Slashdot Mirror
OpenSolaris Indiana Released
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"
Without all that free crap.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I'm tempted to tinker with ZFS just for its snapshotting abilities. You don't have to run a server to find that useful.
They employ sexy-code formatting monkeys. The solaris kernel is a hack of a lot simpler to understand than the Linux kernel - I hege this on my comparison of the sources a while back.
There is still no mighty IOKit killer on the horizon tho... Apple (and libkern, the cpp runtine) wins.
Matt
...a hat and bullwhip?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
With ZFS you can smash a hard drive and keep the system running:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
I've played around with ZFS, it's very cool. I mean very very cool.
It's a crying shame the licensing issues keep it from being ported to Linux as part of the kernel
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Nothing. It's a piece of shit actually. Sun is all about Java so many of the tools like IPS are written in it. It eats memory like no tomorrow and performance suffers. Don't even think of running this stuff on a machine with less than 1GB of RAM.
And the stuff that isn't newly written in Java is like a throwback to the early 90's. Cryptic and hard to use. Sun uses a lot of GNU software but it's a big mix of bastardized custom stuff, stuff from the old Solaris, and GNU tools. It's difficult to get stuff working right because it doesn't work exactly like the old Solaris or something newer like Linux.
Linux kills OpenSolaris in every way.
Show me dtrace or zfs on ubuntu.
As for hardware, the solaris kernel doesn't change its ABI every couple of weeks. Drivers written once continue to work.
Um, what repos do I need to enable to get ZFS or DTrace functionality? Perhaps the ones powered by pony magic, because last time I checked Linux has neither of these very very cool (and useful) technologies available (and ZFS-Fuse most assuredly does not qualify as 'available' yet).
But perhaps your zealotry does not allow you to try new things...
ZFS on Linux won't happen. But Linux on ZFS is possible today. Solaris has a LX BRANDZ container which emulates the linux system call api. So you can create linux container and install RedHat in it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
> The solaris kernel is a hack
You were correct up to this point.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The darn thing never even boots successfully on most all of my machines - on the one machine where it does - the network card (wired) is not detected making it unusable. OpenSolaris seriously needs a bunch of smart driver developers contributing drivers and general x86 workarounds - just not suitable for x86 hardware as of today (unless the h/w happens to be Sun).
Don't want easy raid/storage expansion on your desktop? You don't want efficient storage?
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
You don't want to know how your system is performing in a way like never before? I'm not a developer, but a sysadmin and use dtrace every day to tell those pesky developers that yes, it's actually THEIR CODE that's at fault at not the server I setup for them. It's also neat to be able to easily see what process is using how much network bandwidth in realtime. That was difficult before.
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
I don't like the complexity of SMF, but it's self-healing for the stuff that's already built for it is cool as is it's dependancy checking.
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
It's better than just RPM, but it's about the same as deb or yum. It's a big step foreward for what was a commercial OS.
I can tell you haven't even tried solaris 10, but give it a swig. Before solaris 10 I wrote (often rightly) wrote of Sun. Why would I pay a premium for something FreeBSD can do for free and outperforms it? The hardware is cool (see coolthreads processors...it's hyperthreading done right), it's affordable, and it's innovative. It may not be compelling enough to switch from linux or whatever if all you use from a desktop is firefox and thunderbird, but there is actually some VERY cool stuff in there. Don't write it off. There's a reason FreeBSD is taking in a lot of these features.
We named the dog Indiana.
I'm installing it right now. It looks like a copy of Ubuntu. It has a LiveCD, standard GNOME desktop, and an online package manager (called pkg).
Don't take that as criticism. Cloning Ubuntu is probably the best design decision an OS team can make these days.
Personally, I don't care whether it's Solaris or Ubuntu or *BSD underneath it all, so long as it supports my hardware and runs my applications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I am not even sure I can get worked up about Solaris anymore even for "serious work".
That train already left the station.
It's not just good enough that you make something cool but you should also make it available when people want it rather than 10 years later.
Now Sun has to put on a good showing just to keep from looking silly.
Although this is ultimatey a good thing as it's one of the key benefits of free market competition.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm missing g's and e's :(
As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded, structured and organised than the Linux kernel. But alas, it lacks the many new features that have truly driven linux over the last decade.
