SX:CE EOL; or, The Great Mistake
27 Aug '09 - 08:06 by benrI've been exceedingly slow, despite prodding, to respond to the announcement of Solaris Express Community Edition's (SX:CE) end-of life. I have been largely because I've warned against it many times before, and I shall explain my thoughts on the matter again...
The death of SX:CE represents the end of an era. The cornerstone of any distribution is its installer(s) and packaging. Consider Debian or Red Hat or SuSE. Fundamentally they are all the same; with all the "default" tweeks and installation preferences you can perfectly replicate the experience of one with another, the core difference lay in their packaging (RPM, apt-get, etc) and their installers (Anaconda, YaST, etc.). SX:CE has served a very special purpose of giving us the latest Solaris bits while maintaining the old tried and true distribution. Chucking SX:CE is closing the door on the ways and means we've used to manage systems for over a decade.
Now, you may argue that the Solaris PKG format, Jumpstart, and the legacy installer are terrible, horrible, ghastly things that deserve to die the death... and you may just have a point. But they have one thing that their successors, IPS, Caiman, AI, etc, don't have.... maturity. I don't bash Solaris often, so gather round, these opinions are well known by the authors of these technologies.
Caiman is a pretty installer, but its terribly immature and certainly not production ready. Come on, there isn't even a text driven version of it! It's GUI only! Ridiculous!
IPS is a novel packaging format, but its very young and very fragile. Implementing it in Python has been a constant thorn in the developers sides (that is to say, users give them an exceedingly hard time about it). It makes Sparse Zones impossible and installation of Zones on an IPS system involves re-pulling packages from the network repository, meaning that if the network or the packaging server is down, you can't install zones. Plus, its a very painful system to create packages for, very unintuitive... novel, but unintuitive and frustrating to new packagers.
The Automated Installer (AI) will replace Jumpstart. Jumpstart itself is frock with problems. Its complicated and difficult to understand because its not integrated (meaning, with Jumpstart you manage NFS, TFTP, DHCP/PXE, plus the Media and various pre,post,finish scripts separately but to work in harmony, which takes a long time to get good at). Never the less, AI has so far shown to be immature and fragile. Conceptually I love the architecture of AI, because unlike Jumpstart it is a very integrated system which makes it simple and more straight forward to manage. Never the less, enterprise environments have done the hard work, trained their people, and know and trust Jumpstart despite its failings. AI isn't nearly there.
What am I saying? OpenSolaris (meaning, Indiana) is a fabulous desktop/laptop distribution, but it is a horrific excuse for a server OS. I've warned against this for years. Sun has really focused on the laptop experience in order to whoo Linux users over to OpenSolaris, but all the while Linux users have been abandoning their PC/Linux laptops for Mac's. We fought the wrong fight.
Untill the EOL announcement all this has been academic. We had both options available to us. Want Nevada with the old distribution? SX:CE. Want Nevada with the new distribution? OpenSolaris. Everyone is happy. There is balance in the universe.... no longer. So now the choice is less friendly, embrace OpenSolaris lock, stock and barrel or abandon it for the comfort and safety of Solaris 10.
My long held opinion is that SX:CE shouldn't be killed, but instead it should become Solaris 11. OpenSolaris can continue to do its thing for desktop users, but give enterprise environments what they need to continue using the platform. One day, I hope, all the kinks and immaturity will be worked out of the new distribution, but it hasn't happened yet, not by a long shot. I've held to a delusion that it wasn't a big concern, really, because Oracle would come in and slap some sense into the roadmap, but no signs have yet suggested that to be the case. We can only hope that by year end something pans out.
My message to the powers that be at Sun... I love ya, I love Solaris, but don't take this from us. Please, please just don't.
Very interesting, a bit the way I have been thinking.
I love Sun and Solaris but am beginning to think it’s time to move away.
Is it just me of have the Solaris blogs bee fading away recently? could of course be the holiday season, the Sun blog roll on your page seems to have several with no new content for some time.
