OpenSolaris), do they really need individual contributors?

Re:Hmmm - Linux Fan Boys speak out....

[catmistake]

I have to agree with parent and grandparent posts... Seems to me the community is thriving. I'm sure I'm missing the point of OSS somewhere, but with OpenSolaris I see it as an attempt or ambition to get the rock-solid stability of Solaris and Sun hardware for free on most any hardware, and the ability to initiate experience with Solaris on the cheap (however, Solaris itself is a free download, just licensed propietary, so why practice street ball when you can play stadium? OK poor analogy).

Instant success

[mooreti1]

Yes, because Linux was such an instant success! Wait...no, it wasn't. Everyone forgets that any community, either real or virtual, takes time to build. I believe that counting OpenSolaris as a failed community is premature, at the least.

Re:Instant success

[realmolo]

It's not premature at all.

Linux wasn't an overnight success, that's true. But it's a success *now*. OpenSolaris needs to do everything Linux does, but better. Until it can do that, no one will bother with it. The problem being, of course, that if no one bothers with it, it will NEVER be better than Linux. So, yeah, it's dead. Everyone but Sun knew this would happen.

It's the same issue that prevents any truly *new* operating systems from gaining traction. Simply being *technically* better doesn't mean shit. You have to have wide-ranging hardware support, and all the apps that people are used to using.

Re:Instant success

[quanticle]

Well, the community may not be a failure yet, but if Sun continues being recalcitrant in providing dev tools (like a proper code repository) the community may very well decide that OpenSolaris isn't worth the potential benefits and move on to other projects.

Re:Instant success

[sethmeisterg]

Wow, so you're agreeing with the parent, but then disagreeing. You can't have it both ways. "If no one bothers, then..." -- come on, dude. Let's cut 'em some slack, huh? Why are you so militantly opposed to the possiblity of OpenSolaris success? Ask yourself that.

Re:Instant success

[postbigbang]

You hit the nail on the head.

Linux drivers, sucky as they can be, are still chugging along because there are hackers that want to make things work. Sun sells hardware, and they have a hardware maker's mentality that the software just sells the hardware, folks. That's partly why they went 'open' in the first place-- but it was a lame attempt at building a community that McNealy couldn't stomach and Schwartz pays lip service to. It's all about shareholder equity-- make no mistake about this. Sun couldn't figure out how to make Java open? No, it's just they put the openness change through so slowly that it didn't really matter. It was lip service. Open Solaris isn't like OpenSUSE or Fedora or CentOS; these non-supported version have traction now where OpenSolaris doesn't and can't get any respect. Yes, it's nice, solid, Unix, and it has no wind in its sails/sales, so as a non-revenue producer, it gets no attention at Sun. Sun hasn't figured out how to make FOSS revenues, unlike numerous other organizations. Buying MySQL didn't give them much of a clue, now that closed-source details are starting to emerge regarding MySQL. They don't get it, and as long as it doesn't have an ecosystem to produce revenues, they never will.

Re:Instant success

[nrozema]

I guess success vs. failure comes down to what your initial expectations were.

If you were looking for Yet Another Open Source Linux Replacement, and have failed to receive it from a barely four year old project, then sure, I suppose to you that project has "failed".

If, like me, you saw OpenSolaris as a sandbox and open dialogue with the community to shape the next version of Solaris, and not a Linux replacement, then perhaps you aren't so disappointed at the moment.

The development of ZFS in particular has come a long way in later builds of OpenSolaris vs. what you'll find in Solaris 10. The previous development model would have seen that happen in a vacuum, without community interaction and contribution. That alone is a success in my mind.

Re:Instant success

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, you're comments are so wrong and out of date.

This whole Sun is faking open source is just BS.

From the very beginning, Sun had been a very open company. Look at one of the original founders of Sun, Bill Joy.

You're obviously someone that came late to the game and are just talking out of your ass.

This is my opinion, but I believe it to be based on a bit of fact. Without Sun, from the early days, pushing for open standards, and their publishing of many of these standards, I don't know how Linux could have come to the point where it could be today.

What it always seemed to me was Sun was interested in doing with Unix was to define a common platform that could benefit all Unix. As the tide of Unix rose, all could benefit. Sun's position was something like, we can build a better boat.

Though there have been cases where certain people at Sun have been hostile to FOSS there are just as many if not more that were embracing of it. I don't know how McNealy got this "cound't stomach" FOSS image. Maybe calling linux a "toy os". But really, if you compared Linux to Solaris at that time, he wasn't far off. Sun has open sourced a lot of code and helped a lot of open source projects. The only people that seem to not like Sun are some linux zealots.

Re:Instant success

[postbigbang]

Ah, you've been hoodwinked. Or your a propagandist/apologist for Sun. I'm lucky enough to have been around when SunOS was just a pup, and I had grey hair, then.

Yes, Sun has pushed for open standards, but not for their own software components, rather RPCs/IPCs/APIs. When I did Connectathons, I watched how Sun worked, then the evolution of Solaris, along with the evolution of Sun workstations and servers and their tough migration to a services model to emulate the success of IBM and others.

As I'm not a Linux zealot, rather I understand the orthodox nature of FOSS (and subscribe to some of its tenets), I've watched the half-assed 'open source' passive/aggressive behavior they've managed over the past dozen years. Java was a great environment. And I once fixed James Gosling's laptop, which at the time, ran Windows. I'm not orthodox, and neither was James.

McNealy was very interested in fighting the big battles against his perceptions of the giants in his way. Like other big egos like Ellison, he found that wishing ain't making, and clever slogans don't make good products. Sun's otherwise very good engineering has been well-received.

But their hardware is sold by their software, for it if it stood alone, there would be no hardware sales. No one rushes to write new operating systems for UltraSparc III 8-cores. No one. Solaris helps sell their servers, and the combos help sell services, and that's plainly where their revenue comes from. Zealotry exists in the FOSS community, but Stallman's principles are well-stated and whatever zeal goes behind them is plainly missing from Sun's dribble of open source support.

Re:Instant success

[LizardKing]

No one rushes to write new operating systems for UltraSparc III 8-cores. No one.

No, they port existing ones like OpenBSD and oh, that thing called Linux.

A simple reason?

[tmk]

Schily

Gnu/Solaris

[obender]

Licensing Solaris under the GPL might give it a chance and now is the time. Due to the GPL 2 vs 3 debate it has a good opportunity of becoming the second Gnu kernel.

Re:Gnu/Solaris

[BrainInAJar]

Dear $deity no!

GPL was a reactionary statement to the BSD licenses' freedoms being taken advantage of by corporate powers. The license OpenSolaris is under now ( CDDL ) is much more balanced. It keeps the code under a viral clause ( change it? share it! ) but it doesn't spread to the surrounding code like the GPL does ( link to it? share it! )

The GPL illustrated some fine points about giving users too much freedom, and now it's time to lay it to rest with Marx and pure Smith economics as political tools that were found to be unworkable except in a modified form.

That Linux is successful and also GPL is an anomaly rather than a general rule, and even in that case it serves to illustrate that the hardware manufacturer's unwillingness to write GPL drivers is holding Linux back. Were Linux under a more permissive license, with the market share it has now, hardware mfrs would be rushing to write drivers for it

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[jellomizer]

Agree. One of my biggest problems with GPL v.3 is the rule to stop TiVoization of GPL products, yet the made sure there was a loophole for IBM do the the same thing. It really setup up a double standard, which is very scarry, it is one of those "I beleave in free speach just as long as you say I want to hear" type of thing. If you want IBM to be your friend then you need to allow TiVoization to continue, or if you really don't like TiVoization then IBM should choose wether they should go the FOSS route or not. But what we have now is a double standard. If you are a big supporter then the rules will fit you, if you are not a big supporter then you should punished for your lack of support.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[SatanicPuppy]

Actually, no.

The lesson here is: If you're going to try to court people active in OSS development, then you're going to have to be nice to them, and you're going to have to let them take some ownership.

IBM is being smart; they're reaping rewards far in excess of their investment. Effectively they've outsourced their development, and while the terms of the "outsourcing" say that they have to share everything that comes out of the project, they're still in a position to steer, and support the product.

I'm not sure how you equate that with "control"; sounds just like more FUD to me.

Well it didn't exactly...WORK!?!??!?!!

[jjb3rd]

Yeah, I tried it, but it didn't work with SATA, this was like a year ago...hello? I'm a developer and I can't release something that won't install, or is complicated to install. Why should I waste a bunch of time in 2007 (at the time) on an OS that doesn't support SATA (*cough* Windows XP) out of the box? I was pissed I wasted my time downloading it.

Re:Well it didn't exactly...WORK!?!??!?!!

[sethmeisterg]

What didn't work? What chipset? AHCI-based SATA support has been integrated for some time now and installs flawlessly on every system in my lab. For those of you with complaints about hardware support, you really need to take another look at Solaris -- new drivers are arriving monthly.

Re:Well it didn't exactly...WORK!?!??!?!!

[jjb3rd]

It would have been a nice el-cheapo MSI KM4AM-V with a VIA 8237 chipset. Despite your claim that it's been integrated for some time, I recall doing a little bit of research at the time and there not being good SATA support. I don't really care anymore...YAUV (Yet Another Unix Variant) doesn't it for me anymore. How many ways can we repackage an old OS (same is true for the rest of the OS lineup)? Let's really see some modern libraries that the OS and app developers can use alike. Ironically Microsoft does more in this arena than anyone else despite their refusal to ditch the Win32 API, or at least depricate it.

Re:Well it didn't exactly...WORK!?!??!?!!

[sethmeisterg]

It's a shame that you gave up, but of course you should use whatever works best for you. For me, Solaris just works better than any Linux distro I've tried.

Stanislaw Lem had a Linux distro?!

[Smidge207]

"There are some places man is not ready to go..."

Support Some Hardware?

[bill_mcgonigle]

How coincidental - I've just spent an hour trying to find out what would be the best card to use to support a bunch of SATA II/NCQ disks for a ZFS box based on OpenSolaris and I haven't come much closer to an answer. I decided to give up on it for a bit and read Slashdot for a few minutes...

Re:Support Some Hardware?

[sethmeisterg]

Any AHCI-based SATA controller will work. Marvell-based SATA controllers (models 88SX5081, 88SX5080, 88SX5040, 88SX5041, 88SX6081, and 88SX6041), nvidia nforce sata, silicon image 3124. AHCI and Marvell are good choices. There's also a ton of SAS support (e.g. LSI, Adaptec).

Re:Support Some Hardware?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thank you! So much.

Somebody said the Marvell driver tended to lose links - just curious if you had any contrary experience?

Re:Support Some Hardware?

[sethmeisterg]

The Marvell driver has had the most work on it because it's the controller in the X4500 (a.k.a. Thumper). Yes, it's had its issues, but it's a very stable driver because of all the attention now :). In fact, my contact at Sun tells me there should be some more patches coming out shortly that'll fix the last of the corner cases (most of the problems with the driver were around corner cases involving drive errors).

