[geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 07:47:12PM -0400, Alois Hammer wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 16:34:05 -0400, "Joshua Boyd" <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
> > 
> > Anyway, I wouldn't stick so much on a firewall/NAT box.  I have a
> 
> I'm in an apartment, and not making a whole bucketful of money.  If I
> *had* the space and money, I'd have ten or fifteen servers just for base
> infrastructure.  (Or maybe not; maybe I'd be playing with Xen.  Dunno.)

When I was in an apartment (which was until just last October, and it
was a single bedroom apartment were the living room and bedroom were
both about 120 sq feet), I still had a seperate FW/NAT and DNS server.
It's not like I had buckets of money either.  I used fairly old machines
for the servers (and for that matter for the desktops as well).  Stuff
like a SS20, E250, U1, and a 1.4ghz P3.

> "So, you've got how many years of Solaris experience?"
> "Six.  Well, eight if you count Nexenta."
> "..."
> "It's Solaris with a GNU userland."
> "...so you've got six years?"

Why not just say 8 and leave it at that?  Do you think people who load
the GNU userland onto Solaris 10 go around admitting that they can't
stand stock Solaris?
 
> Besides, I'm guessing that OpenSolaris and the like have thrown out a
> lot of the horrible things Sun's done to the userland in the last few
> years, like the terrible "system resources manager" that attempts to
> replace all the initscripts with URIs and binaries.  

Nope, as far as I know, OpenSolaris keeps SMF.  It isn't hard to fumble
your way through.  Mostly you just place the files that you would have
put in /etc/init.d in a new place, copy and paste a few lines in an XML
file, then run a command that you've written in your notebook because
you don't do it frequently enough to remeber.  Oh wait, that's me.

Now, if you don't want to actually be employed doing administration on
Solaris 10, then that is another matter, but then you wouldn't need to
be discussing how much Solaris 10 admin experience you have anyway.

> Hard to claim Solaris experience if the only thing still Sun is the
> kernel and maybe a few other bits.  Heck, a lot of what I'm doing in
> my present job is relearning how limited the Solaris userland is
> compared to Real UNIX, and working around that.

You can't just load a few utilities of your liking?
 
> It's not nearly the same as claiming eight years Red Hat experience,
> three years of which is working in shops that use CentOS instead of
> paying Red Hat gobs of money.

It seems closer to me.  Nexenta is Solaris, just like Indiana and
Belenix are.  CentOS, OTOH is linux, but it isn't RHES.