All the goodies (zfs, dtrace) will move into other OS’s but I do think it’s the beginning of the end for Solaris. Love to be wrong but with the recent hiccups in latest versions of Nevada it maybe time to jump ship!
Thoughts?
Paul Johnston (Email) (URL) - 27 August '09 - 08:36
Linux was far inferior platform so far. It’s not just about implemented technologies, but it’s more about maturity and stability. OK – patching is complex, but on the other hand I’m having a huge pile of problems with RHEL and RHEL cluster suite, multipathing, and kernel drivers frying up e1000e on my x4150 servers :( I hoped that Solaris Next would be THE server os of the future, but if they really continue the path of OSOL :(I’ve been on the lists, I’ve urged the developers… But lots of them are really stubborn. For example, nobody in IPS team cares about repacaking solution that RPM offers – they say they rely on ZFS snapshots. And what if I want to use UFS as root fs? They say it’s not supported. Does that mean it will never be supported? :-/ Too bad SX:CE is dead, because OSOL is still pure alfa version….
jsosic (Email) - 27 August '09 - 09:20
Ben, while most of a time I agree with you… this time I don’t.First, we are talking about development distributions – sure SXCE was nicely polished due to the fact that it relied on legacy technologies while at the same time delivered most of the goodies from Open Solaris. Open Solaris as a distribution is build from the same sources as you know and the real difference is mostly in packaging and installation only. When it comes to the packaging – it is actually pretty good right now and when it comes to creating your own packages I would actually argue that it is intuitive and most importantly it is based on RPM’s spec file lots of system administrators are familiar with. Yeah, sure it is not mature yet and there are couple of bugs here and there and some things still need to be implemented – but in reality it already works pretty good and frankly the experience is already better than on SXCE. The only main complain people have is that it is slow on older hardware – yes, sometimes it is but from a practical point of view it is not that bad.
Also to remind others, as I know you know it, SXCE and Open Solaris are build from the same sources by the same people and Sun uses a wrapper so when an package is generated in old format it is also generated in new one. So there really isn’t that much difference between SXCE and OS.
AI – I agree with you completely here that it is barely usable at the moment but it seems they are moving pretty quickly.
OS for servers – I’ve been actually using OS for server installations and except for installation I’m pretty happy and my experience is better than with SXCE. Some bugs in the kernel and other technologies are irritating from time to time but it affects both SXCE and OS and hey – for a development OS it works actually remarkable good.
While I understand with some people who got used to relay on SXCE their resistance to move to OS (if it ain’t broken don’t touch it) but at the same time I believe it is a good move by Sun as it will focus their (limited) resources only on one distribution which should help all of us to get “there” quicker.
Re Solaris 11 – I would rather want Sun to keep backporting some features to Solaris 10 for a little bit longer and have Solaris 11 be based on Open Solaris than have it based on SXCE – it would only delay the so much needed transition to new packaging platform by many years.
Robert Milkowski (Email) - 27 August '09 - 09:21
I mostly agree with – ”... OpenSolaris (meaning, Indiana) is a fabulous desktop/laptop distribution, but it is a horrific excuse for a server OS”But the FUD introduced by killing SXCE cuts the ground
out from under many of us recommending Sol10/11 to
our clients.
I suspect Oracle will reverse this madness, and can only
hope they recognise it as yet another SMCC misstep.
As I’ve said in other fora, 99.9% of the code is written
by SUN employees and any illusion that the “community” can be financed any other way is just that, an illusion.
Peter Cherny (Email) - 27 August '09 - 10:00
Ben,While I realise that it makes life more difficult for some users. There are three key points to keep in mind:
- resources that are needed to ensure the maturity of the new OpenSolaris releases were tied up with SXCE releases
- OpenSolaris releases were not getting as much usage and feedback as needed from SXCE users
- the OpenSolaris releases have been hugely popular compared to the SXCE releases (in terms of download stats, etc.)
It really comes down to time, resources, and needs. If the OpenSolaris releases are going to become that wonderful product we’re all hoping for, some pain is necessary.
