Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Get Smart with SmartOS

admin-magazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#21

Post by xte »

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #7

I 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…

On software compatibility unfortunately the actual state (nearly anyone only on GNU/Linux) lead to forget that other OSes exists and many non-POSIX/non-portable features are more and more used anywhere...

That's not an IllumOS/SmartOS or any other unices faults nor something they can really solve...

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#22

Post by jskaggz »

Love SmartOS! IMHO zones set the bar on containers back in the 2000's, and SmartOS is the evolved logical progression of this. It's truly a ferrari. However, it needs a paint job to accrete community. If you want a cohesive system, and want to become a paas provider, triton-sdc. But I think at the medium and low-end, smartos needs something like proxmox to compete where project fifo appears to be having a hard time. Any takers?

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#23

Post by jskaggz »

jskaggz wrote: post #22

Love SmartOS! IMHO zones set the bar on containers back in the 2000's, and SmartOS is the evolved logical progression of this. It's truly a ferrari. However, it needs a paint job to accrete community. If you want a cohesive system, and want to become a paas provider, triton-sdc. But I think at the medium and low-end, smartos needs something like proxmox to compete where project fifo appears to be having a hard time.…

Let me clarify, proxmox (or the vsphere web ui for example), would be a fantastic management ui on top of the smartos engine that would bring some gravity to accrete userbase. Some organizations are just more comfortable with UI tools. Sure, your hairy-knuckled sa's and programmers will favor maintaining version controlled manifests for zones, and keeping things highly automated, using terraform, etc, but there's a huge base out there that will download smartos, stare at the console prompt, and lose interest unless they can treat it like a vsphere or proxmox machine, like they're used to, and are trained on. Project fifo...frankly, needs some good natured competition to breed better product in this space.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#24

Post by solarengineer »

breul99 wrote: post #4

I 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.

One of the goals of the openzfs community is to ensure feature compatibility when moving a zpool (a collection of disks that run a storage pool) across FreeBSD, Linux and Illumos (on which SmartOS is based). This was reaffirmed on the openzfs call that happend just 5 hours ago.

See: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HB...

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#25

Post by solarengineer »

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #19
detaro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess they mean "use the system package manager", given that they talk about patches not in upstream?

Ah, I see, thanks. Still, that's a non-starter. Many of the packages I use are not available through any system package manager, and it would preclude using virtualenvs. OTOH, I desperately want to move away from Python.

Could you let us know which packages you're trying to install via PIP that cause you issues?

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#26

Post by wkearney99 »

jskaggz wrote: post #23
jskaggz wrote: post #22

Love SmartOS! IMHO zones set the bar on containers back in the 2000's, and SmartOS is the evolved logical progression of this. It's truly a ferrari. However, it needs a paint job to accrete community. If you want a cohesive system, and want to become a paas provider, triton-sdc. But I think at the medium and low-end, smartos needs something like proxmox to compete where project fifo appears to be having a hard time.…

Let me clarify, proxmox (or the vsphere web ui for example), would be a fantastic management ui on top of the smartos engine that would bring some gravity to accrete userbase. Some organizations are just more comfortable with UI tools. Sure, your hairy-knuckled sa's and programmers will favor maintaining version controlled manifests for zones, and keeping things highly automated, using terraform, etc, but there's a h…

'accrete userbase'? Yeesh, where did that bit of geek-speak crawl out from under? Put it back.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#27

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

mikestew wrote: post #11
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #3

SmartOS 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…

It feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring misrepresentation rather than preventing it. There are technical differences, as well. Most of the time one will never tell the difference (hence "Unix-LIKE": you'll likely never know). But BSD is not Linux, and vice-versa. For a really poor analogy, kind of like the electric version of an ICE automobile. Looks a lot like the ICE version (well, the grill i…

I don't have a problem with people calling Linux "Unix-like", I have a problem with people feeling like they have to call actual Unix descendants (like forks of BSD and SVR4) "Unix-like" while IBM gets to use "Unix" for z/OS.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#28

Post by jskaggz »

wkearney99 wrote: post #26
jskaggz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me clarify, proxmox (or the vsphere web ui for example), would be a fantastic management ui on top of the smartos engine that would bring some gravity to accrete userbase. Some organizations are just more comfortable with UI tools. Sure, your hairy-knuckled sa's and programmers will favor maintaining version controlled manifests for zones, and keeping things highly automated, using terraform, etc, but there's a h…

'accrete userbase'? Yeesh, where did that bit of geek-speak crawl out from under? Put it back.

Do you hear that whooshing sound? It's the point I was making that flew right by you.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#29

Post by bahamat »

SamWhited wrote: post #16
bcantrill wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation: it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our projects. As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running into issues, we can figur…

Thanks for the reply; the problem I've had is mostly with things on your GitHub and images you maintain. For example, I asked about the Postgres image and whether it was maintained ages ago and was told that you're not sure if you'll maintain it or not. This is fair, and I don't expect updates the next day, but it's still on Postgres 9.6 and doesn't mention if you plan on ever updating it again. If not, that's fine,…

Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for docker images produced by upstream maintainers.

In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing.

The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable, it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at something I can take a look at it.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#30

Post by bahamat »

2trill2spill wrote: post #2

I 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.

You may want to try it again. We (Joyent) are using some of the latest Supermicro hardware in our cloud.
Post reply on HN