Re:Support Some Hardware?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thanks again. Matching Thumper hardware can't be a bad idea.

of course not

[nguy]

OpenSolaris was an attempt by Sun to throw some sand in the gears of Linux, not to build an open source project. They are doing the same thing with OpenJava.

I mean, who is going to contribute to such a project if (1) Sun engineers keep calling the shots, and (2) anything you contribute needs to be given to Sun so that they can sell it to paying customers?

If Sun were serious about making Solaris and Java open source projects, they'd release them under a single, open source license only. That would probably have to be BSD.

And why not? Solaris was BSD licensed to begin with; it was Sun that made it proprietary.

Re:of course not

[guacamole]

Solaris >=2 is based on SunOS 5 which was derived from closed source system v.

SunOS 4 was indeed based on some kind of BSD, but got killed by Solaris 2 long time ago

Re:of course not

[nguy]

Solaris >=2 is based on SunOS 5 which was derived from closed source system v. SunOS 4 was indeed based on some kind of BSD, but got killed by Solaris 2 long time ago

Solaris >=2 still contains plenty of BSD code. Furthermore, System V contains stuff derived from Berkeley as well.

Without BSD, Sun wouldn't even exist.

Re:of course not

[Anarke_Incarnate]

A consistent naming scheme would be nice. Having it live in both the world of 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8...etc and 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, and 5.10 is silly for the time it takes to explain to management

Re:of course not

[GuyverDH]

You don't pay for Solaris or OpenSolaris, you only pay for media, or support.

You don't even have to pay for minimal patch support. ie security / vulnerability / stability patches are freely available to registered users - without paying for a support contract. This is on their Enterprise Solaris product, not the OpenSolaris product.

Sun has the reigns to make certain that everything works and works well as they end up having to support it on their hardware (and other vendor's as well - Read IBM / Dell agreements).

What does RedHat do with the software written by the Fedora Core community?
Can you even download a copy of RedHat Enterprise Server and use it, with the ability to get patches for free? Last time I checked, you weren't allowed to do that - unless you count the CentOS project.

Re:of course not

[nguy]

Sun has the reigns to make certain that everything works

Yes, and that's the problem: Sun holds the reigns. Even if they were using that control well, it would be a problem. But Sun engineering and management doesn't know what they are doing, and that makes it worse. Of course, it doesn't matter for Solaris (who cares?), but Java has become so much a part of the computing infrastructure that Sun's continued screw-ups are a real problem.

Can you even download a copy of RedHat Enterprise Server and use it, with the ability to get patches for free? Last time I checked, you weren't allowed to do that - unless you count the CentOS project.

Who cares? The problem is not with companies making proprietary add-ons to open source software; if that was all Sun is doing (and they are doing plenty of that), I wouldn't complain.

The problem is with a company setting up projects such that they obtain special rights to contributions, and using tricks to retain control of projects that they should have lost long ago because of their incompetence.

Re:of course not

[GuyverDH]

Incompetence?

Dtrace?
ZFS?
Zones / Containers?
Ultra SPARC T1, T2, T2+?

They took their source code and chip designs, opened it up with their version of opensource license, while keeping control of what gets put back into the distributions for the OpenSolaris and Solaris projects, and it's working - quite well.

If opensource were all on an even playing field, there would only be one opensource license.

Considering the numerous versions and variations, there's obviously some things that everyone just can't agree on for a licensing model.

Re:of course not

[Smauler]

holds the reigns

It's actually "reins", not "reigns", direct metaphor from horses and other domesticated animals. Sorry for being a grammar Nazi, anyway...

Re:of course not

[nguy]

Incompetence? Dtrace? ZFS? Zones / Containers? Ultra SPARC T1, T2, T2+?

Yes, thanks for listing those examples for me. Why don't you add Java, OpenLook, NeWS, and NFS to that while you're at it. There are plenty more Sun engineering disasters.

Considering the numerous versions and variations, there's obviously some things that everyone just can't agree on for a licensing model.

The problem isn't that Sun uses a different license, the problem is that Sun reserves special rights for themselves that no other contributor has. They do that even with GPL'ed projects.

Re:of course not

[puppetluva]

"They are doing the same thing with OpenJava."

How does that make sense? They are throwing sand in the gears of Linux by open-sourcing Java?

I got your point about opensolaris, but it only benefits the opensource community when sun open-sources java.

Reasons for this failure.

[suck_burners_rice]

The disconnection between Sun's executives and the kernel developers might be one reason why OpenSolaris is failing to build a community, but I believe a much larger reason is the lack of any substantial need for OpenSolaris in the market at this point. Currently there is so much development around Linux and the BSDs that these projects fulfill most of the users' needs and offer people looking for an OS something quite compelling, with a developer community in the millions of knowledgeable people. OpenSolaris is first and foremost suffering the chicken-and-egg problem that since there isn't much of a developer community, nobody wants to join, and secondly, since Linux and the BSDs can carry out nearly all the functions that OpenSolaris carries out, there's no compelling need for developers to join that community. Let's face it, Sun should concentrate their efforts on improving Linux and selling distributions and support for their custom distribution. Part of this improvement would entail porting the few advantageous features that Solaris has over Linux currently. OpenSolaris would eventually be phased out completely. Otherwise, they are simply throwing good money after bad.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what's coming with Project Indiana. Installs are vastly faster, and the product is much, much better. Take a look once it's released in May.

Download barriers

[SgtChaireBourne]

Downloading is a royal PITA. The registration is usually a deal-breaker. Almost nothing I've ever run across that's worth anything requires registration for download. However, as a (former) long-time Solaris / SunOS user and major FOSS user, I felt compelled several times to try to circumvent that. But then there's no real way do a network install and othewise week download choice.

That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.

Re:Download barriers

[Anonymous Coward]

That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.
I agree with that last bit, the article is way immature and innacurate.

If you read the comments of one of the blogs cited, you will see OpenSolaris members clearing up the situation and showing how she was a bit hasty in her comments. At least that's my opinion.

Like signing and NDA for a OpenSolaris User Group meeting. Turns out, even by the blogger's own statement that The NDA was for confidential information in case for instance something got left behind in the meeting room. Since OpenSolaris related information is obviously not "confidential" I don't see the big deal. But if shee happens to notice a binder labeled "x5500 new petabyte server runs on 2watts and this is how we do it" then that would be covered by the NDA. From the comments it seems that this is not uncommon when using corporate/government facilities though it is not always the case. Simon Phipps also seems to be eager to get it resolved.

There were some other issues as well. The funniest is that the original governing body that Sun set up to run the project in the period before the community had a chance to elect their own members was mostly composed of non-Sun employees, but when the community actually elected their own board members, it was mostly Sun employees.

The trademark issues might be a different matter and I can't really comment on them but it sounds like something that should be resolved.

I think this guy is just yelling "the sky is falling" because he wants it to.

Re:Download barriers

[JerkBoB]

The reason downloading ANYTHING from Sun is such a PITA is because of US crypto export restrictions.

Can't have those pesky Iranians downloading munitions, you know.

You think I'm joking? Go read about it.

Sun does a huge amount of business with the US Gov't. Sun would rather annoy users than risk its lucrative government relationships. Ergo, stupid download portals that make you verify that you're not from the axis-of-can't-get-strong-crypto.

Re:Download barriers

[just_another_sean]

Is this really still accurate? The article you reference is from 2000. I thought things had relaxed quite a bit now that implementations of various crypto are in the hands of developers outside the US. With AES implementations in universally available GNU/Linux distros why would they bother?

Mind you it would not suprise me in the least if the USG was still being this stupid but I seem to remember hearing otherwise... So, here is what I dug up in a few minutes of googling. (and yes, Wikipedia is close to the top :-).

Wikipedia

Cryptography exports from the U.S. are now (as of 2006) controlled by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Some restrictions still exist, even for mass market products, particularly with regard to export to "rogue states" and terrorist organizations. Militarized encryption equipment, TEMPEST-approved electronics, custom cryptographic software,[citation needed] and even cryptographic consulting services still require an export license. Many items must still undergo a one-time review by or notification to BIS prior to export to most countries. The regulations, though relaxed from pre-1996 standards, are still complex, and often require expert legal and cryptographic consultation. Other countries, notably those participating in the Wassenaar Arrangement, have similar restrictions. Apparently Schneier wasn't sure as of 2005.

He has a link in this article to a site - www.bxa.doc.gov - that does not seem to exist anymore. A page from the old FreeSWAN manual references this bxa site as authoritative as well.

Anyone else have any knowledge of current US Cryptography export policy? It still looks pretty bleak to me.

Re:Download barriers

[JerkBoB]

Hey, I didn't say that I believe in this nonsense... :) But apparently there's enough ambiguity that someone deep in the bowels of Corporate HQ feels it's worth covering our asses on.

Like I said... Annoyed (non-)customers vs. angry/schizophrenic US Gov't withholding wads of cash; guess who wins?

Re:Download barriers

[just_another_sean]

Annoyed (non-)customers vs. angry/schizophrenic US Gov't withholding wads of cash; guess who wins? Good point. There certainly seems to be enough confusion (by design?) on the subject to keep people erring on the side of caution.

Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great?

[Kenja]

Only reason I ever used Solaris was for the Sparc hardware. Soon as Sun went Intel based, they where dead to me. Why spend more money for the same level of hardware when the OS has less support then Free(tm) options?

Too easy to replace Solaris...

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

We ran Solaris boxes at the government agency I worked for and it was easy as heck to just replace Solaris with RedHat. OpenSolaris = one more free *nix initiative in a world with too many free *nix initiatives as it is.

As a member of the community...

[saleenS281]

I guess I disagree. I'm on several of the opensolaris mailing lists, and they're ALWAYS busy. And not just with people from Sun, people from all walks of life. To claim that opensolaris has failed is preposterous to me. I guess I don't quite understand what this mans idea of *success* is, but apparently having users and contributers from both sun and the public abroad isn't *success*.

Is his complaint that the majority of code comes directly from Sun? If so... let me just say *DUH*. If you have thousands of PAID programmers writing code, nobody is going to waste their free time re-writing from scratch. On the flip side, there's TONS of public side-projects, I can think of several around zfs like the automatic snapshots. Or maybe that little side project called nexenta.

I think I understand what his issue is... he doesn't even know what the opensolaris community is. By his definition, one distribution of linux is a measure if its success or failure. Last I checked, when we talk about linux, we're encompassing ubuntu, redhat, suse, slackware, etc, etc, etc... Guess what, the same holds true for Opensolaris.

So... basically, it sounds like a linux zealot casting a stone because he's most likely upset that Sun wont' release solaris under the GPL so that linux devs can start ripping code.

Re:As a member of the community...

