Sun Is Giving Away Solaris 10 DVDs

sounds good.
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D.P. said:
Long way ahead of every other OS on the planet that sure.
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Someone's been spending too much time reading Sun's leaflets and literature.
Most of people I know that had contact with Sparcs, myself included run linux on them if they can. It's just logical thing to do.
 
v0n said:
Someone's been spending too much time reading Sun's leaflets and literature.
Most of people I know that had contact with Sparcs, myself included run linux on them if they can. It's just logical thing to do.
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Hardly anyone I know does that, at least not in a professional environment. Why pay different vendors for hardware and OS support when you can get both from Sun much cheaper if you're running their boxes.

What logical reason is there for running Linux on a Sparc box?
 
v0n said:
Someone's been spending too much time reading Sun's leaflets and literature.
Most of people I know that had contact with Sparcs, myself included run linux on them if they can. It's just logical thing to do.
Click to expand...


No One I know does that.

I attended NDA Solaris 10 and USn hardware conferences. OSme very tatsy stuff coming.

Virtual servers for starters ZFS. Solaris is an awesome OS. But remember, it is not designed as an out of the box desktop for home use. I mean, a straight install leaves a very danger unsecured OS.

Sun's biggest customer is the US DoD. Sun hardware and Solaris is military grade equipment.
 
Wicksta said:
What logical reason is there for running Linux on a Sparc box?
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Because such great hardware doesn't deserve such unfriendly, hostile and unsecure OS as Solaris.

D.P. said:
Sun hardware and Solaris is military grade equipment.
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Customer base doesn't make the software great. Back in the time when Solaris would cost several thousand pounds scientific and media world was using SGI and Irix with even more insane pricetags. And as much as hardware was great and what you could do with it even grater, at some point if you had no support package from SGI with engineers on standby it would get compromised in seconds. I should know I spent months patching and servicing SGI boxes. Sometimes I would walk into a room and look at them funny and half of the farm would start printing their root passwords and other half moving it's /lib directories to /dev/null just in case. That's the kind of security we are talking about here. ;) And still everyone would buy them by the kilo, as there wasn't really any alternative to speak of.

But now we live in different times.
We do have a choice.

Anything you can think of, anything that you will use in the everyday environment as Unix admin will be always harder and more tiresome to do on Solaris. In many ways it's just like Dec Unix was - great to look at when it was in the box but just unneccessary complication of great standard for no logical reason.
Solaris is the elitist *nix. The OS so perverse and so niche in its quirks that firms that decide to use it (mostly because for compatibility with old hardware and code, DoD great example there) spend great amounts of money to keep it running even when it's free. Even today, when Sun given up and got closer to free unix derived platforms than ever. It's the OS that your staff will never learn fully and you will never stop sending them to trainings because the minute you don't pay attention the next revision takes the whole ruleset and set of standards for a walk.

There is nothing complicated about Unix. And there is no reason to make it so. It's not like we are talking Fire boxes crunching echelon records across 144 threads on 72 processors. In 90% of cases all those Sparc boxes in datacentres run web servers, mail servers, backups and databases. Going for Solaris for such tasks is just as logical as choosing 60ies Land Rover Defender for motorway commute. You know it's gonna be stuck on the side of the road sooner rather than later and you will need specialist garage to deal with it. So why do it? It will run faster, safer and happier with linux. On Sparc hardware.
Come on. You know I'm right. :)
 
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Solaris is the bane of my life. If there is a non-standard way to do things, you can trust Solaris to do it that way.

Instead of just coming up with their own variants of commands entirely, they use identical commands to Linux, but change the argument flags completely. Talk about messing with your brain when you're routinely going between BSD, Ubuntu, Debian and Solaris. Add in the utterly moronic "killall" literally killing a box dead so that you then need to hard reboot it (why? Why? WHY?), when on every other flavour of a POSIX system I've ever touched it just killed all instances of the specified service.
 
solaris 10 is what runs our authoratative DNS (on sun hardware obviously) and I wouldn't swap it for anything, it's very dependable.

then again, budget concerns means the cacheing dns runs on redhat on HP hardware.

still, there's a lot to be said for solaris in a pro environment
 
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