[geeks] OpenSolaris ready for Production?

[Mark Benson]

On 3 Mar 2009, at 23:10, Mike Meredith wrote:

> On Tue, 3 Mar 2009 21:38:53 +0000, Mark Benson wrote:
>> I just wondered if anyone here had any passing opinions as to wether
>> OpenSolaris was mature enough or ready in any way for a use on a
>> Production server? I'd say no, I mean it's barely a year old in it's
>
> I'm in the middle of turning my old desktop into an OpenSolaris server
> to replace my ancient U60. So I'm betting that it's ready for
> production use :)

Yeh ditto, I'm in the process of turning my Little Falls 2 machine  
over to OpenSolaris 11.2008 as my home server. Now I've fitted a  
PicoPSU on the board and got rid of the ATX PSU fan, and fitted a  
quiet fan on the Northbridge, it can run for as long as it likes next  
to my desk because... I can't hear it!! :)

I've added the OpenSolaris SAMP stack, which comes with neato GUI  
tools for gnome. We'll see how it goes...

> Of course it does depend on what you mean by "production". I wouldn't
> choose to run a bank on an OpenSolaris server, and I dare say Oracle
> would immediately close support calls mentioning OpenSolaris.

Yeh, like I'd use Oracle anyway ;) I'd rather boil my feet!

> But for a smaller server running stuff you won't get fired for if it  
> breaks ?
> Sure.

Not fired, but we lose time and time is money, so I'd like to avoid  
it. O'course my own code breaks as often as not, then there was that  
time I dropped a whole database out of the SQL server and found I had  
no workable backup... So yeh Im sure it;ll be fine. I mean, anything's  
gotta be better than Windows right? :o)

> And show us your battle scars afterwards :)

I've got a few already. A couple more won't make much odds :)

> BTW: The Blastwave IPS repository is a little rocky for now.

Does OpenSolaris use that or is it an add-on repo?

>> official form, and it's not intended for production, but on the
>> flipside it's Solaris, can it really be that bad?
>
> That's the key. It's just Solaris that's been fiddled with.

For the most part, Linux-sed.

> There's a few people wandering around who seem to think that  
> OpenSolaris is
> something new and completely different from Solaris.

Ignorance is bliss, they say...

> As long as you
> ignore the license and the fact that a few people other than Sun
> engineers have been doing stuff, is it really any different to what
> Solaris 11 could/would/will be ?

Pretty much.

>> I was just musing as it's a bit less scary to work with than Solaris
>> 10 and has slightly better and broader hardware support.
>
> I'm not sure why Solaris 10 is scarier than OpenSolaris; after all you
> can simply install bash, do something like "/bin/bash -c true &&
> exec /bin/bash" in root's .profile, and a few other things and it  
> won't
> seem much different.

Graphically and organizationally the GNOME implementation is a lot  
nicer than S10, the repo system is handier than having to handle  
dependencies but hand with ,pkgs and pkgadds, and the AMP stack is (if  
you install the UI tools) nicely integrated into the desktop. It also  
makes using other IPS repos easier. It struck me that someone else  
might have to use the system when I'm off site and a nice friendly GUI  
is something they will appreciate greatly :)

I was going to plump for a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS install, but Open Solaris  
seems to offer the advantages of Linux with the underpinnings of a  
proper UNIX. Plus it has ZFS, which totally trumps Ubuntu every time,  
especially on a system where there is likely to be a need to upgrade  
storage down the line.

It just feels like a happy median between userland and serverland.

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>

"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."