[tytso]

Please let me make this clear. I was not disparaging Open Solaris as an operating system. And I was quoting Jon Plocher, a Sun Engineer working on Open Solaris, when he admitted that Sun didn't get the community they were hoping for. So it you can call it failure in terms of Sun being to get the results that it had hoped for when it released (most of) Solaris under an Open Source license. Other people who were major Solaris fans, and who were excited with whatever scraps Sun might throw from the table, might be mightly pleased with what Sun did. But nevertheless, it is interesting that Sun hasn't achieved what they hoped to accomplish with Open Solaris after three years.

The reason why I found Jon Plocher's candidate statement for the Open Solaris Governing Board so interesting was that it was first that I had seen someone from inside Sun comment about the what Sun had been hoping to achieve by release Solaris under a Open Source license that didn't appear influenced by Sun's marketing/spin machine. I don't believe Sun's officially stated reasons (that show up on the CEO's blog, for example) because after three years their words have not been matched by their deeds.

So for me, it's more about correcting the marketing spin. If Sun salescritters want to pay analysts to create Total Cost of Ownership white papers which compare the cost of the most expensive get-someone-on-the-phone 24x7 Red Hat support with a support-by-email Solaris support subscription, I might mock their desperation.

Similarly, if Jonathan Schwartz wants to talk about how wonderful it will be that Open Solaris is Open Source, and how they will reap the benefits of having Open Source developers, but three years later still have processes that result in 0.6 patches/day being accepted into Open Solaris, then I think it's only fair that to point out the chasm between his words and his company's actions.

Re:As a member of the community...

[g2devi]

Actually, it's more the case of a French man complaining that an Irish man needs to speak French.
Speaking French might be expected if you're in France, but if you're in Ireland, then perhaps the shoe is on the other foot.

OpenSolaris users choose OpenSolaris because they trust Sun, its track record. its binary backwards compatibility (Solaris 2.6 binaries still run unmodified on Solaris 2.10), its way of doing things, and its 10 year life cycle. If they didn't they would be using Linux. The binary compatibility that spans decades and long support cycles necessitate a slower development model and a more cautious community. It's not supposed to have massive change...its just supposed to give users more flexibility without sacrificing Solaris strengths.

Re:As a member of the community...

[Zemplar]

+1

Re:As a member of the community...

[turgid]

Thanks. All the Windows astroturfers around here like to go on about Windows backwards compatibility: you can run W2k binaries on XP.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[thsths]

> Using it is a tremendous pain in the ass.

I agree. The structure may be close to the "original" UNIX, but where is all the comfort you are used to from any Linux distro off the shelf? The command line is positively hostile, unless you hunt down and install all the typical Linux tools. And on the GUI front things are not much better. It makes a certain kind of sense to write everything in Java, but unfortunately it is horribly slow, ugly and often difficult to use.

Solaris can be a nice system, but by the time you have added all the missing bits, it is hardly different from a normal Linux system.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[FishWithAHammer]

What's it going to do that's better than what I've already got with Kubuntu?

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[dotwaffle]

Nexenta works fantastically - I love it. I would definitely use it for any storage servers, or high availability servers that do your normal Apache/SQL/P* stack.

However, for desktop and non-standard services, it still sucks. If it's not a web server, and it's not a storage server, don't use Nexenta, use Ubuntu Server. Or Debian if you know what you're doing :)

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[morgan_greywolf]

Not only that, but many people will simply ask "why?" There are already several fabulous free/open source software communities gathered around several fabulous free/open source operating systems, each having its own niche:

• - Linux, which is geared around being the UNIX-like Swiss Army Knife OS for PC people, built around good hardware support and solid application support.
• - FreeBSD, which is geared around bringing genetic UNIX on a PC (note the not-entirely-semantical difference), which aims for pretty good hardware support and concentrates on being the best UNIX it can for the PC, built around being a good, solid, tested and stable server software
• - OpenBSD, which aims to be the most secure OS on the face of the planet, built around solid, stable security mechanisms
• - NetBSD -- Well, nobody really knows what NetBSD is about except for those nutty NetBSD people ;)
• - ReactOS, which aims to be a complete free/open source Windows replacement OS
• Haiku and co., which are aimed at reviving the BeOS community

So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.

Never received starter kit?

[truthsolo]

Every starter kit I ordered (3) did not show up at my doorstep. When I questioned Sun, they said it was either at the post office (which it wasn't) or it was "lost in transit, feel free to order another kit at no cost." Cheers, thanks Sun.

Re:Never received starter kit?

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

Every starter kit I ordered (3) did not show up at my doorstep. When I questioned Sun, they said it was either at the post office (which it wasn't) or it was "lost in transit, feel free to order another kit at no cost."

Cheers, thanks Sun. That's strange, I've received every starter kit, or other free media package for Solaris or OpenSolaris I've ever requested. Where are you located? Perhaps they are having trouble with shipping to particular countries/districts.

Re:Never received starter kit?

[witherstaff]

I'll second this. I never received mine either. I ordered two of them in the past 2 years and they just never showed up. While the most recent hardware I have is a sparc 10, it was still worth a shot to try it on. I know Michigan is the backwaters of technology, but our mail doesn't suck that badly.

Re:Never received starter kit?

[BiggerIsBetter]

I'd assumed my lack of delivery was because I ordered from a foreign country... Good to know it was happening domestically too.

Re:Never received starter kit?

[ryanov]

Jeez, I'm sorry about that! For every starter kit I ordered, I seemed to get about 10 of them (for awhile, I would get a box of Solaris 10 on Fridays). I guess we had our wires crossed there for a bit. ;)

Re:Never received starter kit?

[ryanov]

I'm not sure it will run on Sparc 10, will it? Is that even sun4u?

Re:Never received starter kit?

[LizardKing]

I'm not sure it will run on Sparc 10, will it? Is that even sun4u?

No, an SS10 is a 32bit sun4m machine.

My answer

[Archangel Michael]

Too Little, Too Late.

There is no need for it now. Linux had already supplanted Solaris

Re:My answer

[Digi-John]

Every new OS effort improves the quality of all the others. You think Linux was developed in a vacuum? It's pulled in stuff from many different Unixes, Windows, Mac OS, and Plan 9 over the years.

Re:My answer

[tbuskey]

Solaris 10 is very different IMO from Solaris 9.

Heck, if you go by desktops, MacOSX has already supplanted Linux.

In any event, having the right tools for the job is great.

I wanted a file server with redundant RAID - ZFS is way easier to admin then Linux LVM/RAID. Easier then Windows, easier then Sun's Disksuite. As easy as a NetApp really.

I'm also picking supported hardware for it & not stuff that's lying about.

Then I wanted to run a virtual Windows to deal with TiVo stuff. Looks like Linux is the answer there. And I run owhttpd for 1-wire sensors. I have some hardware that Solaris doesn't have drivers for, but Linux does. And some video conversion tools.

For a firewall? I really like OpenBSD. Very security in multiple layers. Or a Linksys running dd-wrt linux.

OpenSolaris is a very young opensource initiative

[blind biker]

Give it some time - it's still growing, and while there are some adjustments to be made, the situation is far from catastrophic for its stage of development. After all, there's a number of people contributing to it, and hopefully as processes and community contacts improve, the contributors will increase in number. You have to take into consideration that it's a huge chunk of code and some people are still just lurking to find their place under the sun (no pun intended).

OpenSolaris is an interesting operating system, I don't doubt it'll grow in popularity among developers, however slowly. As I said, give it some time, we have only just begun.

Wait

[ISoldat53]

Sun has an OpenSolaris?

Linux Partisan Disparages Non-Linux OS

[planetralph]

This is news?

Yowsa

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Sun is screwing themselves, again, many times over.

-Wouldn't let the opensolaris board call the project opensolaris. Probably a legal quagmire of their own creation. The consequences of that lead to this resignation. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html

-There's this gem, most of which I don't pretend to understand. The punchline is on the bottom. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

-There's this gem, where even Ian Murdock links in suggesting the difficulty is happening above his level. http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/a-solution-for-suns-os-community-problems/#comment-17418

As much potential as Sun continues to exhibit, they still can't turn it into anything.

Re:Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great

[multipartmixed]

You know, when Sun started shipping opteron hardware, the sparc stuff didn't vanish into thin air. It's still very much alive and well.

BTW, what white-box linux platform competes with, say, the Sun Fire X4500 + Solaris?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[thsths]

> So where does OpenSolaris fit in? It seems to be an OS lacking a niche.

The niche for OpenSolaris is the 64way mission-critical server. Unfortunately, even ultimate kernel hacking enthusiasts rarely have one of those at home.

Re:Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great

[Kenja]

Its still around, but its not progressed much or sold with the same fervor. Its a dead platform it seems. Course I'd still recommend it for a massive database platform. Nothing says sexy like hot swappable CPUs.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[jandrese]

NetBSD is for people who want to install Unix on their Ukranian made MIPS powered PDA like device.

OpenSolaris was supposed to be for people who really like Solaris but don't much care for official support or something. I've only ever used it once, for a precompiled application that was built on it. It's not really that bad to configure although it did require several trips to google to get everything set up properly. My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'm looking forward to it. I like to give OpenSolaris a spin because ZFS isn't bad at all. If the default shell isn't shockingly unusable, I'll be happier than I was with Nevada.

Re:I didnt bother.

[marcosdumay]

Simply said, Linux works better than Windows

We are still at an Open Solaris thread, aren't we?

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Anonymous Coward]

"closing of part of mysql's source is just as big an indicator that they're not committed to being open."

You have that story all wrong. Nothing that previously was opensource is closing. MySQL has released open and closed-source products forever. The decision to make a native backup driver and compression/encryption as plugins to the open/public API had nothing to do with Sun's management. That was decided by MySQL prior to the acquisition.

There is 0 change there. It's an indicator of business as usual for MySQL.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[mrsteveman1]

The Tivo stuff is a problem because FSF thinks they can use the license to force a company to change.

That company will not change though, they will quit using the software if thats the only option.

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[harry666t]

Why? Last time I tried to install Solaris 10, I couldn't do it in graphical mode because it needed at least 400 (not 384, installer said 400) megabytes of RAM. And even with 256 megs the full install (something like 5 GB of stuff on one DVD)... It took around 8 hours. Damnit, it's just a few gigs of data to be copied from a disc to a hard drive, and then (possibly) set up a little... About 8 hours just to copy some data from one place to another. Even after that, Solaris was slow like a... Vista of some kind. Booting the system took 4 or 5 minutes (compared to Linux on the same machine: 30 seconds? Something like that). When I got the DVD burned I was really excited, since I heard many good words about the OS and stuff, but after trying it out I was just... Really disappointed with its hogginess. Not to mention crappy userland (very old Gnome, no VTs, many minor annoyances, the way stuff is organized within the file system is a total mess...). I really see no real gain from choosing Solaris over Linux (except if you just LOVE the CDE).

Copyright assignment

[diegocgteleline.es]

In opensolaris (just like in openoffice) you need to give your copyright rights to Sun.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to take part of a community that requires the copyright assignment. Yeah, the FSF also uses a copyright assignment, but then the FSF is a foundation, Sun is a company. I mean, I write the code and Sun takes my rights??? (yeah, i can fork opensolaris and keep my copyright, but it just shows how community-unfriendly opensolaris is...)

