On 1/7/2010 6:01 PM, Christopher Chan wrote: > >> I'm not recommending OpenSolaris on purpose. > > Serious system administrators are not Linux fans I don't think. I think I must have been sent back in time, say to 1997 or so, because I can't possibly be reading this in 2010. I base this on the fact that your statement logically means there are no serious Linux sysadmins, which is of course is so much hooey that no one believes this any more in the time I come from. Therefore, I must have been sent far enough back in time that such statements were still uttered with complete seriousness. I guess the other possibility is that someone's gatewayed a Usenet advocacy group to this list. > I find pkg on OpenSolaris to be more akin to yum or apt than ports In some ways, sure. Ports is definitely a different way of doing things, though, I think, not a bad one. There are several areas where OpenSolaris' package system falls down: 1. No free updates. Even if you just want security fixes, you have to buy a support contract. (If you think this is reasonable, why are you here on the CentOS list, a place for discussing a solution to a different but similar problem?) 2. There is no upgrade path from release to release other than "reinstall", and releases are spaced just 6 months apart. Between this and the previous problem, it means I have to reinstall my server every 6 months to keep up to date if I don't want to buy a support contract. Those serious sysadmins where you come from like this sort of thing? In my world, we prefer OSes with long term support so we can stay current on a release for years at a time. 3. The main package repo is pretty sparse. If you want anything even a little bit nonstandard you end up downloading sources from the Internet and compiling by hand, which may not even succeed since Solaris is down in the third tier or so of popularity these days. At least with FreeBSD's ports, you're pretty much guaranteed that it will build and install with "sudo make install clean", even chasing down dependencies for you automatically. 4. At least back in the 2008.05 and 2008.11 days when I last tried to really use OpenSolaris, I found IPS to be quite immature. I managed, twice, to render a machine unbootable simply by removing packages I thought I didn't need, using the GUI package manager. No warnings, just boot...bang. Now maybe I'm being unrealistic, but I would think one of the basic requirements for a package manager is that it know enough about dependencies to refuse to let me uninstall core system components. After discovering all that, I'm afraid I rather lost interest in trying to make serious use of OpenSolaris. I keep a VM of it around merely to test compatibility with a free software project I maintain. I won't install it on anything critical now, not without taking the time to do a complete reeval of it, anyway. It's been a year...maybe it's time. > and then there is always nexenta if I > really want a complete GNU userland and apt/dpkg. How many different machines have you tried it on? Perhaps you have been lucky, and have found that it installs on everything you want it to run on. In my experience, both NCP and NexentaStor made me jump through quite a few hoops to find a hardware configuration they were happy with. Even after I got them working, neither seemed valuable enough to bother sticking with them, compared to OSes I already know and trust to just run. > Does it support direct sharing/exporting as nfs/cifs/iscsi NFS, yes, that's how I'm using it. CIFS, no, as there is no CIFS support in FreeBSD's kernel. Of course, you can always just use Samba. iSCSI, no, because there isn't yet any iSCSI serving support in FreeBSD of any kind. Since I didn't want my ZFS pools to be directly attached to another machine, but rather shared among multiple machines in traditional file-server manner, this didn't cause a problem for me. Let me bounce this ball back in your court: how about AFS, for the Macs in your organization? ZFS has no direct support for it on either platform, but at least on FreeBSD and most Linuxes, it's a supported package, available on demand, already preconfigured for that system. All you have to do is do local customizations to the configuration, set it to start automatically, and you're done. With OpenSolaris, it's a fully manual process. > Does it support using ZFS for booting Not as part of the OS installer, but it can be done: http://lulf.geeknest.org/blog/freebsd/Setting_up_a_zfs-only_system/ This doesn't interest me because it shares the same limitation as on Solaris, which is that it will only work with a mirror. I don't want to dedicate two disks just to the OS if I want a RAID-Z pool for actual data. My solution for high root FS reliability was to put it on a CF card. In addition to being solid state, it has a few side benefits: - It lets me use an otherwise unused ATA connection. - It's small enough that I can mount it in otherwise dead space in the chassis, instead of taking up a precious disk bay. Once I got the system installed, I moved some top-level trees into dedicated ZFS pools, so my root filesystem is now quite small and rarely touched. > lot more on vinum than there is on zfs in the FreeBSD manual. I did most of my FreeBSD ZFS setup using the Solaris ZFS Admin Guide PDF. Everything it asked me to do worked fine on FreeBSD. Yes, I'm sure you can point to places where a thing will work on Solaris and not on FreeBSD, but I haven't found anything that actually *matters* to me yet.