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!'"
Sun put a lot of time and money into GNOME when they were working on JDS. Most notably in the accessibility features of GNOME.
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.
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.
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.
This is an idiotic statement and I can't believe anyone modded you up. The source for OpenSolaris has been available for years. When will the stripping start? Where is ZFS for Linux? Where is DTrace, Zones, or any of the other cool new stuff?
Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
The primary difficulty with OpenSolaris is that is part of a new breed of corporate controlled Open Source. Much as they might trumpet that it is, it isn't actually proper open source. I can't take it, rip out any bits I want and use them elsewhere. No matter what the license says, if I can't do that, it isn't 'Open', and as you point out, some bits you can't.
Also, it has hardly any developers not already on Suns payroll, and those that are independent are shackled by a lack of proper tools.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday May 05 2008, @04:51PM (#23305362)
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).
I ran into a similar problem. In a lot of cases, the drivers for the network cards are actually available. The problem seems to be that there is no mapping of the PCI id in/etc/driver_aliases. I've found that in many cases you can just add a line in that file with the appropriate pci vendor and product id and the nic will work. You can find the pci vendor and product id using prtconf -v and searching for the Ethernet Adapter section. There are also a bunch of free network drivers for Solaris can be foun [nifty.com]
If I remember correctly, they swapped linux kernel with sun kernel and added some tools. Since debian (foundation of Ubuntu) is kernel agnostic (but linux is the working kernel), SUN just ported Ubuntu to solaris. More on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexenta_OS [wikipedia.org]
Sun had a lot of rights under previous licensing agreements before Novell even purchased the rights to Unix. The SCO deal seemed to be for some additional licensing and some drivers. Novell has claimed they won't be suing anybody over Unix anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers 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 [opensolaris.org] 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.
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.
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.
ZFS is a marginal improvement at best over what's already available.
I disagree. I guess you haven't seen one of the common types of data corruption that can happen with raided disks.
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.
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!
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
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.;)
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday May 05 2008, @06:13PM (#23306054)
(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
I would really not write off Solaris, it's far from dead
Customers : Bring out your dead OSs ! Solaris : I aint'ed dead yet Linux : Yes you are Solaris : I'm feeling better ! Linux : You'll be stone dead in a moment
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.
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?
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday May 05 2008, @05:34PM (#23305730)
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...
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... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday May 05 2008, @07:51PM (#23306814)
They have also forcibly crashed it over a million time and it has never lost data even once.
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]
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday May 05 2008, @06:21PM (#23306110)
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.
"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.
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.
You use the term "underlying", but then refer to the ability to run command-line tools directly. I think you're confused. You're probably thinking of the Sun Management Center [sun.com], a graphical tool that allows you to manage your Solaris-based system. It is based on Java, but it's also sitting ABOVE the command-line tools, not below them as you
I stand by my original statements 100% (I'm a certified SAP basis engineer on Sun equipment).
I might believe you if I wasn't a professional Software Engineer with over a decade of experience with Java and access to the IPS source code on the OpenSolaris site. Alas, however, I am a professional Software Engineer with a decade of Java experience and I canread the source code [opensolaris.org]. There is no Java visible in these tools. It's a completely Python-based system. I seriously doubt you'll find an OpenSolaris developer who will tell you otherwise.
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.
Hey! It's Debian! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey! It's Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
What if... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's designed by (deb)Ian Murdock, with 15 years of hindsight.
Parent
Re:Hey! It's Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
Parent
But will it ship with.... (Score:5, Funny)
Want to smash a harddrive like this guy (Score:5, Interesting)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0 [youtube.com]
zfs (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a crying shame the licensing issues keep it from being ported to Linux as part of the kernel
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Much as they might trumpet that it is, it isn't actually proper open source. I can't take it, rip out any bits I want and use them elsewhere. No matter what the license says, if I can't do that, it isn't 'Open', and as you point out, some bits you can't.
Also, it has hardly any developers not already on Suns payroll, and those that are independent are shackled by a lack of proper tools.
Sun doesn't want
That's a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
the true shame... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Relegated to VMWare on x86 (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are also a bunch of free network drivers for Solaris can be foun [nifty.com]
Indiana... (Score:5, Insightful)
installing now (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
More on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexenta_OS [wikipedia.org]
Linux-friendly = GPL-compliant license (Score:3, Insightful)
IP Issues with OpenSolaris? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Informative)
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
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Informative)
|>oug
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Interesting)
There is still no mighty IOKit killer on the horizon tho... Apple (and libkern, the cpp runtine) wins.
Matt
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You were correct up to this point.
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)
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 [opensolaris.org] 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.
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Funny)
$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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)
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 [datacenterknowledge.com]
read these comments [prefetch.net]
Parent
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Funny)
Solaris : I aint'ed dead yet
Linux : Yes you are
Solaris : I'm feeling better !
Linux : You'll be stone dead in a moment
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Re:Still not sold - OpenSolaris in Peril (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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?
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Re:Still not sold - OpenSolaris in Peril (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The source code [opensolaris.org] (which remaps linux systems calls to open solaris and fudges inconsistencies)
Info on installing debian [sun.com] (it's designed for RedHat based linux, so it's slightly painful ... though possibly out of date).
Brand Z info [opensolaris.org]
Overview of linux support [opensolaris.org]
I haven't tried it, but there shouldn't be much overhead/performance loss.
Re:ZFS simply rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Difference between Indiana and Nexenta? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Difference between Indiana and Nexenta? (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
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Re:Image Packaging System? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You use the term "underlying", but then refer to the ability to run command-line tools directly. I think you're confused. You're probably thinking of the Sun Management Center [sun.com], a graphical tool that allows you to manage your Solaris-based system. It is based on Java, but it's also sitting ABOVE the command-line tools, not below them as you
Re:Image Packaging System? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)