I'm definitively not wasting time with a project that requires copyright assignment to a copmany....

Re:Copyright assignment

[EvilRyry]

That is my issue #1, my issue #2 is that Solaris has a single company with a tight grip on it.

I use Linux in the server room. If one vendor really gets me peeved, there's nothing stopping me from going elsewhere. With Solaris there is really only Sun. In that respect, its as bad as Windows.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[FrozenFOXX]

I have to admit that I feel the same way. Oh sure, there are some nice things (Solaris Volume Manager, once you get the hang of it, is actually not bad though I still have some gripes), but on the whole it ends up feeling like I have to go and reinvent Linux from scratch just to get the system working like I think it should.

Good thing I used to run Gentoo otherwise that kind of thing might actually tick me off. ;)

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[rumith]

There is some truth in GP's words. While Solaris is full of great ideas, and most of them are pretty well implemented, one must admit that the native userland hardly differs from what it has been in early '90s. Of course, the GNU environment is available, but it hasn't replaced the default one so far. Once that happens, I expect Solaris user base to boost.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[morgan_greywolf]

Meh. Having been a Solaris, HP-UX and AIX admin, IMHO, there is no better OS for high availability and high scalability than AIX. Solaris is okay, but it's not any better than Linux in that regard. Moreso now that most of the AIX code that counts for HA and HPC are included in the Linux kernel thanks to IBM. ;) In fact, one might (easily) argue that Linux is rather better than Solaris in the clustering department.

Re:Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great

[Digi-John]

Ooh, we just got one of those in the machine room. If it performs OK during the 60 day trial, I guess they're gonna buy a whole bunch of fully-loaded units.
It's a sexy, if heavy, machine.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Gewalt]

I never heard of that project, so I google'd it. First hit was schwartz's blog.
"what is project indiana? I can't tell you!"
I closed that browser tab immediately.

Re:I didnt bother.

[segfaultcoredump]

Linux just works? Yeah, maybe for a small system running a simple app stack.

I had to setup an oracle cluster: Thanks to Oracle's support policies, we could not use Solaris x86. Nor could we use RHEL5 (no Oracle 9i support), so RHEL4.6 it was. Should be easy, right? Well tested "enterprise" class linux that can do everything the big boys can do.... We took the hardware we were going to use for solaris and switched it to linux. A pair of Sun x4600M2's, 128G of ram, 4 Dual core AMD's. Sun fully supports linux on this box and RedHat lists it on their HCL. Should be easy.

The basic OS install was more or less easy, once we battled through the serial port redirection setup (guess most linux users never used a serial port before. After all, why bother when the box sits under your desk). I stil like serial ports over video for one major reason: issue resolution (when bad things happen, having that panic string saved by a console server can really save the day)

Ok, so the system was kickstarted and now it is time to set it up for use as an oracle DB. This is a production system, and we need lots of space (4TB) and High Availability. This means redundant connections to everything, mirroring and clustering.

Issue #1: multipathing drivers for the SAN. With solaris, you just plug the thing into the san and all of the storage that the host has access to just showed up. Multipathing was instant and I didnt have to do jack. I could see what devices mapped to which physical array with a simple command. I didnt have to guess which array /dev/sde came from vs /dev/sdf. When you have 20 luns mapped to the same host from two different arrays, its kinda important to know which drives come from which array and what the corresponding lun numbers are. That said, most linux admins I've talked to didnt have a clue about what I was talking about since they never had a san.

Issue #2: dynamically add luns: With solaris, you just change the mapping on the array and the host picks it up and auto creates the dev links. That was easy. On Linux? you've got to be kidding me... You get to echo some crazy strings into several spots in /proc and watch the fun start.

issue #3: IP Multipathing. With solaris, dladmin is used to create a bond (if it is going to the same switch and the switch supports bonding) or use the built in ip multipathing to do an active/failover setup if you are going to multiple switches. Very well documented and very easy to do. With linux... yeah, bonding is a fun task. Need to go to multiple switches? no such luck, you are screwed. I eventually used VCS to take over the systems main IP and uses its IPMultipathing agent to do the job for me. VCS on solaris just hands the task off to mpathd since the OS already does it for you.

Issue #4: zones: dont get me started. I dont want to run another entire OS, I just want name space isolation and chroot is so primative it is not even funny. Zones gives me everything I want with minimal overhead. It would have been nice to have since there are a few oracle products that dont play nicely with clusters (*Warehouse Builder*) because they imbed the host name everywhere. We could put it under Xen, but this is an app that moves huge amounts of data around, not exactly a good candidate for virtualization. Zones let us get around Oracle's brain dead use of the hostname, no such luck with linux.

Issue #5: 3rd party drivers vs the new kernel patch. If I install a 3rd party device driver in solaris and upgrade the kernel, I dont have to rebuild/reinstall the driver. Linux (even redhat 4.x with their "back port") forces me to rebuild/reinstall every damn time. Its great if the driver is standard with the kernel, but if you need something outside of that (lsi multipathing drivers to get around #1 and 10G NIC drivers in my case) and you are screwed. No wonder up2date ignores all of the kernel* rpm's by default.

Issue #6: Whats the system doing? Solaris: `mdb -k` and dtrace. Linux: still trying

I'll tell you how...

[mpapet]

The last I checked in with the Nexenta project they were in violation of the GPL because the Sun license IP conflicts directly with the letter of GPL. When I asked on list, I got no response. Huh. Imagine that.

Here's a link to somewhat inflamatory summary of their license issues. Look for the comment titled "Nexenta devs = liars and thieves" http://www.osnews.com/comments/12569

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Anonymous Coward]

> nobody really knows what NetBSD is about

Running on everything and having really elegant source code.

> So where does OpenSolaris fit in?

A stable ABI, with extensible kernel constructs that don't require rejiggering the ABI every couple weeks. You write your solaris driver once. Ever.

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[MajinBlayze]

Please mod parent down as flamebait. Why? This seems like a reasonable argument despite the harsh attitude. Is OpenSolaris the resource hog he says it is?

CDDL

[Anonymous Coward]

If Sun had chosen GPL, then direct code sharing with Linux.

If Sun had chosed a BSD license, then there could be direct exchange of code with a BSD OS.

Picking CDDL was design to keep the control, but I did not help spread its use.

Re:CDDL

[hansraj]

Picking CDDL was design to keep the control, but I did not help spread its use. You are very confusing.

Re:CDDL

[BrainInAJar]

Picking CDDL was to keep people from taking the code like they did with the original 4.xBSD series, while still allowing people to write closed-source drivers for it when it gets popular enough to attract people to do that.

Imagine how good the hardware support could be on Linux if Linus had just picked a license that lets people link in to the kernel with non-GPL code, and kept a stable ABI so that it made sense to do so. THAT'S what Sun was after

It's Difficult to Download OpenSolaris (rants)

[turgid]

I spent over a week trying to get Open Solaris build 85. Sun just doesn't get the free distribution thing. You have to register and log in to the Sun Download Centre, from where you can download the CD or DVD images. They try to persuade you to get the Sun Download Manager which is some Java app that gives you pause and resume buttons for the download.

I tried 5 or 6 times to download on different days with the download stalling at sometimes as much as 90%. On the 8th day, I got the whole image. So much for their download manager. You just have to overwrite the chunk you have and start again.

After all these years, they still haven't sorted out the auto-layout of the filesystems. There's not enough room partitioned to install their developer tools.

I went to build gcc-4.2.3. That took 5 days and about a day of CPU time. OK it's an ancient 500MHz USIIi that I got for nothing, but...

See, Solaris's /bin/sh is badly broken (archaic) and can't be used to build gcc. So you set CONFIG_SHELL to be ksh. Only the configure scripts in gcc are still broken from gcc-3.1.x days and two of the scripts it generates, bin/as and bin/collect-ld at each stage of the bootstrap are broken because they begin #!ksh instead of #!/usr/bin/ksh or whatever.

When I used to build gcc on Solaris, I just sed'd all the scripts to replace /bin/sh with /bin/bash or whatever.

So, for the casual SPARC/Solaris power-user/Linux developer myself, it's just too darn inconvenient.

And the stuff in /usr/sfw/bin, which is where the "Open Source migration" into Solaris proper was supposed to happen still looks like it did in 2005, 3 years ago.

Solaris has a brilliant kernel. Putting the DVD images on Bittorrent (officially) like OpenOffice.org, would be a great start. There are too many hurdles for the average user to go through who might have been interested in trying it out. I don't have to register to download Slackware, Ubuntu, KNOPPIX, NetBSD etc.

Sort out the default install so that the disk layout is sane and make it trivial to install the GNU toolchain.

But I've been through all this years ago, and it pains me to see that it still hasn't been fixed.

Re:It's Difficult to Download OpenSolaris (rants)

[Renegade88]

That's really a crock, sorry.

The download manager works just fine. I even live in Southern France which has about the most primitive internet capability, a real pain after my stints in the Netherlands and Germany. If I can get the downloads in one go, anybody can. Sounds like a problem with your computer, not Sun.

I've installed openSolaris dev edition from scratch and 4 months later performed a live update to the new version. It worked perfectly to the letter as outlined on Sun's excellent documentation.

On the dev editions most things work pretty well -- There's been a couple of hickups like the ethernet card going down during FTP transfers between computers on the same LAN.

In general, openSolaris works extremely well on my new core2duo machine although it didn't recognize the built in gigalan connection on the ASUS motherboard (I had to install an old ethernet card I had lying around).

If I could change one thing, I would love openSolaris to have a ports system like FreeBSD. Blastwave is not even close. It's too hard to install, compile, or maintain these programs. I have to manually configure and compile almost every program and every dependency and it wastes a lot of time. It's frustrating, especially since I have FreeBSD 7 installed on a sister server and I can experience the differences between the two firsthand.

Project Indiana is supposed to address the missing official package repository issue, but it will have a long way to go to be comparable to FreeBSD.

Re:It's Difficult to Download OpenSolaris (rants)

[turgid]

If I can get the downloads in one go, anybody can. Sounds like a problem with your computer, not Sun.

Which one? I've got 8 and my wife has a laptop with windows on it. The build 78 download was fine. It was 85 I had the trouble with. I'm in the UK where broadband is pretty ropey. I never have trouble downloading anything else, though. The last big thing I did was Slamd64. All OK.

If I could change one thing, I would love openSolaris to have a ports system like FreeBSD.

NetBSD pkgsrc runs fine on Solaris. A friend of mine was hired by Sun to work on it. He got a couple of thousand extra packages working with it while he was there.

There will be no official "ports" for Solaris. Sun PHBs can't handle it, and neither can the big egos.

The reason you have to log in to the download centre for Sun is export restrictions licensing and usage counters. The former could be solved by removing the offending code. The latter is just PHB nonsense.

