Yes it was SSI. IIRC the servers were shipped to them way before they became available to the general public, so I expect they're pretty flaky beta hardware:). I think they were using a very early form of the wildcat interconnect. I doubt you could buy (or afford) this particular configuration from Sun as a commercial customer.
Solaris has had some 'non-SMP' support for a while, there just hasn't been the interconnects available until now. You could argue that the SunFire boxes aren't true SMP anyway, because off-board memory access is subject to slightly higher latency than on-board. The F15K even more so. Solaris 9 was given some memory placement optimisations to help with this.
Sure, have a look at the Debian SPARC Port [debian.org]. Have a co-worker who runs it on a Sunblade at his desk - works great.
Would you run linux on an Apple PowerBook instead of MacOSX, I know I wouldn't.
Given the cost of Solaris is included in the chassis price on Sun kit (if you're the original owner on an MP capable box) why would you replace an OS designed and tuned directly for the hardware platform, with linux? Especially when Solaris is such a good OS. It just doesn't make sense.
...that we had pushback from customers on selling a "non-standard" linux...
When I was at Sun, this is exactly what I tried to feed back. Who in their right mind would want a non-standard/niche flavour of linux when they can get the real thing from RedHat. Aside from support what value would Sun be offering? The last thing Sun needs is to become another ICL.
This reminds me of Sun386. Remember that? Reactionary thinking by elements of management who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions.
I had the exact same feeling when I saw the Phoenix announcement: WHY?!
Not affiliated with this project at all, but I thought I might comment on this. I compiled mozilla 1.3 on a fairly well spec-ed, 2-way SPARC/Solaris box a few weeks ago. Once the source was unpacked and about 4 hours later the source had almost finished building - it ran out of disk space. I was surprised.
At that point 'du' reported ~/mozilla (containing source and object files) as 1.6GB. Now that's bloated.
Personally, I don't like having the mail client integrated with the browser. I don't want HTML mail support (reading or composition). I certainly don't want any scripting support. I don't want a newsreader built in (I use pan/nget for that). I want smarter filtering capabilities, or no filtering capabilities and lastly I don't want any of the offline reading support. I'm not even sure I want the address book.
I'm all for splitting the applications. I seldom use the composer (but it's nice to have there, when I need it). The IRC client is installed but has never been used, it's just wasting space. I usually run the mail client on one machine and the browser on another so that they're on different screens.
Mozilla mail is the certainly the nicest IMAP client that I've come across, but I want the smallest possible RSS (especially on SunRay servers). A fresh start is often a good way of clearing out the cruft in a application. It's now at the point where it's almost unusable on a 5 year old machine.
...Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years...
Too true (though more than a couple of years I'd say). Most people here don't understand enterprise computing (or they mostly keep quiet). It needs saying again, and again. Linux is not ready. This is not flamebait. It will get there in the end with enough support, but it will require hardware vendor support.
I think everyone here (that matters:) supports UNIX. Linux is sort of mostly UNIX, I would think most of us value it's transparent openness over and above it's conformance to standards, but would I want to support it on big iron now? No, it's not ready, there is no hardware vendor support for big iron functionality and the OS scalability isn't even nearly linear over 10+ CPU's. 10-12 CPU's is midrange by any serious UNIX player standards. Let's not start on fibre channel support, or monitoring tool integration, or any of the other many, many missing bits.
Linux will grow up through the enterprise, through small boxes, to medium sized boxes to large boxes (with vendor support). It'll take time and can't be accelerated by 'many eyes' because those many eyes don't have access to the crucial (and innovative) design details which differentiate one big box vendor's product from another big box vendor's product.
Better yet, send emails congratulating them on using Barry Fox (not affiliated in any way, other than as a reader of New Scientist I assure you) whenever the BBC wheel him out. As technology journalism goes he is pretty damn good. My Mum, a fellow Radio 4 listener (who - bless her, has trouble using a mouse without looking at it) understands a surprising amount of what he covers - and there's still enough technology content to interest and more importantly not irritate me.
Last year I had a conversation with an engineer involved with security for the Bluetooth wireless protocol. I told him that Bluetooth has only privacy and not per-packet authentication. He responded with the prototypical lame responses: 1) pseudorandom frequency hopping makes it "nearly impossible" for an attacker to get in, and 2) the range is only 8 feet, so the attacks are naturally limited.
