[SunHELP] Guys, this is not good...for Sun

[Dale Ghent]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Anthony J. Gabrielson wrote:

|  I sent out an email the other day looking for a bit of info on doing an
| ethernet driver, I didn't get any responses - I also called sun and they
| asked me why in the world I would ever want to do that.  I like Solaris,
| even thou it is odd at points.  Most of the other free nix's are at
| least just as good.

For your driver question, this list is (quite obviously) populated with
sysadmins with various degrees of Solaris experience, and driver
*programming* questions would probably not gather a quick response :) But
as for that, there's docs on http://docs.sun.com/ in the Solaris8
/Developer section that answer that question.

As for hardware support, I believe the Solaris/x86 is well-rounded in that
area, but yeah... Sol/x86 does not support every p.o.s. hardware that
comes out of Taiwan. I think it would not be prudent for a focused company
such as Sun to persue the kind of hardware support that you see with Linux
or FreeBSD. If you want to run Sol/x86, you tailor your hardware to suit
it in this case.

| I want anyone who disagrees with me at this point to ask themselves why
| sun should survive.  I'm expecting to hear due to their robust servers or
| something to that effect. Do you run apache on that server?  Which smtp
| server do you run?  More than likely it will run just as well under other
| inx's.  Also Linux can be locked down.

Sure, Apache would and should run on Linux as well as it does on Solaris,
and vice versa. But what happens when you get up into the high server
load? My experience is that a 800Mhz pentium Linux box will fail to
adequately service requests before an otherwise comperable 440Mhz Ultra
does. And despite what Ellison says, Oracle on Solaris/sparc is alot more
capable than it's Linux analog. Need 2GB of SGA? No problem.

Now, not everyone should use Solaris for everything. Up to a point, Linux
on x86 serves the capacity well. Beyond that, you're limitting yourself.

The claim "Linux can be locked down" is a bit ambiguous, though. Out of
the box, some linux distros can be alot more secure than a stock Solaris
load. But that doesnt mean that a stock Solaris load can be brought to a
comperable level with a little bit of effort (and scripting, if you're
going to do it more than once! :)

/dale