Let me get this straight: Once you spend hours building your own distribution on top of the one Sun provides that's custom and untested you have some of the same goodness that Linux users enjoy right out of the box.
Ever hear of "pkgadd"? It works a lot like "rpm". In fact, it predates rpm, so I'm willing to bet it inspired it.
Guess what? The vast majority of the GNU stuff is available for Solaris as packages that can be added with pkgadd. The most frequently used are starting to get wrapped into Solaris, a wide range of the others come on a "companion CD" with Solaris, and you can get the rest from solarisfreeware.com.
Takes all of about 2 minutes to write a for loop that installs all the ones that come with the OS, and once you get wget (one of those) installed, you can wget and install the rest you like from solarisfreeware. Damn, that's hard, and takes SO MANY HOURS.
Neither one is installed by default. They're "too insecure" for "mere users" to ever want to use. Never mind that, as you say, telnet (the client) is useful for testing and for connecting to lots of legacy equipment like old TC's etc.
You must have missed where I said "as a Unix Vendor". Diebold is taken very seriously as a provider of ATM machines, but nobody compares them to Red Hat, despite the fact that the ATM machines run winders.
Every distro I've used (SuSE, Debian, Red Hat) suffers from the same disjointed problems (though Debian is the best from this aspect, for obvious reasons), because making things be consistent is a HARD JOB, especially when the underlying software isn't written to any kind of common standard. Red Hat may be the worst of the lot, but I have yet to see any distro that I can get off the shelf that doesn't have the same issue.
As for the rest of it, read my whole commentary here. Yes, I agree, use the right tool for the right job. Just quit saying that Sun is never the right tool and they should just give up and go away, because that's just stupid, and ignores all the places where Sun equipment is the right tool (big high end stuff in particular).
I'm sorry, but it's not exactly clear that the sunos5 kernel is more scalable than the linux kernel.
"recently". Sun's been scaling for how long now? Working on tweaking it with each release since 2.0? Show me Linux throughput benchmarks on a 32 or 64 way machine, and we'll have some data to talk about.
How does using Linux lock you in?
Did you read what he said? "I have no time to port to another OS/architecture, even if I wanted to". That sounds like lock in to me.
Because they're ENORMOUS and have a huge managed services organization. And probably the personnell to be able to manage the split personality of writing and supporting their own OS and Linux. Since they did it with Mainframe and Unix for so many years, they have more experience at it too. Woo hoo. I can't imagine there's room in the marketplace for another company trying to be a carbon copy of them.
That's not to say that there aren't a lot of folks out there who are using Linux for reasons not related to zealotry.
I don't recall saying they weren't. Linux has a lot of good uses and places. Even Sun admits that.
You're not paying attention are you? If the underlying drivers don't let you allocate new storage without rebooting, all the volume management chops in the world don't help.
Given the market pressure to downsize, and the significantly different mindsets/environments between Solaris and Linux, I can't see how embracing both is really very feasable without a bunch of developers and support staff who are capable of severe split personality.
I didn't attack Linux, I attacked the assertion that it was obviously better for all purposes. As a matter of fact, I run Linux at home because it's a lot easier FOR AN INDIVIDUAL in a SMALL ENVIRONMENT to deal with. That's not enterprise class usage, and the attempts I've seen at enterprise class usage of Linux only rarely work (yeah, trot out Google. Good example. A shame more companies don't run like Google. Fact is, though, they don't).
Linux is only easier to use if it's what you use all the time. Solaris is easier to use in the same sense, plus it has more consistency in "how you do things" across the entire product. It wasn't designed by a million hackers scratching their own itches. That's a benefit and a limitation, quite honestly, but when it comes to ease of use, it's an advantage.
But in the end yes, you make sense--use the right tool for the right job.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 5, Insightful
it presumably would have developed them there instead.
DTrace, and other kernel related goodies, would be extremely hard to fit into the overall scheme of how the Linux kernel currently works. In other words, the investment to make it work in Linux would be significantly higher.
