On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Chung Hang Christopher Chan wrote:
There was no backup server before the Open Solaris
box.
So, are you saying you have no experience with running a backup server
before this install? I would imagine it would be hard to evaluate an
operating system properly in that case.
My experience with Linux software raid has been
quite good. So good that I have even missed the latest
features available with mdadm such as creating mirrors
with just one disk so that you can add the second disk
later.
But what about real world pounding on the system type data, you know where
you're pumping i/o through the pipe and trying to sustain as much
throughput as possible, have you don't any of that to really test Linux
against Solaris?
You've mentioned some of the annoyances on Solaris, but how did it stand
up? Is this the type of stability that your freind would laugh about? Or
did Solaris buckle and fall over?
Support for
lvm on raid has been available for quite a while.
There's a difference between being available and working. What is your
real world experience with running on Linux?
I have not read the latest on install on zfs but I see
that this will not be a linux point much longer.
Really? Are you referring to System Tap? How so do you mean?
The guy is running ext3 on software raid and on one
instance on a 3ware too. I built the 3ware box for
him. As for comparing filesystems...I guess I would
try this test:
http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04
and see how it stacks up.
That's a nice blue-sky thought, but what actual tests have you run to
compare Solaris to Linux? The more you mention, the less it seems you've
done.
I have also seen a lot of people in this industry who have learned more in
2 years than some of the people that have been doing it for 25 years. And
there's a lot more of the smart ones that learn in 2 years as of recent,
since the inet. I think it's a pheonomina.
So, far you haven't shown any real test results of how you evaluated
Solaris to Linux, I'm still trying to understand why Solaris doesn't meet
up to your needs, but fishing for straws at this point.
The two reasons that he laughs at Sun that I can think
of are one rather personal reason which I shall not
mention and the other being that his brother-in-law
who works for some Fortune 500 company replaced all
their Sun boxes or Solaris with Linux. I gather that
his brother-in-law was get high up and perhaps made
the call too...
I don't care about your friend's brother-in-law, is this what you're using
to evaluate?
So Solaris has no fair comparison in his own
environment and getting him to try Open Solaris is at
the moment at stalemate of "don't like GNOME".
Does this effect the server? If not, I don't think it's relevant in the
context we're talking here, so let's not mix it up.
We know the desktop is not as far along, ok. Let's move on to real
testing, not blue sky based on your friend's BIL.
As for my current environment, I am the sole IT guy
and I got two linux boxes as the company fax and a
mail server in addition to the existing MS Exchange
installation.
That sounds like a big responsibility. Have you looked at snapshots on ZFS
to do backups? What do you think about that? How would you do that on
Linux? For you fax and mail servers, you could leverage that to have
incremental backups, which could not only save you time but could be more
effecient than you're using now.
This is what I call "Google Support". Not only do we
have that on Solaris,
you can go to docs.sun.com and get one stop shopping
for much of the
system.
So will Open Solaris cater to guys on Google support
then?
Well, let me see. You come to OpenSolaris.org and get responses from
several Solaris engineers, which I'm marginally considered one of.
Wouldn't you be one of those Google Customers, to some extent? That's what
you keep doing when I ask you a question, go google and reply with a link
to something you would probably use or would consider testing with...
Redhat Hong Kong is working hard at creating
Linux professionals over here so that they can get
some more google support guys and hopely one or two
paid support guys when those guys convince their
employers.
Well, wake me up when Red Hat Hong Kong has cornered the IT industry with
all of these Linux Professionals, and wake me up again when people are
paying their hard $$$s on it. While your friend is laughing about Sun
support, there's a lot of folks that are willing to cough up their $$$s to
have it.
I am not using any because they do not list Solaris on
their website and others on the Centos list have said
that 3ware does not provide Solaris drivers. At least
Areca is available but I have never tried an Areca
card.
You should enquire with 3Ware about drivers. I encourage all folks to
enquire to any company that doesn't have a driver that they need/want on
Solaris to find out availability, or schedule, often one is in the works.
I don't have a choice. I am using ext3 at the moment.
XFS = fast on writes but disaster when you lose power.
ext3 = slow but more stable.
So, you had 2 drives for the mirror, and another to
boot off of?
Yes.
That should be a very solid test bed. You have the system issolated from
the mirrors, and there's cache for each drive of their own. That sounds
like a decent test bed to me.
This was only incidentally noticed during rcp attempts
of a bzipped tarball that was about 220MB in size.
Did you try scp? I would stay away from rcp, it's not secure.
http://www.opensolaris.org/bug/report.jspa
Thanks, I will do that.
Please do, that's the only way to get an engineer to look at it. You know,
the ones that Sun pays...kinda like support for free.;-) Maybe Red Hat
Hong Kong will do the same on Linux. Do you think they have the expertise
to do that?
I run rcp over a vpn link and besides scp slows things
down big time when compared to rcp.
Do you have some real numbers to show how much slower scp is?
--
Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group
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