What about all of the burned bridges?

[mpapet]

It seems Sun is doing everything in its power to alienate a developer community.

-Wouldn't let the opensolaris board call the project opensolaris. Probably a legal quagmire of their own creation. The consequences of that lead to this resignation. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html

-There's this gem, most of which I don't pretend to understand. The punchline is on the bottom. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

-There's this gem, where even Ian Murdock links in suggesting the difficulty is happening above his level. http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/a-solution-for-suns-os-community-problems/#comment-17418

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[turgid]

Yes, it's a hog, and I say this as someone with a couple of dozen SUNW^H^H^H^HJAVA shares.

I have some old Sun boxen, one of which (Sun Blade 100, 512MB, 500MHz) I used to play at 64-bit big-endian RISCs running Solaris. All of my other boxes are Linux including an old Ultra 1 with splack.

Nevada build 85 only took about 2+ hours to install from DVD on my Sun Blade 100. The previous one I tried (78?) took 3.5. The GUI is unusably slow, and the disk thrashes like mad. I use it headless over my network normally, so I don't mind too much. There are suspicious java processes running all the time, too. I sometimes run SETI@Home on it and it gets just shy of 330MFLOPS, which isn't bad considering its age.

I remember when Sun started the Java desktop thing. It is a port of GNOME, but they insisted on writing a lot of replacement applets in Java for it. Why have XMMS for audio when you can write a lame mp3 player in Java, for example? *sigh*

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Knuckles]

And are you going to actually tell us which part of the GPL3 commits this horrible act of treason?

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[thsths]

> My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.

"They also called is Slowlaris."

from an old article on Slashdot

[CDMA_Demo]

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/0418234

Re:I didnt bother.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Use SUSE and rejoice. The tools for what you were doing are not only cleaner and more robust, but they actually exist. Red Hat is great, but SUSE for oracle seems more natural to me.

Install the Oracle prep RPM from Novell, all parms are set.

Multipathing? Not nearly as hard as you seem to make it out to be. As well, to me, multi-pathing involves FC and not IP bound networks. STILL a lot easier to handle in SUSE than RH

You want zones? How about using a hypervisor? There ARE solutions for Linux to let you share the kernel like zones will, but I still like using something like Virtual Iron or Vmware.

Try strace. Brandz has something about Dtrace for Linux if you like that sort of thing.

Good idea: talk about it

[menace3society]

One of the things I've noticed about the computer culture on the internet is that these people like to read technical articles on cool new stuff. One of the reasons for the various BSD's increase in mindshare is that they've started doing more presswork, so that they announce stuff, here, on kernelthreads, etc, when there's a new feature or mechanism and how it's great. OpenBSD does this especially well. It usually starts flamewars about this vs. that, but the point is that it gets people to read about the product. If I read about the compelling features in the latest *BSD, or the newest Linux distro, and there's an easy link to download an ISO, I am much more likely to try it out than if I have to subscribe to a developer's blog or read an mailing list.

Think about it--what's the current status of DragonflyBSD (if you use it or are involved with it, you don't count)? I know the general status of FreeBSD and OpenBSD because they frequently announce their stuff, but I haven't heard more than a whisper about DragonflyBSD since the project started. I never see stuff on slashdot or other newsy sites about OpenSolaris, and if they want to build a community and encourage a following, they need to rectify this.

If anyone at Sun is reading this, tell your boss to pay some developer an extra $100 or so a month to write about the system online and post it to prominent places (even better would be a to have an unofficial 'community liason' who knows how all the stuff works, but spends his full time working with stories, comments, etc rather than developing).

Typical Sun

[codemachine]

Their OSS stuff is generally high quality production code: Java, OO.org, Solaris...

But the OSS projects themselves have problems involving people outside of Sun. In the case of OpenOffice, Novel had to fork to get their improvements in at a reasonable pace. NeoOffice had to fork to get a useable Mac OS X version at all.

OpenSolaris may head down the same path, with Nexenta having the better and more available build than the main project does.

It seems that Sun knows how to code. They just don't know how to be open. Websites with registrations and download managers are barriers. Projects that accept outside contributions at a glacial pace, if they accept them at all, are barriers. And these are typical of everything Sun.

If they could learn how to create vibrant open communities, while still retaining the ability to guide/control the projects as much as needed for their purposes, they'd be an even more incredible force in the OSS world.

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

> There are suspicious java processes running all the time, too.

Solution:

svcadm disable webconsole
cacaoadm disable
cacaoadm stop

Re:Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great

[turgid]

Sun typically priced its x86 and "x64" hardware cheaper than Dell's and HP's.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Xabraxas]

> nobody really knows what NetBSD is about

Running on everything and having really elegant source code.

Linux runs on more architectures now than NetBSD and has for some time.

> So where does OpenSolaris fit in?

A stable ABI, with extensible kernel constructs that don't require rejiggering the ABI every couple weeks. You write your solaris driver once. Ever.

That sound horrible. Even Microsoft isn't that backwards. If what you say is really true, forget about refactoring when new hardware comes out and you want to make functions more generic. Just imagine the spagetti code that would arise from that kind of naivety.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please.

IBM is at every technical conference I've been to in the last four years. OLS? ISO? POSIX? GCC Summit? LSB? IBM people write for LWN, even though IBM published a ton of linux-specific documents on their own site. IBM people are active on all major FOSS lists, including kernel, gcc, glibc, they donated Eclipse, etc etc.

Intel is about the same.

Sun gets maybe 20% on this stuff. For the most part, they give the appearance of not caring to involve the community even on the software (openoffice, see build divergence, java, now mysql?) that they "own." Sun doesn't even test gcc on Solaris. Let alone actually try to fix bugs in native support.

Jeeze. And I don't even work for IBM.

Re:I didnt bother.

[segfaultcoredump]

I'm sure suse is better than redhat, but RH has the 'market' in the US and oracle picked RH as the basis for OEL, not SUSE. Of course, its all 'linux' (i know, its not) but that is another issue for another day.

For multipathing, I was mostly talking about FC networks. That said, we also use it a lot for our IP networks. It is easy to setup on solaris and windows, but not linux. We've had "fully redundant" cisco switches go down due to a hardware failure before. So the idea of pulling everything back to a single switch is not a good idea. For $10k (list) extra, we just get two chassis and put a single supervisor in each one. This way an entire chassis can fail and nobody notices (in theory).

As for zones vs a hypervisor, that is an example of having several tools to fit the job. One is a screwdriver, the other is a hammer. When I want a copy of the base OS, zones are much nicer. They get patched with the base OS, they dont take much disk (150m with sparse root zones) and the performance hit is not even measurable. ESX/Xen/Etc are the other end: you have to fully manage them as another instance, they take up a lot more disk, and performance issues abound (depending on what you are doing)

And we are looking at brandz... just what we need, to run a linux zone on a sun box... It does look attractive and I'm going to give it a try :-)

As for the strace vs truss debate, I left that out. strace is still a subset of truss, but kmdb and dtrace go even further.

And this is exactly why Roy Fielding resigned...

[xtaski]

I forgot about Roy Fielding's resignation from OpenSolaris.

Sun didn't just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That's the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit. Given Sun's recent track record on breaking promises, another one doesn't surprise me at all.

This well is poisoned; the company has consumed its own future and any pretense that the projects will ever govern themselves (as opposed to being governed by whatever pointy-haired boss is hiding behind the scenes) is now a joke. Sun should move on, dissolve the charter that it currently ignores, and adopt the governing style of MySQL. That company doesn't pretend to let their community participate in decisions, and yet they still manage to satisfy most of their users. Let everyone else go back to writing code/documentation for hire.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Secrity]

Somebody with a mission critical server should be running real Solaris, not OpenSolaris.

Sun: EOL Early, EOL Often. Openness is foreign.

[sethstorm]

...they've driven a great deal of people away in terms of hardware support. The way they like to kill hardware (ZX is dropped, but lowly cg6's are kept?) and entire platforms (especially sun4cdm well before OpenSolaris) has very little logic. Of course, it has economic purpose for them, but next to none on your end.

The only saving bit is that Sun has some openness - but they are still playing the same sort of game with their in-house video hardware.

Do you want to roll the dice with your hardware 2 years after purchase? Buy Sun. Otherwise, seek another hardware vendor with a bit longer EOL times(IBM or such).

All this adds up to a community that looks like a lot of Sun employees driving it while wanting to appear non-Sun driven.

Re:Sun: EOL Early, EOL Often. Openness is foreign.

[ryanov]

Umm, Solaris 10 still runs on our E450's that became available in 1997. That's more than 10 years of support. They haven't been made since 2002 and they even have hardware support until toward the end of this year. I'm sure that modern Solaris will continue to run on them for another 5 years after that.

I don't work for Sun, I just want you to get real.

Re:Sun: EOL Early, EOL Often. Openness is foreign.

[sethstorm]

That's a sun4u system. Short of an Ultra1 or similar, that's the dividing line.

Their policy of dropping the higher end addons in support(and acting as if it was a cardinal sin to ask why - that's bmc for you) just seems out of touch with reality. The same can be said for the sun4m (dropped for reasons of dtrace/kcf) controversy.

If they're so insistent on keeping sun4cdm (but not small bits of sbus by virtue of the ultra2) out, just clear out the use of 32bit Solaris 9 and allow for backporting newer features.

I'm calling on Sun's platform enthusiasm to get real.

Re:Sun: EOL Early, EOL Often. Openness is foreign.

[ryanov]

You still haven't demonstrated any machine they've sold that was no longer supported 2 years later. Were sun4m machines selling 5 years ago, shortly before Solaris 10 came out?

because

[Anonymous Coward]

there is no benefit helping there
and
thus no thrust to get in
why someone love someone doesn't love in turn?

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[jellomizer]

IANAL But this sure looks like it is targeting "Consumer Products" While giving corporate products a green light.

A "User Product" is either (1) a "consumer product", which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling. In determining whether a product is a consumer product, doubtful cases shall be resolved in favor of coverage. For a particular product received by a particular user, "normally used" refers to a typical or common use of that class of product, regardless of the status of the particular user or of the way in which the particular user actually uses, or expects or is expected to use, the product. A product is a consumer product regardless of whether the product has substantial commercial, industrial or non-consumer uses, unless such uses represent the only significant mode of use of the product.
"Installation Information" for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).
The requirement to provide Installation Information does not include a requirement to continue to provide support service, warranty, or updates for a work that has been modified or installed by the recipient, or for the User Product in which it has been modified or installed. Access to a network may be denied when the modification itself materially and adversely affects the operation of the network or violates the rules and protocols for communication across the network.
Corresponding Source conveyed, and Installation Information provided, in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available to the public in source code form), and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying.

Re:I didnt bother.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

I realize that mdb is a great tool. I have limited exposure to Solaris, but I was able jump in, having UNIX experience on AIX and HP-UX as well as Linux, to debug a problem we had with an OODB on Solaris/Fujitsu SPARC.