Shawn Walker (Email) - 27 August '09 - 10:05
@Shawn—why now wait until the technologies are mature before cutting off SX:CE? The technologies Ben mentioned are alpha quality at best (and that is pushing it), and I absolutely dread using opensolaris since pkg is slow and convoluted. It kills me that the opensolaris folks couldn’t re-use an existing package manage, but had to opt to create there own. Ugh.– Ryan
Ryan - 27 August '09 - 12:19
I kinda feel the same way now about Solaris as I did back in March 2005 when Solaris 10 launched, “What is this junk Sun us pushing on me?” I got used to it and it proved to be great technology once the kinks got ironed out. Now we are about to take the another turn on the roller coaster.I already caved-in on the desktop and abandoned Solaris for Linux and Mac. I got tired of fighting the application battle. There were several apps I wanted to run but required Linux. I was running branded zones for specific apps, but got fed-up with Sun not keeping up with the times and only supporting RHEL3. I went down the VirtualBox path, but that meant I had two OSes to maintain.
For servers, you can’t beat maturity. Maintaining over one-year uptimes are not unheard of in Solaris. I have been known to wipe Linux servers and install Solaris.
I will certainly miss Jumpstart. Many admins have devoted long weekends perfecting their Jumpstart configurations to provide flawless clones and rapid disaster recovery processes. Yeah, it is complex, but once mastered, it just worked.
Solaris has come a long way. I still remember having to compile every little FOSS program that we now rely on (perl, ssh, apache, MySQL, etc) back in the Solaris 2.5.1 days. Now we have great repositories like OpenCSW, SunFreeware and the Software Companion disk. Moving from rc scripts to SMF was painfull, but proved to be a valuable resource. Remember all the ZFS bugs? How about patching a system with zones? Yep, all buggy at the beginning, but now solid. Heck, even trusted extensions is starting to become a usable product, reaching the standards set by Trusted Solaris 8.
We need to start “eating the new dog food”. with plenty of feedback and focus, it can become another great feature of Solaris.
Craig A. Betts (Email) (URL) - 27 August '09 - 12:38
There are many people who have a lot invested in doing things the “old way”. You can just replace Solaris 10 with SXCE and build a locally customized system with a newer OS that just works. Switching to the IPS-based model means redoing your entire install and maintenance structures. You have to rip out and replace everything. At some point when the new system is fully mature it may be worth it to do this but at this point it isn’t. I think it the EOL of SXCE is premature. On a second point, what is this successor to Solaris 10 going to be? If they explained more completely what they’re planning to do there might be less FUD.Rand - 27 August '09 - 12:43
I welcome the change. I was always confused why Solaris had what 4-5 different versions. We need a model very simular to RHEL and Fedora distros. OpenSolaris should be the latest and greatest kinda R&D distro which eventually makes its way into the “enterprise” Solaris.Chris (Email) (URL) - 27 August '09 - 12:44
digg it.. maybe it’ll get some attention : [[http://digg.com/linux_unix/SX_CE_EOL_o..]]digga - 27 August '09 - 12:54
Ben,I would agree with your opinion.
The end of SX:CE is a little too early and abrupt.
Many enterprises (which are from where the revenue comes BTW) have spent years of time to build up the jumpstart infrastructure to automate the standard images and the end of the old packaging system will require a major rework – I don’t suppose the enterprise users would like it.
In the mean time the new ipkg system is just not stable enough to be production grade. Yes it will mature over time but again enterprises would not like it.
So, Sun should really think hard twice before they impose this EOL so soon.
Sean - 27 August '09 - 14:29
I agree with Ben, OSOL may be nice and usable for the desktop, but it has problems, its a rush ts obvious and painful for those of us that are used to Solaris and SXCE, you see the worst part of it is, that it breaks Sun’s own software, Sun Ray server, and Secure Global Desktop either require hacks to make it work or are broken and just plain don’t work.So in there rush to make Linux user happy, they are alienating there core users the Server admins, do they think we are unimportant or are they hoping we will just stick with existing versions for months if not years until they get it all back in working order?
