[Sussex] Solaris Networking

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Steve 'Dobbo' Dobson wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 07:56:26PM +0100, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>   
>> Solaris has.... interesting historical issues and variations from the 
>> open source and Linux models. The misnaming of SunOS 5.x as Solaris 2.x 
>> and renaming of SunOS 4.x+OpenWindows as Solaris 1.x was typical of 
>> market driven nuttiness Sun has been prone to.
>>     
>
> As I remember it SunOS was the label for the kernel that prior to the
> Solaris naming was also used to reference the other software packaged
> bundled with that kernel.  Solaris was the label that unified all the
> software shipped in the box, the kernel, X11, OpenView, ...
>   
The boxes said both Solaris 1.x and SunOS 4.x, and Solaris 2.x and SunOS 
5.x for quite some time. Since I could find no way to buy the operating 
system, SunOS, without the OpenWindows that made up the remainder of the 
system, and since the OpenWindows was pointless to buy without SunOS to 
run it on, it was like trying to separate the car with the fenders on it 
should have a different name than the car without the fenders.

> Sure this was marketing driven but that change didn't bother me.  That's
> the sort of thing commercial companies do.
>   
It was deliberately confusing to get people to switch over to the new 
Solaris architecture. I sat in on the marketing discussions for some 
system purchases where the sales people clearly and deliberately 
obfuscated compatibility questions, calling it SunOS or Solaris at whim 
with whatever would make the sale. It was *nasty* to have to explain 
that the new sun4m architecture would not run the old SunOS 4.x/Solaris 
1.x, only the new SunOS 5.x/Solaris 2.x.
> The one that did bother me was the switch from "Solaris 2.x" to "Solaris x".
> One of my contacts in Sun told me this was pure marketing, and the only 
> reason was to give "Solaris" a higher version number then WindowsNT.
>   
I wish they'd just stuck with the "5.x" from the SunOS switchover. That 
drove me nuts, much like the RHEL numbering scheme starting over and 
coming round to RHEL 4.2 makes my resume with work on RedHat 4.2 
somewhat confusing.

>> They seem to have been reverting to BSD style UNIX due to the GNU and 
>> Linux pressures. Linux, for *years*, had far more usable versions of NIS 
>> and NFS than you could find on a default Sun obx.
>>     
>
> Given the popularity of Linux now in the Unix-like area is that surprising?
>   
Oh, not at all. I do want to be sure to give GNU tools their due: the 
availablility of gcc, gzip, gmake, gtar, etc. all made SunOS and Solaris 
systems vastly more usable. I used to spend a lot of time porting such 
things over from FSF and later from Linux code to those systems.

>> If you want to be leading edge and have a cheap play environment, 
>> though, try CygWin. You can learn quite a lot about open source packages 
>> and software development there, especially cross-platform work. The 
>> knowledge will stand you in good stead when the architecture changes 
>> under your project.
>>     
>
> I would council against CygWin.  Don't get me wrong, CygWin is a great system.
> I installed it on a Win2003 laptop I *had* to use when I worked for a 
> company a few years back.  It made that system useable to me, a long time
> Unix hack.  But the file naming systems on Windows meant that it never
> felt quite right.  So I'd recommend going for the "real" thing.
>
> If you are trying to determine which would be the right distro for you then
> please don't just ask "Which distro is best?" - you'd be better off putting
> the names into a hat a picking one at random.  90% of what you learn on
> one distro will apply to the others, and 80% will apply to the rest of the
> Unix like OSs (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS/X, ...).  If you can ask
> questions like "Which Linux is the most popular in the server room?" or
> "Which Linux is the least influenced by commercial pressures?" then this
> would be a good thread to discuss the various merits of the different distros
> and find the one that best fits you.
>   
Yeah. I like RHEL and CentOS for system stability: when I install a 
package on one machine, I want it to be the same as I installed on that 
other machine last week, not built with secret sauce on a differently 
configured local server like gentoo.

Ubuntu does look promising for getting user interfaces and installers 
right. But if you want real fun, build an interesting tool and port it 
from one OS to the other. That's an education!