The parent claimed that Sun should have dropped a more mature, more cohesive, more scalable kernel and turned their attention to the Linux kernel. That's flat ludicrous from an investement standpoint. "Hey, we've done all the work in our kernel, let's just do it all over again with a new kernel that doesn't work even remotely the same way as ours, so we have to do pretty much the same amount of work all over again."
If your argument is that Linux is easier to use because of GNU stuff....guess what? You can add all that stuff to Solaris and it works great. You don't even have to compile the majority of it, you can pull it off the Solaris companion CD or (gasp) out of the several GNU tools that are now officially part of the supported OS.
a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant
I sympathize, and I wouldn't try to get you to change. But I'd like to point out that this problem effectively makes Linux just as proprietary in a "lock in" sense as Solaris. You're locked in. If it does the job you need it to do, that's not necessarily a problem, but I hope the hard core zealots reading this recognize the spurious nature of arguing "but Linux is OPEN". Once Solaris 10 is open source, even the argument of being able to continue on without Sun in the marketplace goes belly up.
You mean unlike all the FUD from Red Hat? Or the (very sad, juvenile) airplanes flying over Sun Campuses this week with "just another day at Red Hat", trying to pretend that spending lots of money marketing something means you don't give a shit?
Quit pretending that Red Hat is so far above Sun in this manner. I don't think Sun's FUD is ver productive or useful, but it's not any bloody different than any other one of the players in this space.
What is the point of continuing to use a OS that's 2 generations old? If I were complaining about bugs in Red Hat 8, you think Red Hat would be spending lots of resources on fixing every last one of those? No, they'd be telling me to upgrade.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Guess what? What's easy to use is primarily determined by WHAT YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH. If I had a dollar for every Solaris admin who bitched to me about what a pain in the ass Linux was to try and figure out, I'd be a rich man. And it sounds like it works the same way from the Linux side.
The biggest difference, to my mind, is that Linux is a collection of tools all written by different people without a whole lot of coordination to the idea of consistency of interface. Yeah, most of the GNU tools are consistent, but there are a lot of useful and/or necessary Linux packages that aren't GNU and don't conform to the GNU "way". So instead of "getting" the general idea about how things work and being able to apply it across the product, you have to figure out each piece's "way" of doing things as you go. Much harder to keep straight unless you're doing it all the time every day.
As for Red Hat "enterprise ready" offerings, I spit in their general direction. I just had a coworker trying to configure a Red Hat box with "enterprise" level SAN storage. With Solaris, you load the SAN packages, which are clearly documented and easy to find, you plug in your SAN, and away you go. If you need to make changes on the fly, there are a couple of commands to accomplish it, and you're done. With Red Hat, you go find the kernel drivers, load the kernel source, compile the kernel drivers, try to figure out what needs to be done to tell the kenel drivers about the storage....etc. Maybe it's a process that's not terribly difficult to do once you've done it a couple times, but it's a major hassle to figure out, as there's no particularly good documentation on how to do it.
That's not easy to use.
As for major financial institutions flying with the flavor of the week, if you've actually been involved in the decisions to do that sort of thing, you'll understand that such decisions are 90% of the time politically and "buzzword" driven as much as technology driven, if they're technology driven at all. If they want to replace the small Sun boxes they have with Linux boxes, more power to them. I have yet to hear of a credible case of ripping out a 6500, a 6800, a 10k or a 15k and replacing it with linux boxes.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 2, Informative
1) Sun isn't going to replace everything with the GNU versions, because backwards compatability and consistency is valued (unlike so many times I've upgraded my linux box and had to re-learn how some key system tool works).
2) Sun DOES provide very easy to use and install packages with the vast majority of the GNU tools. Some of them are part of the core OS now, and the rest of them are on the Companion CD. "They should be standard!! It's too haaaard to install extra packages that take about 5 minutes to load!" Well, I think the same thing about telnet, but guess what? Every distro under the sun makes me go add telnet manually. Thems the breaks.
Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, linux is so much easier to use than Solaris, and has such advanced capabilities by comparison to things like DTrace, the SAN stack that lets you add and remove storage on the fly, etc.