James Dickens (Email) - 27 August '09 - 14:32
Having read about the imminent death of SXCE, I decided to give OpenSolaris another go. I hadn’t tried it for a while, and I wanted to rebuild my laptop anyway, so off I went.Man, it’s horrible. It’s like a bad linux distribution.
The installer has NO options at all. Sure, my mum could install it, but my mum wouldn’t want to, would she? An experienced Solaris admin might though, and they might have some idea about what they would and wouldn’t like. Full OS into one uncustomized ZFS dataset in one full partition, DHCP client, take it or leave it. Okay, I’ll take it and customize it by hand.
I don’t want GNOME, I want a core O/S and Sun Studio. Can I uninstall GNOME? Can I hell. And to everyone who complains the old SYSV package tools are slow, wait until you see IPS. Jeez. And written in Python? Bash as root shell?
I want the latest and greatest Solaris stuff, so I can be fully up to speed on the new stuff by the time it hits Solaris 10 and my clients’ productions systems. But honestly, I think I’ll move back to Solaris 10 once SXCE gets well out of date.
Maybe I’m being a luddite, maybe I’m cutting my nose off to spite my face, but I feel quite strongly about this. I love learning new stuff, but I found Caiman and IPS were too frustrating and unnecessary to be worth my time.
Who is the target for Solaris? In my opinion, it’s always been business. Real-world admins doing important things. Who is OpenSolaris aimed at? It has the bloat of linux, the installer of OS X, and desktop of Windows ME.
I’ve been using Solaris for 12 years. I’ve got all this installation stuff down to a ‘t’, including Jumpstart. Some people don’t like it, but it works, and if you invest some time in it, you can make it sing!
Mind you, SXCE has been developing some nasty bloat lately. GTK+ as a part of the core install? Come on! What happened to the simple, elegant Unix system with only the software installed on it which was needed to do the job?
Now where did I put those Solaris 2.6 CDs….? :-)
rdf - 27 August '09 - 15:02
Well said, Ban! I couldn’t have said it better myself. (Or, as the new Commander Adama would say, “so say we all!”.)Rich Teer (Email) (URL) - 27 August '09 - 16:07
Ben, I totally agree with you.I was thinking that SX:CE would have become Solaris 11, and Indiana would have become Solaris 12. This totally kills any legacy support going forward, which is very unlike Solaris… Hell we still have /usr/ucb hanging around from the old SunOS days, and Solaris 10, while it used SMF, you could still use the init.d/rcX.d scripts.
I really wish Sun would have thought this through before pulling the plug. But then I think that the Sun I knew and loved withered away under Schwartz’s tenure, it’s sad to see that. I can only hope that Larry Ellison brings some sanity back, and straightens things out.
Dennis Behrens (Email) - 27 August '09 - 19:49
Dennis – there is a project at OpenSolaris to develop a new brand – Solaris 10 zone. So at some point if you need full backward compatibility you will just create Solaris 10 container.All these people fighting for SXCE is a testimony for h
Robert Milkowski (Email) - 27 August '09 - 22:29
Dennis – there is a project at OpenSolaris to develop a new brand – Solaris 10 zone. So at some point if you need full backward compatibility you will just create Solaris 10 container.All these people fighting for SXCE is a testimony for how good it is/was while being a development snapshot at the same time.
Sure there are some issues with Open Solaris but once all developers within Sun will be “forced” to develop for OpenSolaris and not SXCE a lot of these issues will disapear more quickly. James mentiones SGD which is a good example as once the group responsible for it won’t be able to publish it for SXCE they will have to make it work on Open Solaris distirbution.
Someone else asked if you could uninstall GNOME – sure you can, I did it on some servers.
I think that Craig got it right – so many of us are so used to the old way that sometimes we just don’t want to change it, but sometimes it is really worth doing so as with zfs, smf, zones, ... I believe we will get there with IPS and OpenSolaris and I believe we will get there quickier if we drop wasting resources on legacy technologies which are being replaced in a development snapshot.