Naturally my opinions lie with the ease of code readability and ease of initial development - these are not the same as a lkml hardened pro
Not bloody likely. Even a "clean-room" interpretation of ZFS will run afoul of Sun's patents, and those patents are only licensed under the CDDL.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
therefore, it is *not* Linux-friendly
Given what's happening to SCO lately, how valid is the license that Sun purchased to allow them to release the source code to Solaris?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Ok, you're going to find better explanations elsewhere but this is my understanding of it.
OpenSolaris is not necessarily a "distribution". Nexenta, Shillix, etc are "distributions" built on OpenSolaris. Project Indiana as I understand it, is a distribution coming directly from the OpenSolaris project.
At first OpenSolaris wasn't supposed to come up with it's own distribution, and now that it is it did some people didn't like it. Or they didn't like that they were going to call it OpenSolaris instead of Indiana or something like that. I'm not clear on all the details.
Since Solaris will be built using OpenSolaris, Project Indiana is also kind of like an early access release of Solaris 11, without JDS.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Well the only special thing I could find on sun.com is that thanks to ZFS I can now hook up
$59,889,696,578,085,169,569,553,930,907,991,205,216.26
worth of harddisks to my desktop instead of the puny $3,246,626,956,972,881,084.41 I can spend on a 64-bit filesystem.
from a BSD point of view. If good open source software makes into their distribution, good for them and all their users. Goal accomplished.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
The high level parts of the system may be written in Python but the underlying tools it uses are Java. You can actually run some of the command line tools to save memory.
It doesn't help much but it does help. It only took 48 hours to run the updates on a fresh install on my Blade (LOL, it's ridiculously slow, using the GUI version probably would have taken a solid week to finish running).
Then you don't really understand the file system. Seriously, I think this is the BEST reason to look at Solaris .. ZFS is amazing: snapshots; Z-RAID; Zetabyte file ssytem; prevention of bit rot ...
... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???
They have also forcibly crashed it over a million time and it has never lost data even once. Try doing that with your home PC.
And what
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch? Well, for one, Solaris (and a few other OSes) support a new key just to the left of the "enter" key called the "apostrophe" key.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
You, sir, are unmitigatedly fuckin' retahdid.
... under [patent claim(s), now owned or hereafter acquired, including without limitation, method, process, and apparatus claims, in any patent Licensable by grantor] ... to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the Original Software (or portions thereof)." -CDDL Section 2.1(b)
"Conditioned upon Your compliance with Section 3.1 below and subject to third party intellectual property claims, the Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license
Yeah, and you have to fsck that with a traditional filesystem. Plus, zfs takes care of bit rot (which is becoming a problem as HD sizes get larger) volume management (and makes it extremely easy). Well you can make fun of the theoretical limits, when your modern 1GB hard drive crashes or 1.5 tarabyte array crashes you'll be happy when you can boot without having to wait for the filesystem to be checked. Have you had to deal with volume management before? It was a pain in the ass.
Thanks SCOSource. Without Unixware 7.x, this release would not have been possible. The previous releases based on Sys V were really crappy.
is that ZFS, despite all its goodness, lacks some incredibly basic features compared to 99% of the hardware and software RAID and LVM systems out there. You can't grow (please pay attention here) a ZFS pool except by adding similarly-redundant vdevs, and there is no way to remove a vdev from a pool, unlike LVM2.
So. Got a 4-drive RAID-Z2 array, and you want to add more space by buying another drive to add in to your 5-bay hot-swap cage? You're shit outta luck. If you have a zpool with a vdev that consists of a pair of mirrored drives, you CAN add another vdev of two drives, then another, etc. You also CAN replace the drives in a vdev with larger drives. That's kind of half-okay, but still not on par with RAID cards of a DECADE ago. Even Linux's MD can grow RAID5/6 across more devices!
Someone suggested the ability to grow redundant pools by single devices, and the reaction amongst solaris ZFS developers (!!!) was "now why would you want to do that?", and then when THAT was explained, "well shucks, I wonder how they do that" (they = almost every hardware and software RAID solution on the planet.)
Absolutely astounding that a Solaris filesystem developer would not be able to at least guess as to how a RAID5 array would be re-striped to add a new drive.
