41–50 of 57 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting packaging in debian or fedora has some issues? Can you elaborate in one or two lines? Thanks.
No. Debian and Fedora have just fine package managers. What they can't do is boot from a ZFS file system. I am implying Solaris and FreeBSD (the other OSs that boot from ZFS, AFAIK) don't have a sane packaging system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who quit Oracle are going to work for other proprietary software companies where they'll be working on something other than Solaris. I don't see any business model to pay people to work on an OpenSolaris fork.
Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris. If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I think funding will not be a problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris. If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I think funding will not be a problem.
Since about 2005 most large banks have started deploying on Linux for most new projects. The place I'm at now, which is one of the most conservative environments - NIS, heaps of Sol 8 under Vintage support, 15 year old home grown perl scripts for config management, etc - has a minimal amount of Linux skills amongst the day to day support staff, just declared Solaris a non-strategic platform.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris. If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I think funding will not be a problem.
The CDDL may be a problem for a new Red Hat or Canonical that decide to take OpenSolaris/Illumos forward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add to this an idiotic attempt to replace SystemV startup scripts with some insanely non-obvious java-based (of course!) crap, badly ported in a great hurry outdated 32-bit userland (when at the same time x86_64 version of Fedora or FreeBSD-ports were several years old), some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system (pkg) and so on. It is dead. As dead as Irix or Tru64 or even OpenVMS.
> some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system Looks a lot like apt
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CDDL may be a problem for a new Red Hat or Canonical that decide to take OpenSolaris/Illumos forward.
It's not GPL-compatible, but it's an FSF- and OSI-approved license.
This is the model that made Red Hat possible. It would not happen on top of BSD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system Looks a lot like apt
Actually it is on occasion quite cool. For example, it will take a ZFS snapshot before doing package updates, so that if Bad Things (TM) happen you can simply reboot into the system snapshot taken before the update. And it's all copy-on-write, so you only use the disk space for what changed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd distinguish between OpenSolaris the distribution and Solaris the kernel; and my interest in this lies in the server side of things, not UI. I'm currently using Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel with a server-oriented Debian userland. The things Solaris brings along, ZFS, dtrace, SMF etc. are not hugely relevant to the desktop.
> The things Solaris brings along, ZFS (...) are not hugely relevant to the desktop Have you ever accidentally deleted your MP3 collection? ;-)
The few times I have deleted things accidentally - perhaps 3 times in the past 5 years - I've recovered in a few moments from backups. I've lost more data to hard drive failures with somewhat stale backups than accidental deletion. The redundancy of ZFS raidz / raidz2 / mirroring etc. is useful to reduce the risk disk failure, but of course offsite backup is the gold standard.
Perhaps this is a inane question, but why should we care about Solaris? What does it bring to the table over BSD or Linux? If it died tomorrow would your shop close up and everyone go home? I know some of its features (DTrace and ZFS) are quite impressive but they are not really deal breakers. A kernel is great but it doesn't do much on its own. You still need applications and drivers to have a complete system.
In plain english, OpenSolaris (the right version at least, avoid de-duplication) is the only free platform I'm aware of that will give you a fast, stable, iSCSI server with a file system that's basically impervious to corruption.
The only one. Seriously. COMSTAR and ZFS are that big of a deal. They aren't "nice to have"s. They're solutions that allow you to spend a couple grand on a box, put a lot of RAM in it, attach a JBOD, shove in a few SSDs for read-cache and write-logs and you can duplicate the performance million dollar storage systems on the cheap.
You can do this with very little effort on commodity hardware. You can start as small as you want and scale as large as you want. You get snapshots, clones and replication with barely any effort.
Sun's whole storage strategy (Sun Unified Storage) was built on nothing more than exactly this with a pretty Web interface sitting on top.
OpenSolaris is a real pain for a lot of things, but when it comes to storage nothing else comes close (that I'm aware of).
Don't be scared that you'll lose an alternative to Linux. OpenSolaris isn't any good as an application host if you're expecting anything close to modern GNU tools. Be scared that you'll lose an alternative to NetApp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much no reason. The deal breakers you mention have also been ported to FreeBSD and are said to be rather stable already.
Lack of proper package management (you can't compare ports to yum or apt) is a dealbreaker for me. Ports is minimal and you can, conceivably, grow a real package management system out of it, but it's not one.
For one, you can find the libraries you want and they actually work.
Postgres 8.4 on FreeBSD? No problem. With plperl? No problem. OpenSolaris? Well, if you want to run 32bit Postgres on a system with 48GB of RAM sure. No 64bit for you though. And Oracle shutdown the Postgres build farm servers they were hosting.
Just because FreeBSD stores it's package information in makefiles and pkg stores it in a catalog doesn't change the end result. Ports are as easy to use (if you bother to read the very simple README), and offer far more robust support and packages than any flavor of Solaris I'm familiar with.
There was a time I'd have agreed about Ports, but 30 minutes later I had read the README and realized I was just being lazy. ;-)