I tried to argue the point, but eventually gave up. Then I said something like: "I can hardly wait for Bluetooth to become universal, because I really want a wireless keyboard and mouse with the "base station" built into my computer." He said: "Yes, but you really probably don't want to use Bluetooth for that, because then somebody could stuff keystrokes or mouse clicks into your system." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Talk about not getting it.
They have their own Solaris flavour of Unix that they worked so hard on.
As someone who has worked at Sun as a Systems Engineer and now earn my crust supporting Solaris elsewhere, I can tell you that it's very easy to consider Linux and Solaris x86 toy operating systems for toy computers - dull, low end, low margin (but high volume) stuff. If your making 80%-90%+ margin on multi-million (insert local currency unit here) interesting, complex, geographically distributed clustered systems which solve a unique problem with excellent availability and guaranteed mission critical data integrity with decent application performance and a credible level of manageability, it's all too easy to ignore the low end. You'll have to forgive them, currently Linux is not the solution to many problems like this, but Solaris is (or possibly AIX, or HP-UX).
Probably sooner than anyone at Sun cares to imagine, you will be able to do stuff like this on Linux (and maybe even Windows:), there will be decent volume management, mature HA clustering, high-end FC disk array support, big iron scalability and most important of all - business application support. It's not there now, which is why Sun is still going (reasonably, considering the downturn) strong. Sun are going to have to change though, as their market changes.
Sun have always been careful when it comes to litigation, look at how quickly they yanked MP3 support from the JMF when Fraunhofer started grumbling about the MP3 license (it was one or two days). They're still just testing the water when it comes to Linux - give them some encouragement, they're moving in the right direction. Lastly, don't think of Sun as a great big ogre, they are definately the best company I have ever worked for, some of the nicest people you could hope to meet and genuinely passionate about technology and open systems - except for iPlanet and S-Unprofessional Services, they're a bunch of arrogant gits:)
...as you said of the BBC, talks about utter bullshit research some 'scientist' carried out in his 'lab'.
I make sure that I send an email of complaint to the producer of any programme which wheels out the self-publicising Captain Cyborg. I think the 'PM' programme has twigged, as we haven't heard from him since his ludicrous child chipping, or 'we're-going-to-mutilate-a-child-but-meanwhile-let 's-have-an-ethical-debate' scheme. Maybe it's worth complaining about other, less than scientific contributions.
The world's media is useless at reporting science because people who enter journalism as their career are (sweeping generalisation alert) crap at science. The problem is exacerbated by scientists being (further generalisation alert) crap at giving interviews.
New Scientist is the closest I've found to interesting reading coupled with good science, but even that gets pretty fluffy at times. The BBC generally cover science stories with a 'look what the madcap boffins are up to now, what a waste of their time' angle, and most science journals are aimed at scientists so are dull to the non-scientist.
IANAL (I always read that as 'I, anal', *shudder* - but I'm from the UK where scatalogical jokes are standard issue). Here at least, I think that your friend's actions would seen as blackmail.
If your friend had a contract with said employer, then he should obtain redress through the courts (blimey, now I do sound like a lawyer m'lud).
I would certainly never employ someone who acted with such lack of morals and aside from the potential criminal record, I'm sure it wouldn't take much for the 'dick' to destroy your friend's credibility. Remember Bernie Shiffman? Would you knowingly give him a job? - How about after you typed his name into google?
This is a direction Sun is working towards and you're right, it's not trivial. To do it (at all) you need both software and hardware support - this puts Sun in a strong position because they own both their key hardware and software technologies.
SunCluster3.0 gives you global devices - a significant step in that direction, but doing anything useful with them requires a low-latency interconnect. Wildcat gives you that interconnect, but it's only available on the big iron. Solaris is already pretty good at coping with I/O bus or device failures but it needs telling when a CPU or memory is going away so it can stop using it. You can do tricks with the hardware to safely remove boards from a running system, but only after you've given Solaris a chance to quiese it, or it'll panic.
Fault tolerance requires good fault detection (or prediction - even better). Not something you can do at the OS level. If you want fault tolerant hardware, Sun can sell you that - specialised kit with full hardware redundancy, CPU's in lockstep, mirrored RAM etc - and it's expensive, but then the single point of failure is the OS or your application.