Far as I know, they've been working on the grow capability for more than a year and we have yet to see it.
Please help metamoderate.
"Image" in the name refers to the ability of the packageiung system to install to a chroot-like enviornment. The Distribution constructor (what actually builds the iso) basically creates an "image" area, installs the packages to this are, compresses it, and converts it to an iso.
Apart from that, you can also create partial images, which is a space you as a normal user can install packages to. These link back to the libraries already installed.
I'm sure some of these features are available in existing linux packaging systems. But these are things the Opensolaris community has wanted for a long time.
Apart from these features IPS also has automatic snapshoting (using ZFS in the background), so you can revert your system back to earlier snapsots.
All in all a very effective packaging system
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
I've tried to explain the use of "image" in my other comment http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=543728&cid=23305852
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
It's a common misconception that raid "prevents" data corruption.
RAID only protects you against (complete) hardware failures, and "noisy" IO errors.
Consider:
You have bad data on disk, but the hard drive reads the bad data without error.
With parity, (even assuming the parity is read upon each read request, which would be a faulty assumption), raid 5 has no way of telling which disk is bad, or whether the parity is bad.
Unlike raid, ZFS has end to end checksumming, so it knows when the data on disk is bad, and it knows which copy is bad, too.
Unfortunately though, from what I've heard, ZFS isn't stable enough for production environments yet:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/15/joyent_backup_services_down_for_three_days.html
read these comments
I fear the Y2038 bug
The source code (which remaps linux systems calls to open solaris and fudges inconsistencies)
Info on installing debian (it's designed for RedHat based linux, so it's slightly painful ... though possibly out of date).
Brand Z info
Overview of linux support
I haven't tried it, but there shouldn't be much overhead/performance loss.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No this is Debian.
Sun has a video out that I'm too lazy to search for here, where they run ZFS on a bunch of pen drives, plugged into a USB 2.0 Hub. Faster, and fault tolerant. Pretty amazing. ZFS is not for just servers. Think of apples "time machine" software. Also, ZFS includes lots of Metadata and checksums, to prevent bit-rot of your files.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
As it happens, it's actually not a bad tool. From SMC you can manage users, track workloads, install patches, and do dozens of other day-to-day functions for all the servers on your network. The "slowness" you're talking about is just Solaris, not the tool. It takes just shy of forever to get a fresh Solaris system up to date with the latest patches. (I swear, Sun releases WAY too many patches.) A secret for you is that you don't actually have to install all of those patches. Pick the patches that apply to you and ignore the rest. (e.g. If you don't have a Sun Elite Graphics Card, why are you bothering to install patches for it? On occasion, some of the patches can even be exclusive to each other depending on your configuration!)
Of course, all of this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the new IPS system. Standard Solaris 10 installs include the tradition Solaris packaging system, not the updated IPS system. So you should really give back that mod point that was so kindly provided to your rant.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
While ZFS is cool, it will someday be ported to Linux (the market forces are such). The advantages over ext3 etc. are simply not compelling enough for me to abandon an entire universe of software and hardware I have gotten used to with Linux distributions.
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
(I work for Sun)
These days we see a lot of performance related calls being logged by customers
DTrace is a massive leap forwards
I would really not write off Solaris, it's far from dead
JNode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JNode) would like a word with you.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Solaris 11 = The upcoming version of Solaris.
"Project Indiana" was just the codname for founding OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris = Bleeding-Edge Test Version of Solaris 11 (Think "Alpha")
Solaris Express = Snapshot of OpenSolaris found to be "relatively stable". (Think "Beta")
Solaris 10 = The full "retail" version, often updated with features seeping up from OpenSolaris, that needs to run fine and be perfectly stable on Big Iron.
Well, I tried ZFS on FreeBSD and after a few severe crashes (the last tries were 3 weeks ago on FreeBSD 7-STABLE), this is a combo that I will never put any production data on. At least no until a few years of stabilization.
Yes, FreeBSD has ZFS, but it's experimental for a reason. So no need to avocate this yet.
The only serious platform for ZFS yet is still Solaris, and Indiana is a welcome release.
I've also a lot of hopes in DragonflyBSD's HAMMER filesystem.
