[Tfug] Solaris x86 experience

[Tyler]

I ran Solaris on a PC about 5 years ago and it was horrendous to 
install.  Nick, if he is lurking, can attest to what a PITA it was since he 
did the installation. ;)

I think the virtues of Solaris are solidly in the server realm.  Here's an 
example of the type of hurdle open source has to fix before I personally 
will declare Solaris/Sun a wholly useless combination:

We buy a brand new Dell server.  Super fast, loaded with goodies.  We want 
to run FreeBSD on it.  Everything installs.  It works.  As soon a we dump a 
lot of data through the NICs, we notice
that they are seizing and stopping.  Pings from UNIX machines don't reveal 
anything (not that ping is some magic tool) but pinging from our routers 
shows very odd packet loss--every 203,000 bytes to the byte.

We rely on some guy in a back room in some shed to make this driver work 
and right now we're just out of luck and are gonna buy PCI cards to 
circumvent the problem.  With Sun, since everything is so tightly knit 
together (semi-proprietary) it just works.  If the included hardware on a 
popular server model won't work right, then it's harder for me to place 
faith in that platform.  Of course, I've run BSD boxes that worked 
flawlessly for years, but it still gives me pause.  My only hesitation 
about Sun equipment comes from a cost perspective, but I don't worry one 
bit that the Ethernet cards are going to work properly. :)

It almost seems that the "smarter" and more consumer oriented the Free 
Unices get, the less reliable they are from a server perspective.  Stupid 
Solaris is slid.  Maybe I just have bad luck.




At 11:25 PM 12/22/03 -0800, Neil Short wrote:
>Maybe I was expecting something a little smarter.
>
>The installer(s) did not offer a whole lot of options.
>These are things I noticed:
>
>1) There was no option to modify the boot record. It
>just did. No biggie. It at least let me put my own
>boot record back on and still boot everything.
>2) The installer SAW my FreeBSD partitions and I
>specified that those partitions were not to be
>modified. Well, the installer still rewrote the
>partition table around my FreeBSD partitions and
>rendered that OS unbootable. I was able to recover
>those partitions, however.
>3) Neither the installer nor the fully-booted OS could
>see that I had a usb mouse plugged into the usb port.
>That's when I noticed the next problem:
>4) Documentation seems to be pretty bad. There is
>nothing on the Sun website that I could find. The
>newsgroups seem to be filled with "If it doesn't work,
>it's the fault of your equipment. My USB mouse works
>fine on my computer." Yes, there is a 2-cd set of
>documentation that I can download and burn. Maybe I'll
>look at them. There is nothing out there that is
>reasonably easy to find in the way of what to do to
>make the OS look for a USB mouse.
>5) The man pages don't work. I thought that they were
>just not installed but I just now noticed an old
>newsgroup posting that suggests that the $MANPATH
>variable needs to be set and man page configuration
>tools need to then be run. (windex? catman?).
>
>Yes, I know that Solaris is not really a good "hobby"
>OS; but I'm thinking this may be a little bit over the
>line. Maybe it's just me.
>
>=====
>The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of 
>society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. - Albert Einstein
>
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---
# Tyler Kilian, CCNP, SCSA
# Technology Director, Dakota Communications
# TKilian at DakotaCom.NET | 520.745.3900 x 100