Sure you could buy a support for SXCE – but IIRC upgrades were never guaranteed and support was for limited time only in a first place.
Robert Milkowski (Email) - 27 August '09 - 22:39
This looks more like a hastily put together post then anything else. What this posting severely lacks are any examples.>Chucking SX:CE is closing the door on the ways and means we’ve used to manage systems for over a decade.
My install time for OpenSolaris is around a half hour. For Solaris or SXCE it’s a tad over two hours. To upgrade from a version of SXCE to the latest bits is around three hours.
>But they have one thing that their successors, IPS, Caiman, AI, etc, don’t have…. maturity.
This is like the old get a good job circle. You need experience but how do you get it unless you get the job.
>It makes Sparse Zones impossible and installation of Zones on an IPS system involves re-pulling packages from the network repository, meaning that if the network or the packaging server is down, you can’t install zones.
On the second point you can download the ~ 7 GB repo and put it on the local network and speed this up considerably.
>Never the less, enterprise environments have done the hard work, trained their people, and know and trust Jumpstart despite its failings.
I haven’t used AI and there is no concrete example of the failings of AI or any indication that the failings have been reported so they can be corrected thereby giving AI some “maturity.”
>Sun has really focused on the laptop experience in order to whoo Linux users over to OpenSolaris,
Ok, try to woo them with Solaris and Gnome 2.06. Give me a break. Yea I know you can run headless.
>I hope, all the kinks and immaturity will be worked out of the new distribution, but it hasn’t happened yet, not by a long shot.
Again, no examples.
Time to move on.
alan
Alan Pae (Email) (URL) - 27 August '09 - 23:22
Ben i can’t say I agree with you here, Solaris 10 will have it’s full support lifecycle, it’s not as if you have to stop using it even in the next five years. This will get more folk using Indiana, more eyes, more bugs filed, more bugs fixed and in the end a much more mature product than we have today. If something is missing that you want please file RFE’s on Indiana but I think you will see that a lot of your specific issues are already being addressed.Che (URL) - 28 August '09 - 01:48
SX:CE should be the next Solaris 11. Yep, that’s right, it should. Let OpenSolaris be the playground, and give us a rock solid Solaris 11.It looked that way anyway, until they killed it.
And don’t forget Flash™!
Flash™ is simply an awesome piece of technology, that nobody else has and everybody envies (including Redhat engineers). It’s so simple, yet so powerful: JumpStart™ a master system, strip the system-specific information, create a compressed image (OS build). Have JumpStart™ create a mirror for you, install that .flar archive via JumpStart, have your own packages installed by JumpStart™.
Wow, you mean create-once, fully automatic, and lightning fast provisionining? I must have reached nirvana!
Is there such a thing in OpenSolaris? Well, gee, no, there isn’t! It’s being worked on, but in the meanwhile, OpenSolaris is unsuitable for any kind of mission critical deployment.
And they killed future Solaris 11 by axing SX:CE. All that stability, all those mature server OS features, they’re all buh-bye now.
UX-admin (Email) - 28 August '09 - 04:37
Oh yeah, and before I forget: I do software development. On Solaris. And make packages. With SX:CE being axed, all of the packaging work I’ve done has been reduced by half. Now I’ll have to double the work, because I’ll have to produce System V packages for enterprise customers (Solaris 10), and IPS packages, since “that’s the future”.Hundreds if not thousands of hours and four years of work lost. Gotta love OpenSolaris and IPS.
If I didn’t love Solaris so much, I would have been long gone and on GNU/Linux by now. I’m pretty fed up with these OpenSolaris antics, but I’m still hopeful Larry Ellison and Oracle will whip Menlo Park up in shape.
UX-admin (Email) - 28 August '09 - 04:43
@rdf: I felt the same way about bloat, until I started asking myself why I cared. The minimum hard disk size I can order from most of my vendors now is 160 GB, which means there’s usually over 100 GB sitting unused on the OS drives of any server I build. GNOME takes up, what, maybe a hundred megs? It just doesn’t matter anymore. The only time I really notice the bloat is when I do an install and have to wait for it to be copied from the CD.David Brodbeck - 28 August '09 - 16:42
I feel a fork coming on; oh, and a conspiracy theory ;-)Solaris (10|11|xx) is the business OS. I think this is being reigned in prior to Oracle taking over. If they do it now it will mean that Oracle aren’t the bad guys stopping SX:CE. Solaris may go back on sale with the next version.