The problem turned out to be kernel tunables with ZFS, which, is a shitty beast to deal with, or was at the time. Sure, the ease of use and flexibility was there, but performance sucked.

Don't blame me, my predecessor was the one that tried a "New and untested" file system on an important DB server. I had to limit the ARC buffer size, change the read block size, etc etc.

However, having used both RH and SUSE, I can say that RH has its pluses, however Oracle has certified SUSE and Oracle's Enterprise Linux......sucks compared to either one of them. I would use SUSE or CentOS or RHEL before it without pause.

Re:I didnt bother.

[laptop006]

The basic OS install was more or less easy, once we battled through the serial port redirection setup (guess most linux users never used a serial port before. After all, why bother when the box sits under your desk). I stil like serial ports over video for one major reason: issue resolution (when bad things happen, having that panic string saved by a console server can really save the day)

So adding two lines to the grub config (one for grub itself and one for the kernel it starts) and setting the BIOS is too hard? I fail to see how it could be much easier under solaris.

Issue #1: multipathing drivers for the SAN. With solaris, you just plug the thing into the san and all of the storage that the host has access to just showed up. Multipathing was instant and I didnt have to do jack. I could see what devices mapped to which physical array with a simple command. I didnt have to guess which array /dev/sde came from vs /dev/sdf. When you have 20 luns mapped to the same host from two different arrays, its kinda important to know which drives come from which array and what the corresponding lun numbers are. That said, most linux admins I've talked to didnt have a clue about what I was talking about since they never had a san.

For part a in linux, unfortunatly they appear to have pushed multipathing on to the device driver layer, for the second part dev-mapper is your friend. Anyone who doesn't use it against a SAN is an idiot.

Issue #2: dynamically add luns: With solaris, you just change the mapping on the array and the host picks it up and auto creates the dev links. That was easy. On Linux? you've got to be kidding me... You get to echo some crazy strings into several spots in /proc and watch the fun start.

Or just run "scsiadd -s"

issue #3: IP Multipathing. With solaris, dladmin is used to create a bond (if it is going to the same switch and the switch supports bonding) or use the built in ip multipathing to do an active/failover setup if you are going to multiple switches. Very well documented and very easy to do. With linux... yeah, bonding is a fun task. Need to go to multiple switches? no such luck, you are screwed. I eventually used VCS to take over the systems main IP and uses its IPMultipathing agent to do the job for me. VCS on solaris just hands the task off to mpathd since the OS already does it for you.

Standard, in-kernel 802.1ad is too hard for you?

Issue #4: zones: dont get me started. I dont want to run another entire OS, I just want name space isolation and chroot is so primative it is not even funny. Zones gives me everything I want with minimal overhead. It would have been nice to have since there are a few oracle products that dont play nicely with clusters (*Warehouse Builder*) because they imbed the host name everywhere. We could put it under Xen, but this is an app that moves huge amounts of data around, not exactly a good candidate for virtualization. Zones let us get around Oracle's brain dead use of the hostname, no such luck with linux.

It's called linux-vserver. Yes it's a patch, but it works well.

Issue #5: 3rd party drivers vs the new kernel patch. If I install a 3rd party device driver in solaris and upgrade the kernel, I dont have to rebuild/reinstall the driver. Linux (even redhat 4.x with their "back port") forces me to rebuild/reinstall every damn time. Its great if the driver is standard with the kernel, but if you need something outside of that (lsi multipathing drivers to get around #1 and 10G NIC drivers in my case) and you are screwed. No wonder up2date ignores all of the kernel* rpm's by default.

Fair cop, in debian at least they keep binary compatability wherever possible in a stable release

Issue #6: Whats the s

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[1lus10n]

+1 about linux being better at HPC, the deployment mechanisms are better, as are the distributed management tools.

That being said, Solaris scales on single nodes like its nobodies business if you follow the best practices and know what your doing. I've seen big Sun boxes hit loads in excess of 300 and keep chugging. I *still* havent seen a Solaris box that was well maintained crash. (cant say that about Linux -- if anything its getting less stable).

AIX hasnt impressed me in the limited exposure I have had.

Re:I didnt bother.

[1lus10n]

^^ What he said. (segfaultcoredump)

I know how to do all the stuff mentioned in Linux, but for real installs with real requirements Solaris 'just works' and Linux requires a lot more effort. Where a rookie user or a small install is typically the exact opposite. (linux is easy, solaris is hard)

I love the SAN song and dance on Linux. Pissing into the wind effort if ever there was one.

KVM might someday compete with zones, but really they are worlds better for most uses than either Xen or Vmware. (and I'm a xen fan for the record)

Re:I didnt bother.

[1lus10n]

I've never seen anything on Linux that touches dtrace.

For the sake of IP networking the multipathing in question is largely known in linux has bonding, and its ugly. Half the modes only work in idealistic circumstances.

and for the record, vmware is not a linux solution, its an additional product, which has a cost attached to it.

What about "Project Copy Linux"?

[felixdzerzhinsky]

What about "Project Copy Linux"? http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/07/29/sun_projectindiana_oscon/

Re:I didnt bother.

[segfaultcoredump]

Here goes:

1) We did it as part of the finish script in the kickstart script. It was more than just adding it to the grub.conf, you also have to tweak a few other files to actually get the damn thing to start a login prompt on the serial port. Compared to solaris where I just add a console=ttya in the add_install_client script (yeah, we jumpstart everything) as a boot param and the installer takes care of the rest.

2) I ended up loading the lsi mpp drivers. Using a combination of veritas dmp debug commands and the mmpUtil command, we can map which lun it comes from. the vx commands give us the uuid of the lun, and the mppUtil commands tell us what lun has that uuid. Oh yeah, and we use VxVM for the fast resync capabilities since we run a campus cluster. ZFS offers a similar function of only copying the changed blocks over when (not if) something goes wrong. I hate waiting for a 2TB volume to fully resync, and so do the DBA's who then bitch about the performance hit.

3) We first tried the magic that redhat suggested (echo "bla" into a bunch of /proc files). Then we tried the mppBusRescan utility that comes with the lsi drivers. Noe worked because they were only operating at the scsi level, not the FC port level. The missing magic? we have to first force a lip on the FC ports by echoing more stuff into more /proc files. `cfgadm -c configure` is so much easier since it does everything in one shot, and that is only if you turn off the autoconfigure option.

3) 802.1ad is bonding, aka EtherChannel in the cisco world (truning to everybody else). I mentioned that we are running between two different switches and bonding is not supported in that config. This is the problem with linux. I say I want to do something, and everybody jumps on the wrong answer. (yes, cisco will support it between 6509's running the not yet out Sup 1440's.... like I trust that to work, 10G is just easier for the bandwidth)

4) linux-vserver... its close, but zones takes it to the next level. And I hate patching the kernel since you are just asking to get something to not work since you are now one of a very small group doing it. If i wanted to do that, i'd work for redhat/suse/oracle/whoever. Yeah, it was fun in the early days of slackware when you had to more or less build a new kernel from src to do anything, but I really dont have time for that anymore.

5) ps and top are good for easy problems. Here is an one that those tools didnt spot: I had to figure out what was eating a system alive and sending it into a tailspin. Turns out that oracle's enterprise agent was spawning thousands of sub jobs that lived and died in under a second. dtrace spotted this in an instant. top and ps will never saw it. (once you know the problem, strace will also spot it, but you first have to know what process is causing the problem) Yeah, when somebody says the system is 'acting funny', I reach for top, ps, ptree and the like. If nothing shows up in 30 seconds, its time to dig deeper. That requires tools like truss, snoop, dtrace and mdb (for the really nasty problems). I dont get paid more than everybody else in my group to solve easy problems. I get paid more because I get to solve the nasty ones.

As for zfs, the first release was cool, but had a few 'issues' that needed to be sorted out. At least the sales engineers I talked to warned me to wait for an update release or two before I used it in production. That was then, but this is now, and it rocks. We now use it as the base FS for all of our zones and as a failover fs with Sun Cluster. The damn thing just works. I would not put oracle on top of it due to a few minor strange things oracle does, but for everything else it is great.

And dont feel so bad, I think poorly of HPUX and AIX too :-) Talk about two vendors who have not really bothered to advance their OS in the past 10 years, linux is awesome compared to those two. (of course, my experience with those two have been helping the poor admins try and do half of what linux can do)

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Knuckles]

Thanks. IANAL either, but I can see that GPL3 seems to make a difference between consumer products and others. I will have to read up on where this came from and what it means.

It is very obvious, however, that it is not a clause that gives IBM any more rights than others, as you claimed. Were IBM to sell me a consumer product, they would be bound by the same rules as anyone else doing so.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Knuckles]

Ok, there's a comment on the "user product" clause here: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/gplv3-user-products-clause.html

I guess you can choose to see it as a RMS plot, as you did, or you can see it as a question of practical issues. I would tend to the latter, and I would think a company buying stuff from another company needs less protection than consumers, who usually don't have a legal department to negotiate contracts. But YMMV.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[ryanov]

I think it depends upon why you're using the OS you're using. I personally don't need comfort in an OS I'm running for work -- I wouldn't be good at what I do if knowing where commands are located was considered "hard" for me. If knowing how to administrate more than one type of *NIX is too hard, I think these folks might want to find another line of work. While this has died down some, I had to be familiar with IRIX, HP-UX, Linux and Solaris and work between them all day long. Yeah, sometimes I'll type the wrong command, but really, no big deal.

Load averages

[slash.duncan]

I've never seen the load on a Linux machine rise above like 6, and by then its unresponsive to anything.

How's it get up to 80? I've seen a eight core server hit hundreds.

Mind you that was after I made a mistake on a production server which essentially caused all the site's traffic to turn in to a DDoS attack. :) Just for fun, running my old dual single-core Opteron (242, 1.6 GHz) with lots (8 gig) of memory and swap on a 4-disk RAID-0 as a personal desktop/workstation I used to compile the (Linux) kernel with a patch to the makefile putting it in jobserver (-j) mode. The kernel compile is apparently VERY parallelizable! =8^) I'd run nearly 500 (480-ish) 1-min load average and a gig or two into swap before ksysguard quite responding and I couldn't tell how much higher it'd go.

Since then I've upgraded to the top of the line for socket 940, dual dual-core Opteron 290s (2.8 GHz), and with the recent per-user scheduling options turned on in the kernel, can watch the 1 min load average run to 180 or so (the highest it gets) without ever going unresponsive or stopping the 2-second ksysguard updates. Apparently with the extra speed and cores, the first jobs get worked thru and retired before it ever loads the last ones, so load average (and memory usage) never get anywhere as high.