...about re-direction is almost good enough.
I think that's a good point. Re-direction is almost always good enough. If my desktop (a SunRay terminal) notices that it's server has gone away, it'll go and find another one in the failover group. Within seconds I have a desktop back. Not the same one, but functionaly equivalent and with my own user data.
In my neck of the woods TXT is practically synonymous with text messaging. No, actually it's, synonymous with the delivery of TXT msg svrl hrs aftr u snt thm...
What I would like is a subscript deal where we get a copy of the current version (what ever it is and with all the patches applied) when its shipped.
You can download the latest release of SPARC Solaris for free from Sun's website. The online version is updated pretty quickly after the CD's go out to contract customers. You only need to download it once and thanks to lofi you don't even need to cut a CD in order to build a JumpStart server.
Your faith in Sun patches is touching. I prefer to test patches first before they're applied to my production machines.
I'm reminded of my A level physics teacher (and the rest of us) critically appraising the Simple Harmonic Motion being exhibited by the lower sixth girls hockey team...
I second that. What makes Northern Ireland so unappealing is the Northern Irish. Especially the Loyalists - if they want to be British, I want to be something else.
The day someone takes away my middle click paste, is the day they pry the related X server code from my cold dead fingers. This is also the reason why I will never switch to a certain computer vendor who's products only have one mouse button.
Slashdot Mirror
Please enlighten someone who is not from the USA.
I haven't got round to RTFA yet, but I assumed they meant ball bearing of the air pistol/rifle variety. The metal ones are 1.77" in diameter.
Yes it was SSI. IIRC the servers were shipped to them way before they became available to the general public, so I expect they're pretty flaky beta hardware :). I think they were using a very early form of the wildcat interconnect. I doubt you could buy (or afford) this particular configuration from Sun as a commercial customer.
Solaris has had some 'non-SMP' support for a while, there just hasn't been the interconnects available until now. You could argue that the SunFire boxes aren't true SMP anyway, because off-board memory access is subject to slightly higher latency than on-board. The F15K even more so. Solaris 9 was given some memory placement optimisations to help with this.
2006? Who cares, we will all have jet cars by then...
:)
We'll be able to deliver the packets by hand! How retrograde
Sure, have a look at the Debian SPARC Port [debian.org]. Have a co-worker who runs it on a Sunblade at his desk - works great.
Would you run linux on an Apple PowerBook instead of MacOSX, I know I wouldn't.
Given the cost of Solaris is included in the chassis price on Sun kit (if you're the original owner on an MP capable box) why would you replace an OS designed and tuned directly for the hardware platform, with linux? Especially when Solaris is such a good OS. It just doesn't make sense.
...that we had pushback from customers on selling a "non-standard" linux...
When I was at Sun, this is exactly what I tried to feed back. Who in their right mind would want a non-standard/niche flavour of linux when they can get the real thing from RedHat. Aside from support what value would Sun be offering? The last thing Sun needs is to become another ICL.
This reminds me of Sun386. Remember that? Reactionary thinking by elements of management who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions.
I like linux, but I love Solaris.
I had the exact same feeling when I saw the Phoenix announcement: WHY?!
Not affiliated with this project at all, but I thought I might comment on this. I compiled mozilla 1.3 on a fairly well spec-ed, 2-way SPARC/Solaris box a few weeks ago. Once the source was unpacked and about 4 hours later the source had almost finished building - it ran out of disk space. I was surprised.
At that point 'du' reported ~/mozilla (containing source and object files) as 1.6GB. Now that's bloated.
Personally, I don't like having the mail client integrated with the browser. I don't want HTML mail support (reading or composition). I certainly don't want any scripting support. I don't want a newsreader built in (I use pan/nget for that). I want smarter filtering capabilities, or no filtering capabilities and lastly I don't want any of the offline reading support. I'm not even sure I want the address book.
I'm all for splitting the applications. I seldom use the composer (but it's nice to have there, when I need it). The IRC client is installed but has never been used, it's just wasting space. I usually run the mail client on one machine and the browser on another so that they're on different screens.