{{.sig}}
http://xkcd.com/37/
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/15/joyent_backup_services_down_for_three_days.html
read these comments From that same article you linked to: UPDATE: See our follow-up story for more. Joyent was using an older version of ZFS, and the bug in question was fixed nearly a year ago. From that article it seems that patching/updating OpenSolaris isn't the same as patching/updating Solaris. I have no personal experience in updating OpenSolaris though. OpenSolaris does seem to have the smpatch utility.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You misuse the semicolon. A semicolon is not used in the same contexts as a colon. Instead, it is used to join two sentences (which would otherwise be complete), or to separate items in a list when the use of a comma would be ambiguous. Therefore:
"John was ready already; Anna made him wait."
"They offered lasagne; hamburgers, chips and salad; tacos, enchilladas and burritos; or fried frogs legs."
In no circumstance can you write "As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded..." without looking like a semiliterate try-hard. In general, the best advice for using a semicolon is "don't, unless you know you're sure".
As a self-confessed geek, you should know the importance of correct punctuation. It's not just helpful to compilers.
Look out!
You may believe what you're saying, but you're probably just confused. Don't worry about it. It happens to the best of us.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sorry, I'm calling you on your B.S. Sun fanboy.
ZFS is *not* ready for production.
I'm a working Solaris admin. I can point to several ZFS raidz arrays that have had to be recovered from tape due to ZFS bugs losing & corrupting data.
This is clearly a case of ZFS marketing outstripping ZFS reality. They have implemented all the cool features, but have dropped the ball on robustness.
Do a sunsolve search for ZFS panics or ZFS corruption. There are a half-dozen major bugs that are still un-resolved, and won't be until Sol10u6 - if then. [u5 was just released in the last week or so]
rho
Unless of course, you expect to use it in production. Even freebsd zfs developers say it is not ready on freebsd yet.
Solaris : I aint'ed dead yet
Linux : Yes you are
Solaris : I'm feeling better !
Linux : You'll be stone dead in a moment
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
And what
Last time I lost data to a filesystem problem must have been to a FAT disk, which means it must have been 10 or 15 years ago. I did lose data to hardware failures though. Several times. Recovered most of them through backups. Not all.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
GNOME is also the default for most mainstream linux distributions that Sun would want to position OpenSolaris against. RHEL, SuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora.
You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Upon reboot two devices in the array came up with bad magic in the superblock and all was lost. The consensus seems to be that filesystem corruption caused enough confusion that the md driver decided to overwrite the superblocks. No hardware failure required, and there probably isn't enough info from the failure to find the bug. The bug is still there, and this will happen again to somebody.
Support SETI@home
things not looking so good after reading the transcripts of the Novell/SCO trial, Novell wasn't properly involved nor paid in SCO's granting to Sun the ability to open source System V technology in OpenSolaris. Uh oh, what SCO lied about Linux might be 100% dead on with OpenSolaris, stolen Unix IP!!!
I believe your evaluation to be incorrect on several levels. Firstly, the issue you point out is true for RAID-anything, as the filesystem has to be able to survive the loss of one of the disks for RAIDZ. RAID5 is no different in this regard.
Secondly, with RAIDZ (or RAID5) and 4x500GB, you wouldn't end up with 2TB of disk space -- you'd end up with 1.5TB due to the overhead of the parity data.
Thirdly, you don't have to replace all of the disk drives with RAIDZ to increase the amount of disk space dramatically. You seem to be thinking of RAID5, not RAIDZ. With RAIDZ replacing one of your 500GB disk drives with a new 2TB disk drive would indeed still leave you with only 1.5TB of disk space, due to the requirement for redundancy, but if you bought a pair of 2TB disk drives to replace two of your 500GB disk drives, you would increase your disk capacity from 1.5TB to 3TB, and if you just added the pair of 2TB disk drives to the pool as a mirror, as opposed to replacing existing drives, then you'd increase your disk capacity to 3.5TB.
Fourth, no one is forcing you to use redundancy with ZFS if you don't want to suffer the redundancy/reliability overhead. You can add non-redundant disk drives to a ZFS pool.
If you want extra reliability, you have to pay for it somehow.
|>oug
Novell taking on SCO is one thing, Novell taking on Sun is quite another. Sun is a much bigger company than Novell and a lot more money. It's not worth the fight.
