Slashdot Log In
Take A Look At Solaris 10
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Mar 01, 2005 06:51 AM
from the aughguha-it-burns dept.
from the aughguha-it-burns dept.
SilentBob4 writes "There haven't been many reviews of the recent Solaris 10 release from Sun Microsytems, and even those which are available are thin at best... until now. Mad Penguin, normally a Linux-only site, has release the most comprehensive and well-written review of the OS to date."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, wouldn't they tend to stick with DB/2 on IBM mainframes? At least in the financial sector they do. They wouldn't touch such newfangled technology as Solaris and Oracle with a ten-foot pole ;-)
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently installed Solaris on my 2 Laptops. Reason: testing Solaris compatibility of software that I maintain! ;-)
It has been an interesting experience anyways, because I ended up not only testing (and fixing...) my own software, but also testing Solaris' usability (or rather: lack thereof...):
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to copy them anywhere. Either "pkgadd -d
How do you mount an USB keyfob, or similar device?
In theory, I don't think you should have to mount those at all. vold should do that automatically - just like it does for cds. In practice, getting S10 to recognize my iPod wasn't quite that easy. I haven't tried a USB device, so I can't say whether it will really work.
If vold doesn't automatically mount the keyfob, then try rebooting with the it inserted. Once it has been recognized once at boot, it should be recognized automatically in the future.
Oh, and telneting in from another machine is not an option, if your network card is one of the many that aren't supported out of the box.
On a real PC, you can often redirect the console to a serial line and use "tip" (or some Linux equivalent) to get to the machine's console. That also gives you a way to get a network driver onto the machine without burning it to a CD. uuencode it to ascii, and then use ~> to copy the file over. Since console redirection often isn't available on laptops, this may not work for you.
You can also try PXE booting your machine. Since the boot/install image is on a server, you can easily insert your driver into the image so it is available at install time.
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am going to assume you don't use solaris on a daily basis. If you think solaris is going to work like a redheaded stepchild, you are wrong. you seemed to have come across a bug in the installer, which didn't instruct vold to eject the cd. Because of this, the cdrom drive will remain locked by the volume manager. Forcefully changing the cd will not change anything because the drive never opened, according to vold. I would frequently find solaris machines with nonfunctioning cdrom drives in our datacenter because others that have no solaris experience would paperclip the cdrom drive to get their cds back. Very annoying.
next, don't trust solaris x86 on any hardware that doesn't say sun on the outside. simple as that. solaris is not what is special, its moreso the hardware it runs on and the sparc platform is what solaris is tuned for. yes, x86 may be supported but they don't support every single device created by man.
pkgadd does not ignore -d. get over it.
the install process will also drop you to a text-mode installer if your video card is not supported (a minor problem on our ultra 10s) or don't have a mouse setup. on that note, to fix your X display problem, try disabling it (if you can't figure out how, solaris is definitely not for you yet)
Look at what google turns up about your usb storage device [google.com]
When you try a new OS, you have to get rid of the mentality you're used to. Solaris != Linux, therefore "features" that you normally expect aren't there because the path Solaris takes is different than other OS'. Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc which means, there generally aren't other OS's using the same partition id. Maybe Sun could update the installer, but they didn't. Deal with it. Install everything+oem and lock down the machine with jass, or know what you are doing before you start picking and choosing your packages. Finally, the paths are as they are for historical reasons as well. Solaris didn't always have gcc, they have a much better compiler. GCC was added to the companion cd later since it was publicly available on many sun freeware sites. All non-sun software goes to
Welcome to Solaris, if you don't like it, leave and keep preaching for -insert your favorite os here-. If you want to actually do something productive with Solaris, harness it's real power. Like Zones, ZFS, SMF, etc. Quit bitching about how it doesn't perform like Linux.
-dk
btw, to revive a zombie cdrom drive, stop vold, eject the cd manually (using the button on the cd/dvd drive), start vold
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Insightful)
No need to be a dick. He ran into reasonable problems with some of Solaris' rough edges.
next, don't trust solaris x86 on any hardware that doesn't say sun on the outside
Bull. S10 is humming along just fine on my 2 CPU Dell, my Thinkpad T42 (modulo the Centrino-based Wifi), my homebrewed Epia file server, and my homebrewed 2-way Opteron system. Solaris doesn't have the driver support of Linux, but it still runs on a ton of different hardware.
Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc
No. Solaris is Solaris. The Solaris running on your x86 machine is exactly the same as the Solaris running on your SPARC. Obviously there is some platform-specific code, but it is _not_ a port. They are built from the exact same source tree.