Mozilla mail is the certainly the nicest IMAP client that I've come across, but I want the smallest possible RSS (especially on SunRay servers). A fresh start is often a good way of clearing out the cruft in a application. It's now at the point where it's almost unusable on a 5 year old machine.
...Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years...
:) supports UNIX. Linux is sort of mostly UNIX, I would think most of us value it's transparent openness over and above it's conformance to standards, but would I want to support it on big iron now? No, it's not ready, there is no hardware vendor support for big iron functionality and the OS scalability isn't even nearly linear over 10+ CPU's. 10-12 CPU's is midrange by any serious UNIX player standards. Let's not start on fibre channel support, or monitoring tool integration, or any of the other many, many missing bits.
Too true (though more than a couple of years I'd say). Most people here don't understand enterprise computing (or they mostly keep quiet). It needs saying again, and again. Linux is not ready. This is not flamebait. It will get there in the end with enough support, but it will require hardware vendor support.
I think everyone here (that matters
Linux will grow up through the enterprise, through small boxes, to medium sized boxes to large boxes (with vendor support). It'll take time and can't be accelerated by 'many eyes' because those many eyes don't have access to the crucial (and innovative) design details which differentiate one big box vendor's product from another big box vendor's product.
Better yet, send emails congratulating them on using Barry Fox (not affiliated in any way, other than as a reader of New Scientist I assure you) whenever the BBC wheel him out. As technology journalism goes he is pretty damn good. My Mum, a fellow Radio 4 listener (who - bless her, has trouble using a mouse without looking at it) understands a surprising amount of what he covers - and there's still enough technology content to interest and more importantly not irritate me.
This from the latest Bruce Schneier cryptogram:
Last year I had a conversation with an engineer involved with security for the Bluetooth wireless protocol. I told him that Bluetooth has only privacy and not per-packet authentication. He responded with the prototypical lame responses: 1) pseudorandom frequency hopping makes it "nearly impossible" for an attacker to get in, and 2) the range is only 8 feet, so the attacks are naturally limited.
I tried to argue the point, but eventually gave up. Then I said something like: "I can hardly wait for Bluetooth to become universal, because I really want a wireless keyboard and mouse with the "base station" built into my computer." He said: "Yes, but you really probably don't want to use Bluetooth for that, because then somebody could stuff keystrokes or mouse clicks into your system." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Talk about not getting it.
They have their own Solaris flavour of Unix that they worked so hard on.
:), there will be decent volume management, mature HA clustering, high-end FC disk array support, big iron scalability and most important of all - business application support. It's not there now, which is why Sun is still going (reasonably, considering the downturn) strong. Sun are going to have to change though, as their market changes.
:)
As someone who has worked at Sun as a Systems Engineer and now earn my crust supporting Solaris elsewhere, I can tell you that it's very easy to consider Linux and Solaris x86 toy operating systems for toy computers - dull, low end, low margin (but high volume) stuff. If your making 80%-90%+ margin on multi-million (insert local currency unit here) interesting, complex, geographically distributed clustered systems which solve a unique problem with excellent availability and guaranteed mission critical data integrity with decent application performance and a credible level of manageability, it's all too easy to ignore the low end. You'll have to forgive them, currently Linux is not the solution to many problems like this, but Solaris is (or possibly AIX, or HP-UX).
Probably sooner than anyone at Sun cares to imagine, you will be able to do stuff like this on Linux (and maybe even Windows
Sun have always been careful when it comes to litigation, look at how quickly they yanked MP3 support from the JMF when Fraunhofer started grumbling about the MP3 license (it was one or two days). They're still just testing the water when it comes to Linux - give them some encouragement, they're moving in the right direction. Lastly, don't think of Sun as a great big ogre, they are definately the best company I have ever worked for, some of the nicest people you could hope to meet and genuinely passionate about technology and open systems - except for iPlanet and S-Unprofessional Services, they're a bunch of arrogant gits
...as you said of the BBC, talks about utter bullshit research some 'scientist' carried out in his 'lab'.
t 's-have-an-ethical-debate' scheme. Maybe it's worth complaining about other, less than scientific contributions.
I make sure that I send an email of complaint to the producer of any programme which wheels out the self-publicising Captain Cyborg. I think the 'PM' programme has twigged, as we haven't heard from him since his ludicrous child chipping, or 'we're-going-to-mutilate-a-child-but-meanwhile-le
The world's media is useless at reporting science because people who enter journalism as their career are (sweeping generalisation alert) crap at science. The problem is exacerbated by scientists being (further generalisation alert) crap at giving interviews.