Not only insightful, but also "duh" obvious. Guess what? All those photos your grandparents took? They're fading. They're not perpetual. You're going to have to have them digitized and reprinted if you want "prints" that last forever. Every medium degrades, some faster, some slower. Digital is not so much subject to decay as it is to obsolecense, but the same principles apply. Keep doing technology refreshes and you should be fine.
I think there's a difference between transactional taxes on things like phone service, gas tax, sales tax, etc. and the items you list. For transactional taxes, I agree that the tax should apply to the arena of the transaction taxed. For the others you mention, don't we already have an income tax? I don't recall the grandparent post saying to abolish that.... Such things are also municipally funded by property taxes....
Slashdot Mirror
Ever hear of "pkgadd"? It works a lot like "rpm". In fact, it predates rpm, so I'm willing to bet it inspired it.
Guess what? The vast majority of the GNU stuff is available for Solaris as packages that can be added with pkgadd. The most frequently used are starting to get wrapped into Solaris, a wide range of the others come on a "companion CD" with Solaris, and you can get the rest from solarisfreeware.com.
Takes all of about 2 minutes to write a for loop that installs all the ones that come with the OS, and once you get wget (one of those) installed, you can wget and install the rest you like from solarisfreeware. Damn, that's hard, and takes SO MANY HOURS.
Neither one is installed by default. They're "too insecure" for "mere users" to ever want to use. Never mind that, as you say, telnet (the client) is useful for testing and for connecting to lots of legacy equipment like old TC's etc.
Which doesn't remotely counter the fact that they are MORE robust.
You must have missed where I said "as a Unix Vendor". Diebold is taken very seriously as a provider of ATM machines, but nobody compares them to Red Hat, despite the fact that the ATM machines run winders.
Don't EVEN get me started with the nonstandard by default bs in gnu tar!
Ah, just the sort of "we know better than you" that Sun gets blasted for all the time. Hypocrite.
I would argue that what's unique is more than 10% as well. If nothing else, maturity counts for a lot, when it comes to lack of bugs and stability.
That's right, I forgot. There's no way to get bash for Solaris.
As for the rest of it, read my whole commentary here. Yes, I agree, use the right tool for the right job. Just quit saying that Sun is never the right tool and they should just give up and go away, because that's just stupid, and ignores all the places where Sun equipment is the right tool (big high end stuff in particular).
"recently". Sun's been scaling for how long now? Working on tweaking it with each release since 2.0? Show me Linux throughput benchmarks on a 32 or 64 way machine, and we'll have some data to talk about.
How does using Linux lock you in?
Did you read what he said? "I have no time to port to another OS/architecture, even if I wanted to". That sounds like lock in to me.
Because they're ENORMOUS and have a huge managed services organization. And probably the personnell to be able to manage the split personality of writing and supporting their own OS and Linux. Since they did it with Mainframe and Unix for so many years, they have more experience at it too. Woo hoo. I can't imagine there's room in the marketplace for another company trying to be a carbon copy of them.
That's not to say that there aren't a lot of folks out there who are using Linux for reasons not related to zealotry.
I don't recall saying they weren't. Linux has a lot of good uses and places. Even Sun admits that.
You're not paying attention are you? If the underlying drivers don't let you allocate new storage without rebooting, all the volume management chops in the world don't help.
There were 2 elements in that list.
Given the market pressure to downsize, and the significantly different mindsets/environments between Solaris and Linux, I can't see how embracing both is really very feasable without a bunch of developers and support staff who are capable of severe split personality.
I didn't attack Linux, I attacked the assertion that it was obviously better for all purposes. As a matter of fact, I run Linux at home because it's a lot easier FOR AN INDIVIDUAL in a SMALL ENVIRONMENT to deal with. That's not enterprise class usage, and the attempts I've seen at enterprise class usage of Linux only rarely work (yeah, trot out Google. Good example. A shame more companies don't run like Google. Fact is, though, they don't).
But in the end yes, you make sense--use the right tool for the right job.
DTrace, and other kernel related goodies, would be extremely hard to fit into the overall scheme of how the Linux kernel currently works. In other words, the investment to make it work in Linux would be significantly higher.