All non-sun software goes to
Or
Welcome to Solaris, if you don't like it, leave and keep preaching for
Again, don't be a dick. He was trying to use Solaris and ran into trouble. It happens. If you look at the rest of the thread, it's obvious that he is looking for suggestions, and is willing to try them out. Do you actually think your semi-informed arrogance is going to make anybody more interested in using Solaris?
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does Solaris get you?
- Guaranteed binary compatibility from the smallest SunFire V100 to the largest 96-CPU capable StarFire boxes.
- Excellent platform stability and predictiability. I have never had to recompile my Solaris kernel to support a memory upgrade. Happened to me with RHEL 2.1 on a production site.
- Excellent and consistent hardware quality
- Reasonable price/performance for some situations. Last I checked, a 4-way SunFire V440 was cheaper than an equivalent Intel box, and far far cheaper than anything from IBM.
I've worked with all flavors of Unix from AIX to Solaris, to HP-UX, to Linux, and I've been running Linux since 1998 in one form or another. My favorite production-grade Unix is still Solaris.
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you run RH ES 3.0? Would that also be a problem with it?
I run SuSE and have been up to 4GiG and haven't had a problem, and the motherboard offers up to 24GB or RAM support (Duel AMD Opteron with 64bit SuSE).
Thanks!
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Informative)
Which makes it even more astonishing that it is so hard to get out of it. No Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to zap the X-server, no Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch virtual consoles, etc. The only straightforward way is the "console login" drop down menu, which is kind of useless in the case the screen is so messed-up that you don't see it...
Fortunately there is another way: if you are a fast typer, and manage to log in on the console before X would start, you stay in text mode.
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:4, Informative)
This is available if you use the Xorg server instead of Xsun. I thought Xorg was the default in s10? If ctrl-alt-backspace isn't working, try using the crtl and alt on the right side of the keyboard. I don't know why those are different than the equivalents on the left side, but they seem to be a bit more reliable in this situation.
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny, I install Solaris from a Jumpstart server, and it installs fine every time. What are these CDs you mention?
Refuses to create a Solaris partition if a Linux Swap partition is present (... because both share the same partition id 82, but other OS'es at least give you the option of "ignore this partition, and create a new one instead!"
Once again, I never had this problem installing Solaris on top of linux on my Sun Blade 100, Ultra 60, or Ultra 5/10.
Poor dependancy management in the installer (the Solaris installer does flag broken dependancies, but unlike most Linux distros does not have a button to "resolve" these automatically)
Do you really feel comfortable having a program automatically installing packages for you on an ENTERPRISE system? I know exactly what packages I want, and when I want them installed. Having a package manager 'know better' than me would be a huge mistake when people actually rely on your services.
No straightforward way to configure a Swiss-German keyboard
These [hta-bi.bfh.ch] people would probably beg to differ. Also, I think Java Desktop works wonders. Honestly, I know nothing about internationalization, so I'll shutup now.
On one of my two laptops, X Display was all messed up after install. Fortunately, there was still an xf86config-like script lying around.
Good for you! Where's the problem here?
poor hardware support (on both laptops, I had to download extra drivers from the net to get Ethernet... and the only way to get these drivers on the Laptop in the first place was to burn a CD.... One of the two Ethernet cards was a via-rhine, not exactly uncommon hardware!)
A laptop is obviously not the intended installation target machine for Solaris. Please stand by while I cry you a river that you had to install drivers. Don't like it? Use MacOSX or something.
Unobvious paths for some sundry utils
They make sense to me.
I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion -- Solaris IS NOT Linux. You're not using it in the way it was intended, so it seems clunky and difficult to manage. Your complaints mostly revolve around the fact that since Solaris is not set up exactly the same, and is not as easy to administer than Linux, that it's unusable. Solaris is a really crummy desktop system. I would say that if you went from Linux to Solaris with no training, reading, or prior preparation, you would probably find it quite unusable.
Solaris is ornery on Intel hardware. Linux was pretty ornery too in its first few years on x86. I run a fairly large Solaris setup (15k+ users) and when we've looked at Linux, it takes a lot more work on the part of the sysadmin to ensure that the system doesn't flake out. Solaris on Sun hardware kicks ass for us. It may not kick ass for you. That doesn't mean it's unusable. I bet a tractor trailer would be unusable at first to your everyday SUV driver!
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just databases or webservers, in my tiny little world we use it mostly for processing radio signals. This also includes demodulation of 'digital' signals through software, as well as de-multiplexing, removing overhead, decryption, stripping through reed solomon, trellis, etc, etc, etc... 'Infinite possibilities' comes to mind most frequently.