It seems like SCO stiffed Novell by not giving them their cut of the licenses, but that doesn't mean the licenses they gave were invalid. If that was the case, the issue would have come up already.
Novell gets some good publicity in their fight against SCO, but in reality, they're not much of a player in anything. SuSE isn't that popular, at some point their revenues for their legacy products will dry up, and then what's left? There revenue has been declining for years and their profits have been iffy. All they're going to get out of the SCO trial is some pats on the back since SCO doesn't have any more money.
While there's no arguing that what SCO did was messed up, I don't really see Novell in a good light either. Novell purchased the rights to Unix for $300mil. The transaction between Novell and SCO was for about $120-150Mill. So SCO paid about half of what Novell paid and only gets 5% in licensing fees and no patent or copyrights according to Novell.
This just doesn't seem right to me. Either Novell seriously screwed over SCO and they were too stupid to know it, or something else is going on. Ray Noorda, who was CEO of Novell, left to start Caldera. Noorda is undeniably the reason Novell was who they were. From what I could gather they did have a good relationship.
Bottom line, I don't understand how Novell can claim they pretty much just sold a 5% commission deal for 50% of what they paid and act like their shit doesn't stink either.
According the wikipedia Up to his death, Noorda owned the Canopy Group. One of its holdings, Caldera Systems, purchased the Unix assets in 1995 from the Santa Cruz Operation, which had acquired them from Novell. In 1996 it also acquired the Digital Research assets from Novell and immediately brought a lawsuit against Microsoft that largely duplicated the claims that the FTC and Department of Justice had pursued in the early 1990s. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 2000 with a $275 million payment to Caldera. Every time one of Norda's companies purchases something that used to belong to Novell, they sue. Usually Microsoft (Noorda hated MS).
Sorry but it just seems fishy to me. How would Novell not expect that SCO/Caldera would ultimately sue. Maybe Novell was aware of a possible lawsuit to attack RedHat while they were making moves with SuSE?
Open Source Java DAO Generator
zfs is light years beyond typical raid environments... software or hardware...
most raid environments don't do checksumming at every step of the data write / read process.
most raid environments cannot detect silent corruption (bad cache, bad sector, flipped bit, etc) once the data has been read or written.
most raid environments don't offer double parity.
most raid environments require that the entire raid array be initialized at once, wasting potentially hours of time for the formatting/initializing to be completed.
most raid environments when using off the shelf SATA/PATA drives can potentially go bad, even with parity... If you were doing a RAID 5 array with TB size drives, there's a potential that the MTBE can be reached while regenerating data on a replaced volume from parity causing the entire array to be toasted.
All of these things are not issues with ZFS....
ZFS is easily expandable, automatically realigns that data as you expand the pool, can have multiple sub-mount points (mounted anywhere) that can have different attributes - like compressing/shared/extended permissions/iSCSI and more on the way, like encryption, multiple compression algorithms, etc....
I've played/worked with ZFS now for over 2 years and have never lost a single bit of data - even though I've tried...
Build your RAIDZ pool on 20 drives, in 2 disk expansion units attached to 2 channels of a single SCSI card (10 drives per channel)... now shut the box down, remove all the drives, move them around between units, add an additional scsi card to the box, split the disks up between the scsi cards so they are now split 5 per channel, take one drive back out, and erase it... hold onto it for later...
Bring the box back up... the pool will come back online without problems, running degraded as one drive is missing.
now put the erased drive back in, and issue a resilver command, wait a while (not as long as a standard raid controller would take) and voila - all data that was stored on that erased drive is back and in place, and the pool is no longer running in degraded performance mode.
try any of that with a standard raid controller and your data is f0rked!
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Read the transcripts. Novell sent Sun a letter before they open sourced Solaris to warn them that their license from SCO was invalid. Now they're asking the court to rule that this is the case, and Judge Kimball has given every indication that he's willing to do so.
I imagine that the folks at Sun have been pretty nervous since last August. Imagine, paying millions of dollars to put your product in exactly the position you've been (erroneously) proclaiming your competition is in. Not smart.