New Scientist is the closest I've found to interesting reading coupled with good science, but even that gets pretty fluffy at times. The BBC generally cover science stories with a 'look what the madcap boffins are up to now, what a waste of their time' angle, and most science journals are aimed at scientists so are dull to the non-scientist.
Given that speed = distance / time, and the speed of light is finite, just increase the distance.
Calling Soviet Russia...
IANAL (I always read that as 'I, anal', *shudder* - but I'm from the UK where scatalogical jokes are standard issue). Here at least, I think that your friend's actions would seen as blackmail.
If your friend had a contract with said employer, then he should obtain redress through the courts (blimey, now I do sound like a lawyer m'lud).
I would certainly never employ someone who acted with such lack of morals and aside from the potential criminal record, I'm sure it wouldn't take much for the 'dick' to destroy your friend's credibility. Remember Bernie Shiffman? Would you knowingly give him a job? - How about after you typed his name into google?
For Solaris you can find it on the Sun freeware CD which comes with the Solaris 8/9 media pack. You can also find it on sunfreeware.com
GNU screen gives you virtual terminals and the ability to disconnect and reconnect to them without ending your shell.
This is a direction Sun is working towards and you're right, it's not trivial. To do it (at all) you need both software and hardware support - this puts Sun in a strong position because they own both their key hardware and software technologies.
...about re-direction is almost good enough.
SunCluster3.0 gives you global devices - a significant step in that direction, but doing anything useful with them requires a low-latency interconnect. Wildcat gives you that interconnect, but it's only available on the big iron. Solaris is already pretty good at coping with I/O bus or device failures but it needs telling when a CPU or memory is going away so it can stop using it. You can do tricks with the hardware to safely remove boards from a running system, but only after you've given Solaris a chance to quiese it, or it'll panic.
Fault tolerance requires good fault detection (or prediction - even better). Not something you can do at the OS level. If you want fault tolerant hardware, Sun can sell you that - specialised kit with full hardware redundancy, CPU's in lockstep, mirrored RAM etc - and it's expensive, but then the single point of failure is the OS or your application.
I think that's a good point. Re-direction is almost always good enough. If my desktop (a SunRay terminal) notices that it's server has gone away, it'll go and find another one in the failover group. Within seconds I have a desktop back. Not the same one, but functionaly equivalent and with my own user data.
It's meant to convey the feeling of dread that you get when you realise that your Sun workstation isn't shutting down as you intended.
Meanwhile the lights have just gone out on the 6500 in the datacentre.
And then your phone rings...
In my neck of the woods TXT is practically synonymous with text messaging. No, actually it's, synonymous with the delivery of TXT msg svrl hrs aftr u snt thm...
it cost me $100 to download them.
Bandwidth is never free, but $100 for 1 + 1/2 CD's? You're being fleeced, good and proper and I'm sure you can get a better deal.
In your case it probably would be cheaper to buy the media.
What I would like is a subscript deal where we get a copy of the current version (what ever it is and with all the patches applied) when its shipped.
You can download the latest release of SPARC Solaris for free from Sun's website. The online version is updated pretty quickly after the CD's go out to contract customers. You only need to download it once and thanks to lofi you don't even need to cut a CD in order to build a JumpStart server.
Your faith in Sun patches is touching. I prefer to test patches first before they're applied to my production machines.
I'm reminded of my A level physics teacher (and the rest of us) critically appraising the Simple Harmonic Motion being exhibited by the lower sixth girls hockey team...
I'm 26. MILF?
In this case it's well worth it to RTFA:
She's lovely
Maybe it's just in my genetic makeup to fancy raven haired beauties who lick lollypops... Rrr.
I second that. What makes Northern Ireland so unappealing is the Northern Irish. Especially the Loyalists - if they want to be British, I want to be something else.
And that revolting accent. Ugh.
The sutuEErshun nuie is tohtuly unuxEErptubul.
The day someone takes away my middle click paste, is the day they pry the related X server code from my cold dead fingers. This is also the reason why I will never switch to a certain computer vendor who's products only have one mouse button.