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:4, Informative)
"Boxen" is old hacker-speak for the plural of "box". Uses the same pluralization rule as "ox - oxen".
You're not from around here, are you? ^_^
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for a number of years doing SysAdmin/Infrastructure-Architectural work for various global banks. The majority of the niche applications used to provide complex financial services are STILL not ported to "modern" unix-like OS's.
As an example, DST International's (http://www.dstinternational.com) HiPortfolio product will only run on IBM's AIX and Sun's Solaris as it's Unix OS platform. The reason for this is the product is so damned old and ingrained into that specific industry, the company can afford to ignore their customers demands and not re-invest potential profit in expensive porting exercises... You can get away with murder by holding a monopoly on most of the large Asset-Management businesses.
If a bunch of clever programmers got together and wrote some clean, horizontally-scaling, easily intergrated applications to destroy the hold of these monopolistic "niche" software products, they could really make some money (and the world would be better off with one less monopoly market).
Parent
Re:Is solaris still used often? (Score:4, Informative)
I've programmed professionally on Unix since the late 80's and been an admin on Solaris since the mid 90's. During this time I have seen the evolution of Linux and been a Linux user/admin since 1994 so I feel that I speak about both Operating systems from real experience.
My conclusion is this: In a professional environment run Solaris unless you have a compelling reason to run Linux. Quite simply Solaris is industrial strength OS and Redhat (I can't speak about other distros) is not there yet.
At home I run Linux because a couple of emulators (hercules and qemu) are only available on Linux (my compelling reason) and there is better device support.
My prediction is that Linux will be a major force in the low end of the market but pentration into the higher end of the market will be limited because factors other then the cost of the OS become more important to the decision making process.
Many Linux users have a PC-centric view of computing that leads to the rather naive question that started this thread.
Parent
A nice "first look" article (Score:4, Informative)
page 1 (Score:3, Informative)
-----------------c&p-------------
Sun Microsystems has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a wh
Well-written? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well-written? (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, I'm sure he thinks Linux is the real Unix.
Parent
"There haven't been many reviews" (Score:5, Funny)
Before you declare them "dead"... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun has spent years playing in the biggest game with the biggest boys. Their gross holdings dwarf that of Red Hat and Novell. Solaris 10 has all the core functionality that the major major banks and conservative institutions want. Sun has dedicated salespeople who know these clients for years now. Do not count them out, yet.
Sure, Solaris 10 seems like a Hail Mary, but think why the Hail Mary play is there: it works sometimes...
Re:Before you declare them "dead"... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Before you declare them "dead"... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
3,780 hits for "solaris 10 review" (Score:5, Informative)
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,780 for "solaris 10 review".
Review text... (Score:5, Informative)
Please continue reading after you have stopped laughing.
All political issues aside, Solaris 10 is a very impressive OS. It has some features no other operating system can claim and some that are not necessarily new, but have been implemented in an excellent way. This is not to say it is perfect. There are definitely things I dislike and areas that seem quite unpolished.
One of those aforementioned unpolished areas is the installation routine. It can be assumed that Solaris will not be installed by a novice. Even so, the Solaris install is painful and brings with it memories of Windows 2000 installs of old. This is not because its difficult, it is not. The installation is simply unwieldy. My main complaints are the following:
* You must partition, install a small base system and reboot to finish the install. I expect an OS to be installable without a reboot.
* For the first section of the install there is a web browser in the background, but for unknown reasons there is no browser in the second section.
* You have to switch CD's during the install, which is fine, but you can't just switch and walk away. You have to wait for it to read the CD and display another screen and then press next. There is probably a reason for this, but I just find it annoying.
Issues like these make the installation routine seem unfinished and just don't fit with the overall quality of the OS.
Upon booting Solaris for the first time, you are greeted by dtlogin. This is the default graphical login manager for Solaris and plainly has CDE roots. At this point, there is a drop-down menu in which you can choose to go back to a console login or choose which wm/dm to enter, both CDE and JDS3 are options. I am sure CDE has many great features and I know that some people love it. However, I am not one of them. JDS3 on the other hand is a nicely polished GNOME desktop. The theme and general feel is much improved over Sun's earlier versions. Nothing is very remarkable about JDS3, except network browsing. I have never seen any GNOME desktop do as well with windows and NIX network browsing.
There are things I dislike about JDS. As a media player, Sun has chosen the "Java Media Player." This program has no redeeming factors. XMMS or Rhythmbox would be much better choices. They also tapped Mozilla to be the web browser, not Firefox. With FF gaining more and more attention, this choice makes very little sense to me. However, those are my only complaints about JDS3 and they are small ones.
