Solaris is no longer free • Hacker News Board

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#21

Post by forkqueue » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 2:00 PM UTC

buster wrote: post #16

forkqueue wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.

Zones too. I think they offer more then what the usual jail does. Never really used both of them, but.. yeah, zones sound nice, too :) Also, solaris is probably the most stable OS i've ever worked with.

Solaris zones are awful, and a good example of where Linux is far superior to Solaris. The creators of Zones seemed to have user-mode-Linux as their model, and it shares most of the annoyances of that too. It's not virtualization, and it's not a jail - it's a middle ground which is good for neither.

Agree with you to some extent on stability - I've seen Solaris boxes with a load of 300+ still up and running although unusably slow, where Linux would almost certainly have died from resource starvation. In general use, both Linux and Solaris are pretty damn reliable though.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#22

Post by forkqueue » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 2:05 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #15

umjames wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DTrace would be nice for starters.

SystemTap (the kernel probing tool build into Linux) is coming along pretty well - I needed to create something to alert me when arbitrary apps set TCP_NODELAY last week, spend a little while looking at SystemTap, made a simple script that probes at tcp.setsockopt(), got the info I needed, and printed it presentably. I added the script to http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WarStories . Check it out and others, it's…

SystemTap is great for general system issues, but isn't nearly as good when trying to look at issues that occur inside the JVM.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#23

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 3:02 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #18

Solaris 10 used to be "free as in beer". My biggest fear is that some Oracle exec seems this a a way to meet his revenue target at the expense of making Solaris irrelevant and risking the same for OpenSolaris.

[deleted]

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#24

Post by nailer » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 3:12 PM UTC

forkqueue wrote: post #22

nailer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SystemTap (the kernel probing tool build into Linux) is coming along pretty well - I needed to create something to alert me when arbitrary apps set TCP_NODELAY last week, spend a little while looking at SystemTap, made a simple script that probes at tcp.setsockopt(), got the info I needed, and printed it presentably. I added the script to http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WarStories . Check it out and others, it's…

SystemTap is great for general system issues, but isn't nearly as good when trying to look at issues that occur inside the JVM.

True. I believe they're adding providers to the major VMs though (I mainly work in Python so I focus on the cPython VM, but I have heard of some early JVM introspection work too).

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#25

Post by Niten » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 3:13 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #2

this doesn't change the status of OpenSolaris.

No, not directly. But they're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of hardware and licensing by limiting users' ability to run Solaris for free on beige boxes, and that does seem to tilt the odds in the open question of whether Oracle will continue to let OpenSolaris thrive, or whether they will marginalize it to maximize short-term profit.

I say short-term profit because, in taking this course, Oracle seems to forget that many of the part-time tinkerers and educational or small business users whom they've just priced out of Solaris will be the ones making "enterprise" purchasing decisions in the future. This revised licensing agreement ensures that such users will be more comfortable and familiar with the competition instead--Linux, BSD, even Windows (Microsoft has done a fantastic job ensuring that their software is affordable in the education and small business sectors, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy profit margin in enterprise sales).

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#26

Post by nolochemical » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 3:38 PM UTC

mey wrote: post #10

ghshephard wrote: post #4

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side…

Personally I've migrated from FreeBSD to Ubuntu for my at home server tasks. At work, I've seen a variety of deployments, never one of Solaris. I'd say 30% Windows, 60% Linux, 10% FreeBSD (instance installs (host and vm's), not including embedded systems like routers) is what I've seen over the past 5 years are work. Of Linux I've seen SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu widely used. I've seen deliveries of Sun Servers with Solar…

Why didn't you try VirtualBox, its made by Sun.. Yes, ZFS excedes expectations for server setups. Tapes ( still use them for archiving+reports), HDDs ( mid level to 'slowflow' data), SSDs for www/xml-rpc)

Sun is one the best at shuffling data handsdown; yet they always play with licensing like a mean poker player..

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#27

Post by koenigdavidmj » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 4:17 PM UTC

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #17

forkqueue wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, DTrace and ZFS are pretty much the only things Solaris brings to the table above what Linux offers. Interestingly I've never come across any pure Solaris shops that run ZFS, I suppose because if you're conservative enough only to use Solaris, you're too conservative to trust ZFS.

I'd add SMF (unless you know about something similar that's built-in into Linux ?).

What does that get me over Upstart or the other event-driven init systems?

(This is a question of genuine curiosity. SMF has led to many headaches when I've had to deal with it, simply because it didn't seem to comply with normal conventions like returning nonzero for failure or actually printing what goes wrong to the console.)

EDIT: add trailing parenthesis.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#28

Post by mbreese » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 4:28 PM UTC

mey wrote: post #10

ghshephard wrote: post #4

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side…

Personally I've migrated from FreeBSD to Ubuntu for my at home server tasks. At work, I've seen a variety of deployments, never one of Solaris. I'd say 30% Windows, 60% Linux, 10% FreeBSD (instance installs (host and vm's), not including embedded systems like routers) is what I've seen over the past 5 years are work. Of Linux I've seen SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu widely used. I've seen deliveries of Sun Servers with Solar…

I've also never seen anyone deploy OSX Server in any capacity

I've done it, but it wasn't very pretty. Well, I mean the admin tools are a pretty GUI, but underneath it is all a BSD, but instead of being able to upgrade components, you're tied to a vendor that doesn't really update things that way. For example, I had 2 G5 Xserves running 10.3 (Panther) and one Intel Xserve running 10.4 (Tiger). Unfortunately upgrading the version of Python or MySQL on the systems was a royal pain in the ass. Custom configurations is also odd, because they do a lot of custom stuff to the point that it isn't quite a *nix. But if you run off the shelf things designed for a Mac Server or need to use one of the Core Media frameworks they would be good. However, for typical web stuff, they really aren't that good of a server. Great hardware though... I'd love to rip out the Mac OS and put Linux of them.

To put this back into context for the post, OSX Server is probably deployed less often than Solaris.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#29

Post by ax0n » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 4:40 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #4

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position. But, on the flip side…

My last job, about 80% of the systems were Solaris, 15% AIX and 5% Linux/Windows. Granted, this was a large financial institution.

The place prior to that was about 90% OpenBSD, 10% Arch Linux. A startup.

And before that, probably about 25% Linux, 40% Windows, and the rest were a good balance of AIX and Solaris, at a community college. For what it's worth, the college was using Solaris for students to play on, and Sun curriculum for "UNIX" courses, with the thought that students could go get Sun Certified when they're done with the class; and if they did so, wouldn't need to take the final exam. I'm not sure that'll be an option in the future.

Re: Solaris is no longer free

#30

Post by jorgecastillo » Mon, Mar 29, 2010, 5:05 PM UTC

But OpenSolaris is still open source. If the community believes OpenSolaris is such an important asset to lose I am sure they can pick up the development if they want. And we already have the most important OpenSolaris technologies in FreeBSD so it wouldn't be that big of a deal anyways.