What's great tho is as I mentioned the new (well, as of kernel 2.6.24) per-user scheduling/priority options. Set properly, you can have one user running multi-hundred load averages and it barely affects usability for other users at all, because they get equal CPU time (and with the proper I/O scheduler, I use CFQ which by default prioritizes I/O to match CPU priority, I/O to match) if they've got runnable processes, even with only fractional load averages. This is certainly one of my favorite new kernel features and one I regularly use to continue almost hitch-free internet radio playback and even visualization, plus of course general system responsiveness, even when compiling at multiple jobs per core load average. (I normally keep MAKEOPTS to "-j -l15" for general purpose compiling, which ends up running about a 16 load or 4 per core, more to limit memory usage to not run into swap (compiling with the workdir on tmpfs) than load average, tho.)

With a 120-ish day uptime... well, maybe it's a 2.6.24 kernel, but probably not. However, with that kernel or better, an 80 load average, or even a 500 load average, really shouldn't be unmanageable at all, as long as the scheduler options are set right, and if user-based scheduling groups are turned on, apache is running as a user other than root and other than the remote login shell would be running. As such, by default, root would get double the CPU cycles allowed other users (and appropriate I/O, assuming CFQ or similar prioritized I/O scheduling with priorities similar to the CPU priorities), and no matter what the apache user load average, the remote login shell should get equal cycles (assuming equal process priorities). It should thus be nearly impossible to DOS the machine to the point remote administration to get in and correct the problem becomes difficult or impossible.

Just in case it's not apparent by now, I *REALLY* like that aspect of kernel scheduling, new at least to the Linus kernel with 2.6.24. =8^)

Re:Load averages

[1lus10n]

Ah yes, but a kernel compile is not a viable test set. Though it is a neat observation. There was (is?) some oddity regarding the way Linux calculates load average with regards to I/O bound process's vs the way other nix's (incl solaris) do.

Try getting a Linux box thats doing application or DB transactions into a unhappy place (bad code, bad queries what have you) and see what happens.

My list of linux gripes is long, the core hit list:
shitty nfs support on the client side. (3 is bad, 4 is worse)
SAN. Try it sometime, it'll make you cry. In 2008 your cating and echoing things into /proc to setup SAN attached storage.
Networking. It was half assed before, now with things like network manager is getting worse. The way it handles bonding config is silly and why for the love of god does redhat load ipv6 by default when it breaks shit and nobody uses it ?
in-flight process control. ulimit is nice, limits.conf is nice, now how do I give that oracle DB/apache instance more file descriptors while its already running ? (the 2.6.24 scheduler stuff solves the other problem - user priority)

I can go on and on. For a desktop or laptop linux is great, for low end servers in bulk linux is good. Start getting into more complex 'non-wintel' market space and application needs and it gets less and less attractive. (not even touching on things like zones, zfs, dtrace, key management etc)

As a random observation Linux also is suffering from incomplete project creep where lots of things are 'good enough' but not many are 'awesome'. I'm also a bit upset about most distro's starting crap like avahi and hald. Give me a 'server' check box. I dont want or need that crap (or any of the other crap like bluetooth - wtf ?). Yes its easy to fix, but why is this the default ? Is Linux trying to be Windows now ?

Re:Load averages

[paulatz]

Crap, this was the most boring post I ever read on Slashdot. God, now I need half a litre of real Italian coffee, and consider it's just half past three PM here. I should save a bookmark in case I shall ever suffer of insomnia. Yawn, yawn, zzz

Re:Because Solaris without Sparcs isn't that great

[ryanov]

How are the Niagara-based CPU's not being sold with fervor?

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[sethmeisterg]

The biggest problem with Solaris is the installer, no question about it, but that's something that is (finally) changing with Project Indiana and the new packaging system. Give it a whirl in a month when it's released -- I think you'll be impressed at the progress made.

Re:I didnt bother.

[kenoshi]

Lol...couldn't agree more...attaching multiple LUNs from different arrays to a Linux box is an exercise in frustration, and multipathing on Linux is a joke...especially with SLES. IMO both have their nuances, but I've had a lot better results/stability with OpenSolaris than Linux...and let's not mention volume management...EVMS vs ZFS? Lol... Linux is great for simple LAMP stacks...

The Solaris Community is hard to enter

[LostMyBeaver]

Don't get me wrong, but Solaris became the same thing as Linux was. Once upon a time, I could just buy a copy of Solaris x86, install it, run it, and develop for it. I used to write network drivers and loved messing with Display PostScript.

When Solaris went open, I stopped doing it because I didn't have the time or patience to dig through the different Solaris distributions to find the one I wanted/needed to work on a hobby project.

So, I just stopped bothering with Solaris. I always loved the platform since it was a UNIX with a fixed ABI, so I could write code that would run on all Solaris distributions for a single processor architecture once. Now, I don't even know if that's true anymore.

Load averages

[slash.duncan]

That being said, Solaris scales on single nodes like its nobodies business if you follow the best practices and know what your doing. I've seen big Sun boxes hit loads in excess of 300 and keep chugging. I *still* havent seen a Solaris box that was well maintained crash. (cant say that about Linux -- if anything its getting less stable). While I can't argue with the crash angle (likely in large part due to the fact that it's my personal desktop/workstation and I actually prefer running -RC kernels and a beta/testing/unstable distribution level general system), I'd certainly argue the load average angle.

As I posted up-page in the slashdotting discussion, I like to run compiles in -j unlimited "jobserver" mode just to see how far I can push the hardware. Back before I upgraded from the dual-single-cores Opteron 242s (1.6 GHz clock), jobserver-mode (Linux) kernel compiles would run up 480 on the 1-minute load average before the (KDE/X) ksysguard graph would freeze up and I couldn't tell how much higher it'd go.

After upgrading to top-of-the-line-for-socket-940 dual dual-core Opteron 290s (2.8 GHz), with the user based priority/scheduling in kernel 2.6.24+, I no longer see those GUI freezes so continue to get load average updates, but the system is fast enough it apparently retires the first jobs before the last are loaded, so now job-server mode kernel compiles max out at only ~180 or so on the 1-minute load average. (FWIW, both the dual 242 480+ load and the 290 180+ loads are with 8 gigs RAM, the 480+ load would run into swap, but the 180 peak I manage on the 290s never touches swap.)

However, the nice bit is that with the per-user or control-group (I use the former) scheduling available in kernel 2.6.24+, I can run practically unlimited load average compiling as a different user, as long as I don't hit swap too hard, while all the while maintaining hitch-free net radio playback and nearly hitch-free visualization (it's slightly jerky updating but I don't miss many frames). The limit isn't on the load average aka CPU cycles, but rather on real memory vs swap. If I'm not streaming, I can maintain "acceptable" if somewhat jerky interactivity several gigs into swap, altho that's certainly partly due to the fact that swap is 4-way-RAID-0/striped.

So the 300 load average on Solaris isn't really all that special on Linux either, as I used to routinely do 480+ load average "just for fun" compiling the kernel, and that was before the recent very dramatic scheduler improvements. And be sure to check out that 2.6.24+ per-user scheduling as it's certainly worth it.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Skrynesaver]

DTrace, Solaris Containers, ZFS filesystem ....
Nothing of which you'll miss on your Kubuntu desktop but for production environments and development shops Solaris still holds the edge, I run Linux on the desktop and Solaris on the server myself, gnome on Open Solaris has issues as Linux is the target so it's not optimised for Solaris (proc issues etc)

Was Linux born in 3 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back to when Linux was starting out...

There were lots of people messing around with floppies and definately not the crowd that it has today. I'm trying to think back, was it 1991 or 1992 when the 0.99 was about? And by 1995 or 1996, was it so much better? Or the community?

The proper time frame to judge whether or not OpenSolaris will be able to build a successful community is somewhere in the 5 to 8 year time frame.

It is still too early to decide if OpenSolaris has failed or not to build a community.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[jellomizer]

Well since IBM sold it Desktop and Laptop Line to Lenovo. IBM Doesn't have much in term of Consumer Product line anymore. But the point of this point was to stop "TiVoisation" and earlier version of the GPL/3 Draft. IBM had problems because they sell systems at different prices which are the same system the only difference is some software in the firmware that tells the processor what speed to run at, and turn on or off additional features, Section 6 would make it difficult for them to continue this and still follow the GPL and they pressured RMS and FOSS to allow them to continue. So they added the "Consumer Product" section to allow IBM to continue. Yes it doesn't say IBM and TiVo directly. And HP and other companies can use that clause. (however the definition of consumer product is very wide, allowing only Big Iron equipment to fall in the list of Big Iron is almost an IBM Monopoly while most other companies produce products that could be considered Consumer Products as well. Being the general use of most computers.

Just publish the APIs

[SgtChaireBourne]

Bullshit. Binary drivers are what we already have in too many cases. Notice that the years where binary drivers were all the rage, hardware support was at its worst. If you want good 'hardware' support for peripheral devices, the device manufacturers just need to take Bill's dick out of their mouth long enough to publish the APIs to their products.

Binary-only drivers tie the peripherals to specific architectures and OS versions. As part of the deal you get security and maintenance problems along with the portability problems. At this point, moving more in the direction of GPLv3 will keep OpenSolaris from being slowed by the dragging weight of binary-only drivers.

Opening the drivers expands the market for the hardware.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Knuckles]

I don't even say that what you said can't be true, it's a reasonable though experiment. But you did spin the facts in you first post, and now your accusations really are very severe considering that you don't back them up at all.

How does this help Unix, silly bashdot

[vallef]

What is the point of this, Linux is Unix so how does this help the Unix movement. Why can't all the Unix people work together, that was the point of open systems, to be able to work/interoperate. Linux has its benefits and so does Solaris. In a few situations one has a cost, useability, scaleability advantage over the other, but not many. The differences between Linux and Solaris are becoming less and less everyday. Now lets compare Linux to AIX or HP-UX, Sun is putting energy into open source and has done so since before Linux. Why does one gang bash another, very childish.

Every week there is some community or tribe that critices another. Maybe this is caused by jealousy or fear.

The OpenSolaris community is not perfect, nor is the Linux community.

If we do a search for "why I left Linux" there wil l be the exact reasons critising Linux that are used here to criticise OpenSolaris. http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm This bashdot article does not do anything positive for the IT industry. It only helps the proprietary vendors laugh and encourage the open companies and organisations to fight one another. Proprietary organisations are the only winners here, causing two like minded communities to fight, Linux and Solaris. Can Linux/Unix put it's efforts into being better than proprietary OSes e.g. Win, AIX, HP-UX etc. Making Linux and OpenSolaris fight is only good for the proprietary non-open source vendors.

Can Linus have dinner with Jonathon Schwartz what is there to be scared of, they might discover a lot in common and who the real enemy is.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[morgan_greywolf]

That being said, Solaris scales on single nodes like its nobodies business if you follow the best practices and know what your doing. I've seen big Sun boxes hit loads in excess of 300 and keep chugging. I *still* havent seen a Solaris box that was well maintained crash. (cant say that about Linux -- if anything its getting less stable).

I can say the same thing of Linux on the stability end. Again, the box must be well-maintained, admin knows what he's doing.