Nobody is considering Solaris 10 because of JDS3 or its installation routine. They are looking at it because of new features like DTrace, Zones and the new Service Management Framework. Indeed, it has been quite awhile since we have seen a release of any OS with as many large features as Solaris 10.
DTrace
One of the main new features in Solaris 10 is DTrace, a dynamic instrumentation system. DTrace consists of a scripting language, named D (not to be confused with the fledgling D Programming Language), and loadable kernel modules named "providers." When called upon, these "providers" track and report system information. DTrace has several features that separate it from other similar systems:
* It is dynamic. DTrace has no effect on system performance when not in use. Only those providers t
Rootkit? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rootkit? (Score:4, Informative)
A lesson from Microsoft...
Don't keep boot status info in a binary file that also can start programs.
You can't tell if its been hacked without rebuilding it and you can't rebuild it with ease. The new services stuff for Solaris 10 is sort of a mix between init, inetd, cron and the windows registry. This is wrong and someone at sun needs to fix it now.
Parent
Suggestion: Run security scans against it... (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting, eh?
Note: If you don't have access to a Nessus server or Linux, you can use almost any machine to run a scan yourself. Here's a simplified version of what to do;
1. Get Knoppix and boot it; http://knoppix.org
2. When the desktop appears, run the Nessus server;
'Start' (the K in the lower left)
System (note _DO_NOT_ use the Nessus on this menu yet!)
Security
Nessus
3. Wait. This will take a few minutes and you may not see anything. If you want to be sure, come back in 5 minutes.
4. Run the Nessus client;
K
System
Nessus (note _NOT_ the one under the Security menu)
5. The username should be knoppix.
6. The password field should be blank. Enter knoppix for the password.
7. Select the Target tab. Put in the IP address or DNS name of the target machine.
8. Start scanning. Keep in mind that any firewalls or NAT devices between you and the target machine may give back bad results.
More drivel (Score:5, Interesting)
I read this "review" when it showed up on OSNews and thought "yet another Linux/BSD/whatever user attempts to use Solaris and fails". Everybody seems to focus on what Sun is pimping (DTrace, Zones, Predictive Self Healing), what about actually using the OS?
I have been using (and beta testing) Solaris 10 since August 2003, and there is a lot more to it than DTrace, Zones, and Predictive Self Healing. There are several password security improvements, a new installation metacluster (Reduced Networking Support), a new installation method (WAN Boot), the ability to wrap RPC connections so that connections get logged (TCP Wrappers). And so you don't have to download a ton of software, GCC, gmake, webmin, GIMP, and other tools are part of the Full Distribution installation.
The problem with "reviews" is trying to meet the insaitable demand for "information" and not actually providing anything other than a rehash of publicity materials. How about everybody being paitient and hold off for a "quality" review.
struggling with solaris 10 for the last week (Score:4, Informative)
i have been assigned the job of writing my company's pci card driver for solaris 9, and for this purpose i was given an old ultrasparc IIe sparc workstation with solaris 9. After a bit of frustration with trying to setup paths for root, and login shells, and patches, and packages. I decided to just clean install solaris 10. After downloading 5 cds (not including documentation cd) from solaris, I proceeded to install the system.
Installation:
partitioning wizard sucks. defaults are fine, but if you want to change it, then it is just unpleasant.
network setup : it doesn't request a Hostname, and for the life of my system, I have hostname unknown. No big deal, except for a few errors that it prints. I have looked at sun's site, and the recommended way of changing this is sys-unconfig - with a few changes to dhcpagent in
Configuration:
I loaded up root's profile using the Java Desktop Environment (JDE). Nice looking. But it has no link to the Sun Management Console (SMC). I looked through all the menus and I couldn't figure out how to graphically (in the solaris way) add users. Of course I could've used useradd, but i really wanted to configure the system in the solaris prescribed manner. If you use Common Desktop Environment (CDE), then you do have a link to SMC. I had to run smc from console, and then I was able to set up users.
I wanted to change root's shell from
I installed the solaris 10 with a full (COMPLETE) install. Yet when I look for emacs either in the JDE menus or via the a call to emacs from the terminal, i get nothing. to get emacs and a large number of the other programs including gcc ld vim
PATH=/opt/sfw/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/opt/csw/
emacs and gcc are in
ld is in
wget is in
i installed the package pkg-get, and that went into
If you run the SMC, and you try to add patches, it won't work, it says something about installing patch pro manager. You can't install that b/c it is not on the website, it only lists patch pro for solaris 8 and 9. I finally found that in Solaris 10, the patch manager comes built in, not that there is some easy way to know this. you must run pprosvc.
