Has anybody around here ever used HP-UX or AIX or any other relevant non-BSD, non-Linux UNIX-style operating system before?
If so, what do you think are the disadvantages and advantages of these other operating systems vis-a-vis Solaris? I found this interesting link that compares HP-UX to Solaris and seems to argue heavily in favor of Solaris being easier to use: http://loudermilk.org/software/solaris-hpux.html The author claims that there is no easy way to tell how much memory is installed in HP-UX. That's crazy!!! To me this sounds so medieval and so dark ages that I have a hard time believing that there is no HP-UX equivalent to what: prtconf -v | grep Memory | awk '{print $3}' does in Solaris that you could just put in your shell script to extract how much total RAM is available in the system. Can any of the HP-UX admins confirm this? The author of the article said that he had to write a C program to figure out how much memory was installed in his HP-UX machines! The init 5 command also apparently doesn't turn off the machine in HP-UX. I find that kind of strange as well. The only advantage I could find that HP-UX has pver Solaris is that by default it seems to give you more information about what's going on when the computer is booting up (without having to add a "-v" option to the boot loader like Solaris requires) and it saves all that information into log files so that you can see what the boot errors are after the server is done booting up. I don't remember the Solaris "dmesg | less" command ever having any bootup / startup log information in it, so where is this information stored in Solaris? One of the very few things that annoys me about Solaris is that by default (without the "-v" option in the bootloader) it doesn't give you very much information about what is actually going on when the computer is booting up and shutting down compared to Red Hat with it's: Starting this [ OK ] / [ FAILED ] messages. Sure SMF theoretically can start lots of services at the same time which is better than Red Hat's init scripts, but it would still be nice to see more by default about what's actually going on in the Solaris boot process. I also found this article on AIX: http://blog.thilelli.net/post/2007/05/22/Upcoming-IBM-AIX-6-features-vs-Sun-Solaris-10-and-OpenSolaris I haven't played around with AIX yet, but just reading about it, it seems like some kind of a weird, alien land... like UNIX with a New Jersey accent. It's supposed to be a System V, but the init scripts are BSD style instead of SysV /etc/init.d 's ? Can someone confirm this? The seems kind of bizarre as well. Why would you not have Sys V init scripts if it's a Sys V UNIX? Solaris 10 has SMF but it still has a latent backwards compatible Sys V init capability in the /etc/init.d directory if anyone decides that they want to use it. I can't figure out what the advantage is that AIX has over Solaris, even for IBM shops, because Solaris seems like it's capable of running virtualized inside z/VM in an IBM shop's mainframe whereas AIX can't do this. I also didn't mention any of the other non-BSD Unices because I've been doing some research and SGI's IRIX seems like it's are pretty much dead now and Compaq's (DEC's) Tru64 UNIX was decapitated in a duel with HP-UX, which only leaves Solaris, HP-UX and AIX as the remaining three immortals in the System V UNIX "Highlander" competition that seems to be going on in large enterprises for domination of the high availability systems market. Hopefully either Solaris or some kind of BSD will win the tournament and beat out the competition for marketshare as Linux doesn't seem to be all that reliable if you don't roll your own custom-built Linux distro from scratch and run it on carefully chosen hardware the way that Google and Akamai do. When you're stuck with a job as a sysadmin for random x86 based Linux machines purchased by other people with device drivers that are out of the main kernel tree, you never know when a Linux kernel upgrade is going to break something. Remember- in the end... there can be only one! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