OpenSolaris will be left to develop on it’s own, I don’t see the benefit to the enterprise for this OE as yet. I realise that a lot of development has been going on with OpenSolaris but it has a definate desktop focus. I don’t want to snapshot my servers every 5 minutes automatically! Maybe SongBird does help my application server run faster, but probably not! Possibly Oracle will use this distribution as they’re lower cost offering and replace their investment in Linux with it. This would at least give a ‘similar’ set of binaries even if they are delivered differently.
Neil Williams (Email) - 29 August '09 - 10:20
Ben,I understand the hesitation created by the EOL, but it is my personal belief that this is nothing more than FUD which is being perpetrated not by Sun, but by the old system administrators who are used to the old way of things being done. I’m a system administrator for a fairly well know university, and I just recently got into an argument with the head of our compute center when I pointed out that OSOL is the way of the future. Some of these admins who are complaining haven’t even attempted to use OSOL. They’re basing their “experiences” off of angry blog posts by the various system administrators who have used it.
OSOL made me switch back TO Solaris. For the past 5 years I’ve been running Gentoo linux on all of my servers. Why? Because it takes roughly as long to compile everything from source code as it does to complete the SXCE installation. During my time with Gentoo I learned something very important. The more pressing a problem is, the faster it gets fixed.
If Sun continues supporting SXCE, all the current sys admins are going to keep putting off the “problems with OSOL” to another day. The EOL FORCES developers to address these problems. There isn’t time to postpone anymore. I think as OSOL continues to grow, we will see the improvement of Caimen, AI, and at least some of the horrors of IPS will be resolved. Will Sun loose some customers? I doubt it.
Despite all the talk by various sys admins about just going over to Linux, the fact remains that Linux doesn’t offer half the features we’ve come to expect in Solaris, and while OSOL may implement them badly at this point in time, at LEAST they are implemented.
Pryoidain (Email) - 29 August '09 - 16:28
you want headless opensolaris? you got it: [[http://wikis.sun.com/display/jeos/...]]... don’t like it? you can use the distro constructor and create your own OSOL distro.want maturity? you got that too! solaris 10 is still under it’s support life cycle, and will be until OpenSolaris’ little details (including AI, caiman and IPS) are ironed out [[http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/10..]]
SX:CE was always meant to disappear at some point, the sooner the better and it took quite a long time… it’s the only way to focus development resources.
OpenSolaris, the distribution, is aimed mostly at developers… Solaris 11 or Next or whatever will be aimed at server use… it’s like comparing Fedora to RHEL. Yes, Solaris 11 will be based on OpenSolaris, the source code, not exactly the distro.
So, Solaris 10 and the backports via updates will remain until OpenSolaris is ready to replace it…
I don’t know what else to say… there are times where difficult decision need to be taken and this was one of those for Sun. Maybe Oracle will have the resources to keep developing Indiana and SX:CE… but there will be a point where Jumpstart, PKG and the legacy installer will disappear anyways.
Victor (Email) - 29 August '09 - 17:32
Ben:You are exactly right that the packages and package mangement tools are the most important part.
That’s why I use Nexenta! [[[[..]]]]]] . Eventually Nexenta will merge with or mutate into Debian GNU/Solaris.
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (Email) (URL) - 30 August '09 - 19:12
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Maybe the SX:CE editions wernt downloaded as much because they moved over to GA. Like me I assume many users were happy with the GA releases. Personaly I think open solaris has parts that fall backwards.Breaking controller compatability causing RAID’s to need a touch /reconfigure just to not cause errors.
Crossbow isnt quite there yet either.
