On 7/31/05, Shawn Leard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have been involved with Linux since it was first available as a development
> only
> release. This length of time predates Solaris and extends back into the SunOS
> days
> so I feel I am in a position to offer good feedback.
It is early on a Sunday morning and I am holding onto my first
coffee. I was working all day yesterday on moving the Blastwave build
server stack into a new datacenter and I know that I have a long day
ahead of me still dealing with a number of issues. Quite frankly, its
a lot of fun and I love doing serious upgrades like this. Everyone in
the Solaris user base will benefit. I hope.
Responding to this email on the other hand is an action of
questionable intelligence but it is too late. I am already a
paragraph into this and I feel that my fingers are not about to slow
down anytime soon. I feel that Rich Teer would be hunkering into his
chair and saying to himself "ha, Dennis has another opinion breaking
out of the gates, this will be good!"
> Solaris x86 never really caught on because few commercial packages were
> offered for
> it and most major UNIX development was done on Solaris SPARC.
I think that you hit the nail on the head with that one. But that is
ancient history. No one in the OpenSolaris community ( or Solaris
community if there is a difference anymore ) is living in the past any
more. I know that the first telephone switchboards installed in New
York city were horribly clunky and needed a massive infrastructure of
maintainance people as well as an army of operators to place calls.
No one picks up a phone anymore, hits the connect switch three times
and says "operator, please dial Broadway 763". Its nice to see in old
black and white movies but we are not there anymore.
I will say that I had the great pleasure of working with Lotus
Development Corp back when Lotus 1-2-3 was still king of the
spreadsheets. People were beginning to look at Microsoft Windows and
the OS/2 project just released version 1.3 Extended Edition. There
are people within this OpenSolaris community that predate me to a
large degree and, quite frankly, are a whole lot more gifted and
brillant than I. Despite these short comings I do recall that Lotus
worked very hard to ensure that their new killer product Lotus Notes
worked equally well on OS/2 and SunOS and Solaris and SCO and and and
you get the point. Before Java was out yet Lotus had this concept
that you will be able to write code or an application and it would run
on whatever operating system or architecture that had the
infrastructure in place. Sort of like the JVM and the Java bytecode.
Loosely.
So I had the opportunity to work, at great length and depth, with
Lotus Notes on Solaris x86 back when. So long as you had the right
patches in place and knew what you were doing with Notes, and I
profess that was more of an art than a science, the server would run
very well. To that end I installed a cluster of Compaq Proliant 5000
servers ( dual Compaq SMART Array controllers each ) running Solaris
2.5.1 for Intel and Lotus Notes server. Within that small government
( 13,000 users ) we were able to sustain about 2000 users per server
in the cluster simultaneously. It was great fun. I also had an old
SPARCCenter 2000E fully loaded running four instances of the Lotus
Notes server and when it joined the cluster then we were really quite
happy with performance.
But that was the Lotus story and while we also had OS/2 and SCO and
AIX and HPUX covered it was Solaris that was the darling. If you
wanted to scale then you didn't go with Windows NT or OS/2. People
will debate that but it is ancient history. The IBM CEO called up Jim
Manzie one fine Friday to let him know that Lotus was being bought,
lock stock and barrel. Things changed and today I have no recent
revision of Lotus Domino for my Solaris 10 x86 servers. What I have
is Lotus Domino 5.0.10 from a few years ago. But that is about to
change as IBM has made commitments to work with the Solaris x86 market
and I await with anticipation for the great and wonderous day when I
can "zone in" a stack of Domino servers on Opteron hardware. Colour
me happy.
When I can fire up a 32 core super killer UltraSparc processor based
machine then I will be really thrilled. Perhaps tomorrow?
But rolling out the ancient history trick along with the cool computer
story is a fine literary method. Tried tested and true. Its a fairly
obvious way of constructing some scaffolding around a point that would
otherwise topple over under its own flabby weight.
So while I admire your history with Linux as well as your experiences
I really need to pull away the scaffolding and look at the point
standing there shivering and naked in the cold light of day. I think
what you are trying to say was "there were no real software offerings
for Solaris x86 in the past".
If that was the point then okay, I think some people are with you on
that hind sight.
> Many years later with all the corporate and government cut backs, Linux
> developed
> a huge following that continues to grow. The Linux user base has grown to the
> point
> Solaris SPARC is no longer the preferred development platform.
That is a broad and sweeping statement that I won't wade into. The
sales numbers speak volumes and last time I checked Sparc hardware was
moving. But I am not in sales. So I don't really know. Let's take a
look at what I do know. I do know that when I check my package
download stats I see about 17,000 software packages were downloaded on
Friday ( 29th July ) and of those a whopping 12,100 were for Sparc
based users. On the 24th however I see a 9456:6360 ratio for the i386
to Sparc download stats. But I am only checking one mirror out of
about thirty and so at best I can say that there must be one massive
pile of Sparc based machines out there and an equally massive number
of x86 systems. All running Solaris.
The other thing that I can track is growth. Lots of it. That may be
signal noise and the actual data is beyond my ability to filter out.
A simple fourier transform will not cut through all the static but I
can spot signal volume and that is growing every month.
> Personally, I have mixed feeling about that because I like both equally.
Here is the funny thing. I must confess that I have learned a great
deal from my experiences with Linux and I don't think that I have had
quite the same difficulties with Red Hat Linux. My experiences with
other Linux distros is fairly limited but I generally do the same
thing every time; I goto Linux From Scratch and start building my own
kernel and everything else that I need. Its a fun and educational
process and I can tell you, at least with Red Hat Linux 6.2 on a
SparcStation 20, it can be a struggle at times.
But fun to do provided that you have patience for such things. Like
working on an old carburator or refinishing a piece of furniture I
often watch the process with the hope that something shiny and new
will emerge from the process. At the very least I learn a great deal.
> Let's not forget Linux, Solaris x86, and SCO are not the only choices for an
> x86
> based UNIX. Some others are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD; all of which are
> both mature and stable and used by companies like Ebay and Amazon.
At this point I feel the need to wander away to find that second cup
of coffee.
I think, at this moment, that I may be spitting onto a forest fire and
any attempt that I make to say things like "Linux is not UNIX" and
"Linux is a kernel not an OS" will merely evaporate in the bonfire
without ever making a difference.
> To judge the future of Linux based on Redhat is not going to lead to an
> accurate prediction.
To judge the future of UNIX based on the ancient past will not lead to
an accurate prediction.
But it does make for a nice story over a cup of coffee in the morning.
I need to go and screw rails onto servers and slide them into a rack.
This will also include a n ODW PowerPC based machine with some sort of
serial console cable hack such that we Blastware people can work on
the GRUB2 boot loader and perhaps get the OpenSolaris kernel ( or some
standalone binary ) to load via tftp from a boot server. That is one
of the many things that keeps me busy during the day. As well as
writing long wandering posts now and again.
Dennis Clarke
Director and Admin for blastwave.org
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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