Solaris stability and upgrades (was RE: [SunRescue] help a guy run 2.6 on his 670MP)

[Jonathan Katz]

Rip wrote:
> Of course, *all three* of those systems are
> behind multiple layers of packet filtering
> and firewalls...friends don't let friends put
> Solaris boxen "naked" on the Internet.

Ehhh, I'll pick a bone with this one, corinne
(which is a 150Mhz Ross SS20 and runs jonworld.com)
isn't behind a firewall and runs Solaris 7. I
have most everything turned off with the exceptions
of mysqld, sshd, qmail, and pop3d. No hacks that
I know of and I've had her on-line for over a year.
I'd have 400 days of uptime if some monkey in the 
cages at above.net hadn't unplugged my box :(

 12:47pm  up 203 day(s), 23:42,  15 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.03

Most suid bits have been turned off and patches
applied. nscd, rpc, etc are all turned off.
 
[ Reasons to upgrade to 7++ ]
>  - Kernel-level auditing gets un-fscked
>  - POSIX threads (pthreads) finally work
>  - 64-bit kernel support in Solaris 7

You left out a lot of new/nifty extensions to
the ufs filesystem including ufs logging. 
Essentially turns your good 'ol ufs filesystem
into a journaling fs w/o the need for disksuite!

7 and 8 provide better DR support for higher-end
systems than 2.6 did (except w/ the latest 2.6
kernel patches that's no longer true.) 2.5.1 will
never have that level of DR support.

[ Reasons not to upgrade ]
>  - If you have hardware that requires a
> 	specific older version
> 	o  sun4/sun4d/sun4c hardware support

o sun4c was dropped in 8 (7 will run on sun4c) 
o sun4d support will be dropped in a future
release of Solaris. 8 Will run on it just fine.
My question is will the DR stuff in 8 work on
sun4d hardware? Can I power off a problematic
system board in an SS1000 or SS2000 and pull
it for service without bouncing the box?
o sun4dx (Cray 6400) support stopped with 2.6.
That's the last version for that funky, rare,
and fun architecture.

-Jon