Give me a stable GA any day I dont want buggy bleading edge to keep estimated 20 Years worth of manhour data on. Sure a 4hr rebuild time is good but gee 4hrs is alot more than I want to spend getting my data up. I would rather drink some beer around the BBQ and kill some brain cells.
Opensolaris has already previously costme 4 Days of downtime costing me about 8 weeks of unavalible data.
So put me in the group most solaris users fall into STABLE as a ROCK or we blow in the wind just like the rest of the linux users that will usualy jump ship onto a better ice patch.
Unbuntu… oh wasnt that mandriva or centos at one stage in the last 5 years.
Anthony - 07 September '09 - 10:16
I held on to SXDE 01/08 as long as I could, because I felt the SXCE release cycle was too fast and it was too unstable, and OpenSolaris had too many issues in the first few releases, like broken network driver and no sound. Finally when a version of the LiveCD appeared to work on the laptop I made the switch. It’s not been too bad, but I still note that SXDE was the last version that DIDN’T produce an “NMI detected” message at boot-up. Every OpenSolaris release since has done this, even tests of the bleeding edge versions. Not much noticeable subsequent effect, except that “reboot -f” is ruined.I got a shock when I first tried to update OpenSolaris. You can choose “update all”, or not. This was a real gotcha – there were a lot of updates and the unreliable initial version of network driver kept disconnecting part way through the update process. I wanted to just update the network drivers to the latest version first, so I could get a better connection to do the other updates, but couldn’t – catch-22! I hope one day IPS will be a bit more like Fedora’s YUM.
With the ‘old’ way of doing things, you can choose which patches you need, the updates are a lot more frequent, and now the bugs have been fixed you can use the Update Manager GUI to manage patching. The introduction of “deferred install” avoids the need for single user mode too – those patches are applied at system shutdown. Yes there are still issues, but if Solaris 11 will be based on OpenSolaris and not SXCE, then I can’t imagine even Sun recommending sysadmins to update their Solaris 10 systems to a Solaris 11 that is so incompatible on so many levels. Looks like the application binary backwards compatibility guarantee also stops at Solaris 10. We have some systems that the sysadmins are hardly even allowed to take down for patch update reboots. Imagine them asking for downtime to migrate to an ON-based installation and get everything working. But don’t worry, the commenters say, we can keep Solaris 10 on old systems with long-term support, and only use the new OS on new systems. Yes, but then we would have 2 completely incompatible system configuration procedures. Traditionally Sun have held back new features until they have a few years of stability before introducing them at enterprise level. Are they really going to bring out Solaris 11 next year based on ON, and hope to have all the bugs fixed by then? Maybe they should call it Solaris Vista!
Graham - 11 September '09 - 00:48
Ben. I couldn’t agree more. Look at the last few releases to realize that there OpenSolaris (SXCE and OSOL) is regressing…Trident video chip drivers were broken in 116 which is funny since these were used in the V20z and V40z sun products. They haven’t been fixed yet. Zfs raid-z (odd number of disks) broke badly in 121. The boot time in OSOL dev (122) has increased significantly. The list goes on and on. In the past, I’ve been testing releases fresh out of the chute. For the past few months, I’ve been delaying long enough to get some confidence in the quality of the release.
Because of this, I’ve been sitting on 110 on my servers. I can’t risk putting in flaky builds.
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Late but now: we use Osol 2009.06 for nearly one year in production now. really no – yes say NO problems here. we tried sxce – horrible to install for us. osol did the rigth job. fire up – customize one server- redo it on the others – download repository update. off we go.the only problem – is to say – we need a fixed ip adress for start. we too don’t use dhcp – so it should be an option during installation.
just my 2 cents … osol is getting better and better … we rely on it .. even when oracle bought sun :-)
Michael Widmann (Email) - 17 February '10 - 00:35
I’m done with OSOL now that SXCE is gone. b133 doesnt even work on my sun branded hardware. I find OSOL to be a bloody mess that this Solaris 10/9/8/7/2.X/FreeBSD/Linux guy thinks is really sub par.I’ve got lots of old Sun software and gear to “prove” how long I’ve been with SUNW. BUt this OSOL fetish is just that, a fetish by the new guard at Sun that happened at the wrong time, just before Oracle, and I can’t see Oracle allowing OSOL to continue on this messy change for the sake of change path while alienating Solaris 10 users and not getting anyone to come over from Linux/FreeBSD with the new “features” of OSOL. Sorely disappointed.