Driver writing:
I did a full install of solaris, yet I didn't get the program cc, and since all of their driver tutorials refer to using cc, this created some issues for me. (cc is installed with Sun Studio). I switched to gcc, but gcc doesn't accept the same parameters as cc, but i found out after lots of wasted time, that cc -xarch=v9 is equivalent to gcc -m64 -mcpu=v9. of course you can't use the ld from gnu, you have to use solaris's ld to link.
I am now struggling to get some automatic dev links to be created in solaris, and as with everything else that I have encountered under this OS, it is being extremely painful.
I can say one thing for Solaris 10, and that is that the JDE look great. (although it doesn't have links to the apps that I installed, and is missing the SMC). Visually wise it is nicer looking than some other windowing environments I have seen, as is much better looking than CDE
nachum
Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, you do not know what you are doing. And you are writing drivers.
Great!
Parent
Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:struggling with solaris 10 for the last week (Score:4, Insightful)
Horseshit. "Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration. It is the stuff you learn on the first day or two of the job. Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.
A programmer should know how to administer his own machine.
Parent
more stuff (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86.html
http://www.solaris-x86.org
The author said that he was forced to use OSS to get sound to work. There are open source drivers for Solaris as well and they work pretty well. Note that they're compiled for Solaris 9, but they still work with Solaris 10.
http://www.tools.de/solaris/audio/
Resource Manager (Score:5, Informative)
Other point is that the installer have a bug and although it asks if you want the 1st CD to auto pop-up, it wont work, you need to take it out before it starts the installation all over again. Some bouilds have a message reporting this error (instead of fixing it...).
Binary compatibility is withit the ABI for the same platform (obviously, you can't move a SPARC binary to an Opteron box). The good part is that source files will written using the standar ABI will recompily straight.
The main-point with any other OS than Linux is that rigth-now companies seems more likely to die than the hole Linux movement (or however you want to call it).
Solaris Noob (Score:4, Interesting)
I figured I'd be filling up an otherwise uneventful weekend, so I threw together a 433/256 out of spare parts, downloaded and burned the ISOs, and made myself a large pot of coffee. The installation took about 2 hours and pretty much everything I needed worked right the first time, and now I've got myself a nifty little SAMP server for testing. (Running Solaris 10, Apache 1.3.31, PHP 5.0.3, and MySQL 5.0.2-alpha.)
Reviewer missed a lot.. (Score:4, Interesting)
the reviewer had trouble installing without rebooting part-way through.. the way it sounded, he could only install the mini root and then reboot.. I just did a solaris 10 install friday on a Sun V480 box and not only did it install all 4 cds before rebooting into the actual OS, I did all of the package selection at the beginning and didn't have to wait for anything - magic of DVDs! In any case, i'm still pretty sure that you can do the package selection in front without having to twiddle thumbs between cds (eg package selection is not on a per cd basis)..
Those were just a couple problems with the review I saw.. I don't think they really know solaris well enough to be reviewing it and have it considered worth much.
Zones and Xen (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't quite accurate - Xen does NOT have a large performance penalty (UML does, especially for I/O intensive workloads). Xen domains have almost the same performance as the native OS. Additionally, Xen VMs are not Linux kernels housed in a Linux host machine like UML, every Xen domain including domain0 runs under Xen itself. The only special thing about domain0 is that Xen passes off hardware access to domain0 rather than implementing all the device drivers itself.
Xen is more like IBM's mainframe logical partitions (LPARs) than UML or Solaris's zones or BSD jails. It serves a different purpose to zones or BSD jails (but a similar purpose to UML).
And Xen has very very good performance. I've been testing it recently and it blows away any other virtualization tools I've used on x86 including VMWare and UML.
Re:releasing source code (Score:4, Interesting)
While the hell does every company nowadays have to release source code just to be accepted by you guys? Sun have been doing their thing, and doing it well, for years. They don't need to pander to you Open Source hippies in order to succeed.
Parent
Re:releasing source code (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:releasing source code (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You are missing the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
BS. You've obviously got a big chip on your shoulder. Sun is far more responsive than any of their main competitors/"partners" in the data center space.
With Sun you are lost if your problem is not one of their priorities.
And this is different from getting a bug fixed in firefox or Gnome how?
Parent
Re:releasing source code (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:releasing source code (Score:4, Insightful)
'Scales' is meaningless unless you say what it can do. Allowing a carefully-written and finely tuned application to run across multiple CPUs is totally different from being able to act as a general-purpose machine. When Solaris scales across many processors this is usually as a general-purpose enterprise server, with multiple users, multi-threaded databases and application servers. This is fundamentally different from a customised numerical computation server, which is something SGI specialises in.
Parent