Also, a lot of it depends on hardware. A lot of people want to throw Linux on cheap whitebox hardware with bargain-basement motherboards and expect it's going to be as stable as Solaris running on an E-series server. Ha! If you want the stability of Solaris running on E-series server out of Linux, you gotta run it on similar hardware -- hardware built for high availability. Your typical BIOSTAR or even ASUS MicroATX PC desktop motherboard isn't built to do that. Try looking at real enterprise-class hardware from IBM or HP. Hell, I know for certain Solaris running on an E series can't touch the performance and reliability of Linux on the IBM z-series mainframes.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[jellomizer]

Why. I didn't spin it. I stated that the GPL had a loophole for IBMs advantage that was particuly put in. And I felt that it was unfair to have different standards for B2B vs. B2C for the GPL. If you are going to be a hard ass then you need to be equally so. Then I was asked to give me the section of the GPL that explains it. So I did. Then was stated that it didn't say IBM in particular just consumer devices, which it did. But who is the biggest GPL support who deals almost entirly of B2B... IBM, IBM has the most to gain from that section, without stating IBM directly. Sure EMC can take advantage of this or HP, and Medical Technologies and such. But IBM has the most to gain and people making consumer products such as TiVo have the most to loose.
I am actually very scared on how people will just happily change their feelings to match the new GPL states. It is like following a cult, when the leader changes his plans people happily adjust to the plans not really caring that it is a contradiction. I liked GPL/2 I don't like GPL/3 for that reason. I beleave there should be a consistency between B2B and B2C. If B2C has to keep all their data 100% open so should B2B even though it may cause big companies (like IBM) to loose support for the cause. Or if you didn't want IBM to loose support you should deal with TiVoisation and allow for semi-perfect freedom to allow better spread and support for the license.
What are you expecting the GPL to state except for IBM. No of course not it will just explain IBM not by name but by the nature of its business.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[Knuckles]

You accused IBM to apply pressure and the FSF succumbing to it without a shred of evidence. While I can understand where you stand on the B2B vs B2C issue, you completely ignore that there are some valid reasons to draw the line were it was drawn, even though you disagree.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[jellomizer]

No I don't accuse IBM for dirrect pressure. IBM may not have said a word. But when you are in a room with a sleeping lion you don't want to anger it. IBM has been a big supporter of the GPL, the FSF likes the fact that they have a large ally on their side, they are not going to go out of their way to push IBM too far.
I didn't ignore the resons why they drew the line where they drew it. I don't agree with the line at all. Me personally was OK with TiVoisation, I felt it helped push GPL/2 out from the relm of just the techies free copy to a popular products that helped change the world. I understand that TiVoisation was against the spirit of the GPL/2 and FSF didn't care for it, because they would have prefered that it would be possible to make your own TiVo without buying a Unit, By coping all the code and put it in a differnt box, and building boxes and selling/giving those boxes away to others as a TiVo Compatible device, yes it would be nice. But if that was the case the TiVo wouldn't have used Linux as it Core OS and use OSS tools for most of it, and may have gone with Windows for its core OS, and TiVo has been hacker friendly, when my Modem Died on my TiVo I was able to fix it by changing the OS Settings and swapping some com ports. If it was windows based and 100% closed my unit would be dead.
Drawing the Line between B2B and B2C was a move to keep the hackers happy as well as its big supporters happy. But I personally don't like it, and I feel it is a contradiction because Big Iron has a golden pass while small plastic needs to follow rigid rules. Just because some Hairy Toes Hackers don't want to spend money on a cool device that they can't manupliate to get free sercvice or make blaten copies of.
You seem to think I am accusing colution no I am not. FSF is controled by Humans and Humans do stupid things and make mistakes, we all do, it is a fact. And I feel the line is a mistake. I am not saying the FSF and IBM are activily plotting. But I feel that IBM is to big of an influence on the FSF for them to make a decision rationally.
I am intitled to my opionions, wither it is true or not is a different Issue. I am not going to do a full investigation for every opionion I have. I am OK Being wrong if its wrong. I am not calling people into action to distroy FSF or IBM. I am just saying look at the facts and think for yourself and if the GPL has straight from where you personally think it should go then you should look elsewhere and not hang on to a changing Ideal that doesn't match your views.
Besides this is Slashdot there are conspericy theoris on top of conspericy theories. So it OK to assume that Microsoft is out to kill every Linux User and force them against their will to use Windows, and somehow the Bush Administration is behind it. But it is not OK to think that 2 Partners IBM and FSF don't influence each other and could come up with something that I feel is wrong?

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[FishWithAHammer]

Fair enough. Thank you! :)

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[turgid]

Ah yes, svc. You used to be able to do /etc/init.d/foo start|stop.

cacaoadm disable

Is this a thinly-veiled reference to Doom? :-)

The svc stuff came along just as I had no more "professional interest" (shall we say) in Solaris.

I'm sure it's nice when you know it, but it's yet another learning curve.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[1lus10n]

I have one of the z-series boxes at the office, and I've in the past had sun E-series boxes.

Solaris on E series all the way. Linux just lacks the big iron feature set, the more complex task management set. The more complicated workload the more it falls down and cant get out of its own way.

Re:bittorrent

[turgid]

Cool, thanks. I'll get seeding :-)

Re:bittorrent

[turgid]

Darn, that's just the live developer preview CD.

Re:OpenSolaris fails to build community b/c it suc

[Lally Singh]

Actually the fun issue is why I left Linux for Solaris. I wanted an OS that felt like it was built by adults.

I've got real work to do (some of it is pretty fun), and I want the OS to back me up. I don't want to play with the OS, I've done it to death and I've moved on.

I don't think the same type of community that likes Linux will like OpenSolaris. I'm thinking more of an Apache-style group. People who need to get things done, and are willing to send in fixes to make their stuff work.

Re:I though it was just because it sucks

[harry666t]

> you'll be impressed at the progress made.

I sure hope so. I'm always happy to use good software.

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[turgid]

Sun doesn't even test gcc on Solaris. Let alone actually try to fix bugs in native support.

Heh. Sun is quite arrogant in that regard.. however.. back in 2004 when it became apparent that Opteron was the way forward, they decided they needed an AMD64 port of Solaris 10. They went from 0 to up and running in 6 weeks flat but they had to use gcc to compile Solaris for AMD64 since their compiler only did 32-bit x86. They paid Code Sorcery to fix some bugs in gcc for them. That's the "gcc-3.4.3" that's _still_ in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris 11. It's really gcc-3.4.2 with Sun/Code Sorcery fixes, not the real gcc-3.4.2.

They were not keen of having gcc with gcj enabled on Solaris. :-)

Re:Not welcoming your Scott McNealy overlord?

[turgid]

not the real gcc-3.4.2.

I meant "not the real gcc-3.4.3"

News for you: they are correct.

[jotaeleemeese]

There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).

With Solaris you have a clean path of scalability from a very cheap, simple machine to a fully distributed resilient solution without touching the binaries or the scripts involved.

With Linux it is not so easy, specially because it has limits to what it can handle (for multiple processors Solaris leaves Linux biting the dust, and ZFS is way above anything developed so far for Linux).

Re:News for you: they are correct.

[JerkBoB]

There is no chance in hell that Linux can scale properly for most companies (unless your name is Google).

You're probably right, for the moment, in most aspects of the Enterprise space. I know virtually nothing about that world. I've sysadminned at ISPs and small software shops, and for the last few years I've been playing around in HPC. Both very different worlds from the typical conservative corporate enterprise area.

Note that my comments should ONLY be taken to be in the context of HPC. As in, massively-parallel computation, rather than ginormous single-image machines or huge N-way SMP systems. I've never claimed here that Linux will or should replace Solaris in the traditional bread & butter markets for Sun.

With regard to scaling of Linux in HPC, you may be interested to know that 76% of the machines on the top500 list are running some form of Linux. Of the top 10, every single one is running some variant of Linux on the compute nodes, except maybe one. They might still be using Catamount. Solaris? A scant 0.4% and judging by the summed Gflops, I have more nodes in my testbed.

Certainly there are still applications for single 64-way machines, but I think that more and more, esoteric techniques and gear from HPC are trickling down into Enterprise-land. For example, I know of at least one large investement bank that is working on using an Infiniband fabric for trading traffic. They're already running clusters of relatively cheap nodes for doing parallel derivatives modeling and other stuff.

But whatever. Solaris certainly has its place, but it feels like those with a large financial and/or emotional investment in it are getting more and more antsy.

Sun sells services not machines.

[jotaeleemeese]

As long as you don't get this, you will continue to have the false impression that your Linux machines are a better business solution.

-You don't synchronize Solaris machines automatically. If you do that it means your application should be running in something else or that you don't know what you are doing. Solaris servers will run the basic services that keep your company alive and profitable. Those machines are not upgraded automatically. Never. Which makes the package management pretty irrelevant (what is wrong with pkgadd by the way? The interface is clean, all the information is stored in a clear text file for easy inspection, so I don't get the point).

Sun website sucks? Well, if you say so. Since all the manuals are there I beg to disagree, why do I need to google something if I can go to the corresponding manual and find 99% of the answers I need? And when this does not work then there is Google of course, but obviously even googling requires skills, some people are more proficient at this, some others, well, complain that they can't find things.

So yes, in my experience (Fortune 100 companies galore, worldwide) Linux is either an interim stage to Solaris or is used in different applications where a quasi appliance is needed (because an appliance is easily synchronized,at which Linux excels, as you correctly pointed out).

So don't laugh much, because the joke may be on you.

Re:Sun sells services not machines.

[Kent Recal]

Sun sells services not machines.

Oh yes, we learned about that part. If that's what you want then Sun sure is a good partner. For us those "services" (or "solutions") were generally a bit opaque. We like to know what's going on and how to fix it when it breaks. Thus we take sun for what it is in our eyes (a hardware company) and don't throw money after turnkey-solutions.

ou don't synchronize Solaris machines automatically. If you do that it means your application should be running in something else or that you don't know what you are doing. Solaris servers will run the basic services that keep your company alive and profitable.

Erm. Yes, maybe that "something else" is linux then?
I have no idea what you mean by "basic services" and why you think those never need to be updated. And I seriously wonder how you ensure availability for these services when you can't mirror them over multiple hosts - which obviously involves keeping all those hosts in sync?

If you did that in my network....

[jotaeleemeese]

... you would be in danger of losing your job.

I don't want automatic updates in a server that is providing support to all of the US, Western Europe or the Far East for thousands of users making money for us.

As long as you don't get this and other points made above by other people you simply are not understanding the place of OSes like Solaris in a modern enterprise.

Re:If you did that in my network....

[Kent Recal]

Maybe I wasn't clear about that point but we obviously do not set our machines to auto-update from some distro-repository. We set them to auto-update from our local mirror which only receives packages after they have been tested and blessed on a dedicated host. I think in a "moderm enterprise" you would call that a controlled rollout and my question was about how we're supposed to implement that on solaris without package or dependency management. Feel free to enlighten me; how do you do it?