B133 wont even install fresh on a v20z, and b111->b133 doesn’t work either. I already miss SXCE because that always worked.
Mick Russom (Email) - 03 March '10 - 19:54
As one of the folks who setup Sun WAY back in 1983 By way off Bell Labs and as a member of the Unix standards Body (we straightened outthe Spec for Unix 5.4 after Sun messed it up) I insisted that SysV
package tools remain as base of Installs. One of the main reasons
is the contents file (which in the Opensolaris environment has a value
of “0” it gave us all sort of security features like pkgchk that do all
sorts of things like reset permissions, tell you when system files were
changed. As one who has been around UNIX since 1971. Some things
just be left alone. All the NEWBIES have done is create JOBS for
them selves and a lot of grief for those of us who have to REALLY
work for a living. Remember SUN was thrown out of N.S.A. in the
early 1990’s for it’s security practices,(two years to fix and get back
in). Just as Oracle was banned from Verizon for three years until
they changed there mind about patches(releasing them without
breaking something else). They got the message. IT’S the OS
Stupid” not keeping your job. Customers Leave when things
get hard to maintain. I know of one HIGHLY respected company
In Washington, D.C. who leads the way in imagery for 30 years who is moving there site to a new location. I was told by the CIO
that all Sun Products and Software will NOT be moving. The work
load for three folks ( 180 machines) with the new release of
Opensolaris has gotten to high. Plus the support is going down hill
I have spent a lot of my retirement years fixing other folks
DUMB ideas. Don’t fear SXCE will be back. Ellison needs the
OS to run correctly so ORACLE can eat up all of the machine and
NOT crash. Things HAVE TO IMPROVE
Robert P Bates. Alum of Bell-labs Bell-core Verizon and N.A.I labs.
DR Robert P Bates (Email) (URL) - 24 March '10 - 18:19
I was told by the CIOthat all Sun Products and Software will NOT be moving. The work
load for three folks ( 180 machines) with the new release of
Opensolaris has gotten to high.
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p90x dvd (Email) (URL) - 23 May '10 - 23:52
Opensolaris has already previously costme 4 Days of downtime costing me about 8 weeks of unavalible data.So put me in the group most solaris users fall into STABLE as a ROCK or we blow in the wind just like the rest of the linux users that will usualy jump ship onto a better ice patch.
p90x (Email) (URL) - 23 May '10 - 23:53
There has been no .iso release of opensolaris on genunix.org and no pkg:/entire added to the dev repository since b134, before the Oracle purchase. Mailing lists show that Sun/Oracle is using past b140 internally, while before the Oracle purchase we never lagged more than one or two releases in public binaries.While the latest b140+ OS/Net sources are still supposedly available in Mercurial, these sources are certainly not complete of everything that goes into opensolaris, and there isn’t a public build framework to produce a working distribution from the sources.
It is not even legal for Ben to give his SXCE snv_130 DVD’s to his friend, and already Oracle’s used this license flexibility to alter the deal, yoink!, Solaris 10 is no longer $0. OpenSolaris is redistributable, but it’s unclear to me there’s enough 3rd party interest to keep the platform alive if doing so can only be accomplished with a fork. Note that Nexenta is still mostly b134-based, not b140-based (just a few pullups from b140). I bet they are still dependent on a bunch of binary-only packages.
I use lots of OpenSolaris, so it’s in my interest to keep the platform vibrant. This plug in the ipkg flow could be harmless: could be some kind of freeze preparing for the upcoming semi-stable LiveDVD release of OpenSolaris 2010.xx where xx is…any day now.
That said I would have to advise any new users to STAY AWAY and stick with Linux where the license is stable. I don’t trust the future of this platform at all.
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