The parent claimed that Sun should have dropped a more mature, more cohesive, more scalable kernel and turned their attention to the Linux kernel. That's flat ludicrous from an investement standpoint. "Hey, we've done all the work in our kernel, let's just do it all over again with a new kernel that doesn't work even remotely the same way as ours, so we have to do pretty much the same amount of work all over again."
If your argument is that Linux is easier to use because of GNU stuff....guess what? You can add all that stuff to Solaris and it works great. You don't even have to compile the majority of it, you can pull it off the Solaris companion CD or (gasp) out of the several GNU tools that are now officially part of the supported OS.
a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant
I sympathize, and I wouldn't try to get you to change. But I'd like to point out that this problem effectively makes Linux just as proprietary in a "lock in" sense as Solaris. You're locked in. If it does the job you need it to do, that's not necessarily a problem, but I hope the hard core zealots reading this recognize the spurious nature of arguing "but Linux is OPEN". Once Solaris 10 is open source, even the argument of being able to continue on without Sun in the marketplace goes belly up.
Quit pretending that Red Hat is so far above Sun in this manner. I don't think Sun's FUD is ver productive or useful, but it's not any bloody different than any other one of the players in this space.
What is the point of continuing to use a OS that's 2 generations old? If I were complaining about bugs in Red Hat 8, you think Red Hat would be spending lots of resources on fixing every last one of those? No, they'd be telling me to upgrade.
The biggest difference, to my mind, is that Linux is a collection of tools all written by different people without a whole lot of coordination to the idea of consistency of interface. Yeah, most of the GNU tools are consistent, but there are a lot of useful and/or necessary Linux packages that aren't GNU and don't conform to the GNU "way". So instead of "getting" the general idea about how things work and being able to apply it across the product, you have to figure out each piece's "way" of doing things as you go. Much harder to keep straight unless you're doing it all the time every day.
As for Red Hat "enterprise ready" offerings, I spit in their general direction. I just had a coworker trying to configure a Red Hat box with "enterprise" level SAN storage. With Solaris, you load the SAN packages, which are clearly documented and easy to find, you plug in your SAN, and away you go. If you need to make changes on the fly, there are a couple of commands to accomplish it, and you're done. With Red Hat, you go find the kernel drivers, load the kernel source, compile the kernel drivers, try to figure out what needs to be done to tell the kenel drivers about the storage....etc. Maybe it's a process that's not terribly difficult to do once you've done it a couple times, but it's a major hassle to figure out, as there's no particularly good documentation on how to do it.
That's not easy to use.
As for major financial institutions flying with the flavor of the week, if you've actually been involved in the decisions to do that sort of thing, you'll understand that such decisions are 90% of the time politically and "buzzword" driven as much as technology driven, if they're technology driven at all. If they want to replace the small Sun boxes they have with Linux boxes, more power to them. I have yet to hear of a credible case of ripping out a 6500, a 6800, a 10k or a 15k and replacing it with linux boxes.
2) Sun DOES provide very easy to use and install packages with the vast majority of the GNU tools. Some of them are part of the core OS now, and the rest of them are on the Companion CD. "They should be standard!! It's too haaaard to install extra packages that take about 5 minutes to load!" Well, I think the same thing about telnet, but guess what? Every distro under the sun makes me go add telnet manually. Thems the breaks.
In case you missed it, that was sarcasm.
Now if only you'd invest that much energy and anger into something that really mattered!
No disagreement here, but how does that address the quoted point, trying to ascertain the left/right bias of CNN?
So slashdot is now "news for n00bs"? That would explain a lot....
Not only insightful, but also "duh" obvious. Guess what? All those photos your grandparents took? They're fading. They're not perpetual. You're going to have to have them digitized and reprinted if you want "prints" that last forever. Every medium degrades, some faster, some slower. Digital is not so much subject to decay as it is to obsolecense, but the same principles apply. Keep doing technology refreshes and you should be fine.
I think there's a difference between transactional taxes on things like phone service, gas tax, sales tax, etc. and the items you list. For transactional taxes, I agree that the tax should apply to the arena of the transaction taxed. For the others you mention, don't we already have an income tax? I don't recall the grandparent post saying to abolish that.... Such things are also municipally funded by property taxes....