Get Smart with SmartOS
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Get Smart with SmartOS
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#2I wish SmartOS was more widely used, and had better hardware support. I tried SmartOS in a VM and loved it, but when I tried to install it on a Supermicro box it didn't support the hardware.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#3SmartOS looks interesting, but I've never had a good chance to try it on a real project. I do actually have an extra box at work that I suppose I could spin up in my copious spare time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Are LX-branded zones complete enough to run something like a build environment based around a vendor-dropped toolchain?
> The Unix-like operating system [...]
I know I'm late to this party, being a bit too young to have direct experience of the Unix Wars and "UN*X" snark and so on, but this really does grate. It feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring misrepresentation rather than preventing it.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#4I wanted to like SmartOS, but the documentation for Arch really had me spoiled. The Joyent/SmartOS docs are a mess of information for different versions that really aren't conducive to a confident first time user. That and it had problems with a pretty vanilla supermicro build. It did pick up my linux ZFS pool without a problem though, which was a nice surprise.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#5I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Packer so I mostly don't have to look at the UI). The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead).
When it comes down to it though I prefer Triton to the other big cloud providers just because the firewall product is fantastic, bare-metal machines running SmartOS are fantastic, and best of all it's not Amazon (which is all I really want, if I'm honest).
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#6I wanted to like SmartOS, but the documentation for Arch really had me spoiled. The Joyent/SmartOS docs are a mess of information for different versions that really aren't conducive to a confident first time user. That and it had problems with a pretty vanilla supermicro build. It did pick up my linux ZFS pool without a problem though, which was a nice surprise.
This has been my experience as well; I really love SmartOS and Triton, but until Joyent cleans up the documentation or builds a big enough community to crowd source it I can't generally recommend it to new users, which is sad.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#7I really wish I could use SmartOS, but I couldn't even install some common Python packages without getting a compilation error. Looking such problems up on issue trackers revealed old requests for compatibility with SmartOS, and no follow-up from the developers.
I'm not sure what the recourse is, I just don't know enough about C to fix this myself. I assumed this would be a common enough problem that the solution would be well documented somewhere but there seems to be nothing out there even mentioning the issue.
I'm happy to do all my work in LX-branded zones, and that's certainly better than the alternatives (for my purposes), but having two operating systems still kinda irks me.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#8SmartOS looks interesting, but I've never had a good chance to try it on a real project. I do actually have an extra box at work that I suppose I could spin up in my copious spare time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Are LX-branded zones complete enough to run something like a build environment based around a vendor-dropped toolchain? > The Unix-like operating system [...] I know I'm late to this party, being…
> Are LX-branded zones complete enough to run something like a build environment based around a vendor-dropped toolchain?
Yes. Ubuntu is even certified by Cannonical iirc. Given that it boots on USB, and ZFS creates a pool in like a second, you can get started in a few minutes providing your internet is fast enough to pull the guest images.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#9I really wish I could use SmartOS, but I couldn't even install some common Python packages without getting a compilation error. Looking such problems up on issue trackers revealed old requests for compatibility with SmartOS, and no follow-up from the developers. I'm not sure what the recourse is, I just don't know enough about C to fix this myself. I assumed this would be a common enough problem that the solution wou…
I recommend using the package manager than building yourself. If something needs to be modified about the source, it will first be patched in the widely used package manager. convincing upstream to take in a patch & then waiting for a new version to be released with that patch takes time.
Re: Get Smart with SmartOS
#10I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Pac…
> The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead).
Have you sent that feedback, possibly pinged bcantrill on the issue (being Joyent's CTO I'd expect devdocs would fall under his purview)?