It's not Debian. Debian has had the ability to fully encrypt the root partition during installation since Sarge I think. Etch for sure. Ubuntu can do it too with the alternate installer. OpenSuse and Slackware have excellent docs on how to get / file encryption. Disk Encryption is essential for laptops and removable media in 2008. If Solaris wants to get adopted by government and financial sectors for use on laptops it will need to have some form of serious disk encryption. To be fair to the OpenSolaris people there are two teams working on encryption solutions but I think they lag well behind Linux or even Windows (Truecrypt) solutions. Two in development projects: Crypto in the lofi(7D) driver (a bit like dm-crypt on Linux or FileVault on MacOS X): http://opensolaris.org/os/project/loficc/ due to integrate soon. and ZFS Crypto which is still in development but due to integrate this summer. http://opensolaris.org/os/project/zfs-crypto/ However neither of these provide for an encrypted root filesystem as they aren't full disk encryption solutions. However with ZFS Crypto all of your home directory and other datasets (filesystems) with sensitive data can be encrypted. I for one welcome my Sun Microsystems overlords...actually I am glad to see another alternative to Windows becoming more accessible to the masses. I have my copy in bittorrent now ready to install in my [Sun Microsystems] Virtualbox 1.6.0 Congratulations to the Project Indiana Team!
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
You get the Blackberry answer because I'm remote.
stupid enough? I don't know about the characterization.
They had the rights to SVR4 that Solaris is based on to use it, to develop their own OS based on it, to sell it under trade secret and copyright protection but not to make it open. They then bought that right for a song from SCO because at that moment the latter needed a cash infusion to continue their jihad against Linux.
The judge in te SCO V Novell case ruled last August that SCO does not own the copyright to SVR4 and it follows had no right to sell the right to make it open. Novell owns that right and reserved it in a document called th APA. You can read about it on groklaw.
The reason why Novell reserved that right - and why the rights to unix were split so badly as to make it irretrievably dead had to do with Ransom Love's hubris. Hubris is the arrogance of pride.
Mr. Love was president and founder of one of the earliest commercial Linux companies, the Santa Cruz Operation (not to be confused with SCO). When his IPO went bizarrely huge for no good reason its treasury stock was worth several more digits than he was used to dealing with. Paid in equity grew to half a billion and they never sold the majority of treasury stock. Marke cap was several times that early on. Of course he bought all the toys the bubble millionaires like and threw huge company parties, but he was also an old school geek like you find here on slashdot now and then.
It happened that at that precise moment the company that had purchased the rights, code and business of unix from bell labs in their breakup (but not the trademark oddly enough), Novell was finding no success with unix and needed a cash infusion to retake ownership of the network, which had been their genesis. (Some will get the irony of this!). Being an old school geek Ransom wanted to "buy unix" as a trophy for having built a successful Linux business.
Unfortunately he didn't have enough to buy the whole thing and being as he was still wet behind the ears in corporate goverment and his company had never ever turned a quarterly profit, Novell insisted on terms. Here's where the hubris come in. He bought the right to market unix for 5% of the gross with the rest going to Novell plus the right to develop a new and better unix he could keep all of the profits from. For rhis he paid in company stock that I hope Novell sold right away because within a year it was nearly wothless. I think he really believed he could mix in GNU/Linux and come out with something like this Open Solaris and buy up the rest of the rights and take over the server market. It didn't work out because he didn't have the rights to open it fully to attract open developers, his ipo money bled out too fast and eventually his company was bought out by an investment group (this one is the SCO we know and loathe)
By making the attempt he fractured the rights to unix in such a way that the OS languished for over a decade, much to the glee of Microsoft which spent that decade taking ownership of the desktop network client and nearly half of servers. In software a decade is a very long time.
I hope this explains it well enough. My thumbs hurt now.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Linux 2.6 Kernel AIO (and its flaws) Support for kernel AIO has been included in the 2.6 Linux kernel. (...) On ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs and nfs, these do not return an explicit error, but quietly default to synchronous or rather non-AIO behaviour (...) AIO read and write on sockets (doesn't return an explicit error, but quietly defaults to synchronous or rather non-AIO behavior) Linux kernel AIO to do list.
Google is your friend!
(BTW and it was 2005 when I needed it; it killed the performance of my code because it was executed synchronously instead of asynchronously)
The big plus of Nexenta for me is that it is based on APT, whereas OpenSolaris (the distro) has invented yet another new package system (IPS). APT just works so well on Debian and Ubuntu that I don't want to use anything else, and for end users there are nice tools like Synaptic and Ubuntu's Add/Remove tool (which shows popularity ratings for packages as well). At least PCLinuxOS adopted APT while still using RPM as the package format...
