OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective 370
MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go."
Nexenta (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd try Nexenta, except I don't really want to use the Ubuntu repositories for my Linux packages. I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.
I'd consider it for a web-server box to test how the kernel handles I/O.
From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:0, Insightful)
Stay away from Solaris, unless you have to use it.
That being said, I have never seen a large shop without 'some' SUN/Solaris machines.
Solaris isn't bad. There are just 'linux' OS's that do most of the same jobs w/o you getting tied to Solaris.
Re:Nexenta (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.
What, exactly, don't you like about Kubuntu?
Or is that not among the packages ported? Because to bootstrap from ubuntu-minimal to kubuntu is fairly easy.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
It all depends on the skill-set your admins already have. If you have a shop of 100% Linux admins with no Solaris experience, stay away. If your shop already has some Solaris machines on Sparc, go for it - although you should double check the license.
From my own perspective, I've invested several hours getting it running. Granted, I was running the 200805 OpenSolaris installed on ZFS which had some bugs in the boot process which left my system unbootable a few times. Some follow up releases fixed those problems. But as a guy who's been using Linux since 1993, old habits are hard to break.
Re:Love that they open sourced it... but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's.
Except the small detail that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, so you won't see things like Linux kernel-based ZFS. From what I've understood running it through FUSE (userspace) isn't all that great. I do understand why Sun doesn't want Linux to take all its crown jewels, but it's still annoying.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
What, no mention of dtrace? Now that's been an excellent part of the Sol10/OpenSol movement IMO.
Narrow the choice.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If your main concern is whether or not it runs KDE? Then stick with Linux.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Love that they open sourced it... but... (Score:5, Insightful)
He said 'other nix os's' not 'Linux'. The GPL may be incompatible with the CDDL, but the BSDL isn't, and bits of Solaris, such as ZFS and DTrace, have found their way into FreeBSD.
Saying the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL is misleading - the CDDL doesn't say anything about code not explicitly released under it. It is the GPL which imposes constraints on third-party code. If Linux used a more permissive license then it would be able to use OpenSolaris code, and OpenSolaris would be able to use Linux code just as it used to use a lot of BSD code back in the SunOS days.
ZFS and Dtrace are finding thier way into other OS (Score:1, Insightful)
I find quite interesting that the coool features are finding their way into FreeBSD but not linux. Makes you think which users really have more freedom.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
Uptime?
Uptime is so 1997.
Anyone who needs serious uptime of "years" will have a high availability cluster implementation.
Or they'll use a *real* platform known for reliability like a mainframe, not some toy running on purple plastic hardware.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess google have no "real" admins that look after 200,000 Linux servers. Obviously amateurs compared to monkeys like yourself. If you knew what you were doing, why would you be a lowly admin?
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Over 85% of the top 500 super computers in the world run Linux. http://www.top500.org/ [top500.org] as best I can tell almost none run Solaris as most of the Unix is AIX. So all you "Linux's uptime, stability and processing power sucks compared to Unix" old ass fanboys go back to your clubhouse and cry.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Wow...if you are a *real* Unix admin it is no wonder Linux came along and is so successful.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that an uptime of years generally means someone hasn't been keeping their system patched properly. :)
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
"ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point"
Why not set up a server for data storage? Then you get all the ZFS checksum/auto-heal/snapshot goodness ?
"Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers."
Zones are so cheap, I run every single service in a zone so that they can be migrated between machines, any dependencies can be contained, etc. If you haven't seen a use for them it's because you haven't ever used them.
"rcapd - ulimit can do this per process, and there are also multiple 3rd party open source resource limiters."
And yanking the ram stick can do it per-machine. How coarse grained do you want to go before you look like a fool?
In almost every case, the Solaris and other random unix environments could be replaced with Linux at 1/10th the cost."
Solaris is free. Support is 1/3 the price of RHEL. It runs on cheap Dell/Supermicro whiteboxes.
Re:I have a problem with this kind of "open source (Score:1, Insightful)
All spoken as if by a really naive person. You seem to think that Linux is not in competition with BSD, as if it were above BSD (and OpenSolaris). That's a strange position to take. Do you think that Linux' progress is a result of competition with itself or with Windows alone?
Both BSD and OpenSolaris are technically equivalent to Linux in many areas and superior in some others. By the way, Linux is also superior to the other two in some areas, too. You would be a fool to discount any of these operating systems, as each has pros and cons associated with different projects and needs.
Furthermore, if your hypothesis is that OpenSolaris won't be able to compete with Linux because of the "community" aspect, then why would you suggest that it may be able to compete with BSD which also is developed by the "community." That reeks of Linux fanboyism and illogical thinking.
Re:The syntax for ipconfig is different? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft also replaced the BSD TCP stack, but they kept the same userland commands. They already had a different config command (ipconfig instead of ifconfig)... probably because they had to rewrite that to cooperate with their netbios and other stacks, but ...
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Unmodified Solaris scales to > 512 CPU's almost linear
Re:Nexenta (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a matter of taste. "I don't like it" is sufficient reasoning for this arena, like it or not. Furthermore, you have no reasonable basis to say he's saying this "just to get a reaction". He doesn't give what you consider to be good reasons for his opinion, so he's stating his opinion just to get a reaction. Erm, no, it doesn't work that way.
People, not just on slashdot, but on internet forums in general, love to claim that those whose arguments they disagree with must be trolling. It's fucking pathetic, and is just a sign that these people can't handle an opposing point of view with any amount of dignity. Grow up already.
Re:It's a bit late (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been bitten too many times by companies killing off products. Also, my experience in the past has been that the first thing you need to do with a Solaris box is install all the GNU tools anyway, to replace the broken awk, broken sed, etc. So really, why would I want the non-GNU licensed tools available if I'm not going to use them?
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Insightful)
You've run ZFS in production, yet you can't see the improvement on Linux's model? You mean the fact that md is completely broken and LVM is unreliable and slow by comparison?
Re:I have a problem with this kind of "open source (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought it sucked. (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I remember there was an astroturfed Sun-staff-only developer community, little information available online, slow as hell boot time, ZFS boot partition complications, and a broken KDE (the X server didn't work correctly; I have absolutely ZERO problems, even with 3D here in Linux).
And when I looked ahead to maintaining the system (the VAST BULK of where overhead is spent) I didn't see anything that looked as sane or easy as Debian. No incremental updates, just some arcane BSD-esque 'port' or
Solaris 10: pass.
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:3, Insightful)
in that case what you want is Solaris 10, not OpenSolaris