My only real interest in Solaris is to use ZFS on a home NAS - having all that checksumming looks a lot more attractive now that disk sizes are getting so huge that, according to some, RAID 5 will stop being useful in 2009, due to the scenario of one disk failing and another one having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild - see http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162. Without proactive scanning of the disk media for read errors before any failure, and checksumming that can hopefully correct some such errors, RAID 5 rebuilds after failed disks will increasingly fail due to UREs. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html as well for a much more technical view of the issues with RAID 5.
...IPS were better than apt?
It's designed by (deb)Ian Murdock, with 15 years of hindsight.
The code has apparently gotten a bit cleaner although BSD still remains more legible.
Still it doesn't change the fact that for the time being Linux is *it* (whatever that is). It's the system that has the mind share (apart from Windows of course). And for the most part it works just fine.
So while there certainly are other more advanced solutions, I don't see them taking Linux's place in the sun (ha ha) any time soon.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
Are you using content of any sort (images, documents, mp3s...)? Do you care about the longevity or integrity of any of your data? Have you ever lost data? Slap a GUI on ZFS, call it "time machine" and you don't have to be "managing servers" to appreciate what ZFS can provide to Joe user.
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
If you think dtrace is just for developers, you don't understand dtrace. Developers have always been able to scatter printfs in the code and set breakpoints in debuggers to glean what their piece of code is doing. The beauty of dtrace is that it allows anyone (including users, service technicians and even managers), to see what is happening on a system-wide basis without compiling or even having access to the any of the source code of processes running on that system. dtrace will prove itself far more useful for system administration and post-deployment troubleshooting than it will for developers.
But what about Joe user? Have you ever encountered an application hang? Have you ever encountered a sluggish system where "top" shows and "top" as the top process at only 3% CPU usage? Have you ever wondered whether any of your applications (e.g. spyware) are doing something they shouldn't be doing? Have you ever wondered why doubling CPU clock frequency hasn't made your environment any faster, and whether it is possible that other bottlenecks (I/O, paging activity...) might be responsible for a performance problem? Dtrace is the tool which allows you to see all of this.
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
Oh come on. I supported GNU/Linux long enough to know what a kludge rc.* startup scripts are. I know how non-deterministic it is and how many race conditions exist in a typical startup which work most of the time only by chance. While this is fine for a single user laptop, for enterprise looking for 6 figure reliability on massive clusters, rc.* doesn't cut it. There is a very good reason why GNU/Linux is moving towards what Solaris already has.
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Well, I suppose you could say the same for other *nix features: "Rsync doesn't seam(sic) any better than cp..." "tar doesn't seem any better than cpio..."
The biggest advantage for the enterprise user is that IPS is backwards compatible with the thousands of existing SVR4 packages and patches. RPM and Debian APT never will be. RPM and Debian APT do not know about zones, nor know how to handle package installs and upgrades across zones nor will they be able to ever take advantage of zfs snapshot/rollback features for seamless install/uninstall.
I find this interesting, as I just had an issue related to this last Sunday. I tried to play a video from my Ubuntu fileserver running software RAID-5 and found the video was corrupted. It would jump and skip with no sound. In fact *all* the files on the RAID array were corrupted, videos, images, mp3's and everything else. /proc/mdstat and it said everything was fine. So I checked each drive with fdisk and found one of the 5 drives had no TOC, so I wrote a new TOC to it and tried to re-add it to the array, only to find the new TOC didn't stick.
I checked
I dropped the drive off the array, and reassembled it, and all my files were fine afterward. I am currently mirroring everything to a 1 TB external drive.
apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html
Also worth reading are:
Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf[pdf]
Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
With ZFS, a pool is a collection of "vdevs", and you can add new vdevs to the pool at any time to increase the capacity of the pool. A vdev is either a RAIDZ (which is kind of like RAID5), a RAIDZ2 (which is kind of like RAID6), a mirror (which is kind of like RAID1), or a bare disk. The pool is then is kind of like a RAID0 over all the vdevs.
|>oug