>Someone somewhere figured that it made sense to need X to install the >Studio Express software and thus there is no *easy* way to perform a text >based or console install on a server.
Dennis- I'm glad that you are drawing attention to what I think is THE #1 BIGGEST WEAKNESS in the new versions of Solaris (particularly Indiana 2008.xx and 2009.xx) that are coming out from Sun today. I've read a lot of your blogs, and I've come to the conclusion that you are someone who has a lot of experience and knowledge about running servers in a real world data center environment and that's why I feel there needs to be someone with a server / data center focused vision similar to yours having some kind of a positive influence on how OpenSolaris Indiana 2009.xx evolves in the future. My all time favorite blog from you is this one about OpenSolaris 2008.05: http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/?q=node/110 EVERYONE who writes code for OpenSolaris NEEDS to read this blog entry, because I think it does a great job of really pointing out all the major weaknesses that the whole Indiana series has when you try to run it the way you would run a REAL server operating system (i.e. controlling it purely through the ttya serial console or through SSH with no GNOME desktop, and no X-windows and definitely no clicking around with a mouse). Trying to install 2008.05 on x86 hardware via a ttya console like you would install Solaris 10 on a real SPARC server is a clunky, awkward, and impossible task.... inevitably you have to give up and hook up a keyboard and a monitor and a mouse to the darn thing which is awful, because you should never, EVER have to connect a mouse to install a server operating system. What if I'm 10,000 miles away from the data center and can't hook up a mouse? What then? FreeBSD, Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu Server, etc. all let you make it all the way t hrough the installation process without having to use a mouse, yet somehow the newest version of OpenSolaris gets this wrong? "Click Here to Continue"? What's going on? Sure there's an automated network installer in the newest Indiana, but what if you're working on a single colocated server in a datacenter at 3am in the morning and both hard disk drives in the mirrored zpool have simultaneously failed wiping out all your precious ZFS data and you now have 25 minutes to put new drives in the server and re-install OpenSolaris (via the ttya console, of course) and then restore everything from your ZFS and beadm backups. Because it's a single server colocation, there's no "network installation server" to boot from, only the one server with 2 dead OS drives, 2 new drives with no data on them and a USB CD-ROM drive. It's situations like this where you need a REAL server operating system like Solaris 10 that has features that people who work in data centers LOVE like a quick and snappy text based installer and flar / flash archive installations and not a desktop focused OS like Indiana. Why is it that everything in Indiana has to require X-windows and a GNOME desktop to work? What ever happened to Sun recognizing that people who work in data centers prefer doing things by typing in commands through SSH or through the ttya console instead of clicking with a mouse? Even Microsoft recognizes this basic fact, as they just came out with "Windows Server 2008- Server Core": http://www.petri.co.il/understanding-windows-server-2008-core.htm which is a command line only focused server operating system with no solitaire and no talking paperclip and no other mamby-pamby GUI stuff. How come even Microsoft is starting to get this right, but Indiana is getting it all wrong? When are we going to get an "OpenSolaris" server core that is command line and text only with no X-windows dependencies? I know lots of people who wanted to use OpenSolaris 2008.11 in production and wanted to buy the $300 a year support subscription for it from Sun but they ended up using Nexenta Core instead for the sole reason that Nexenta ignores the desktop and gets the whole "server thing" 100% right. Nexenta has a snappy and quick text-based installer (the most brilliant thing about the installer being that it runs inside a "screen" session so you can switch between different installation ttys see link below): http://foss-boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-solabuntu-part1.html and at the end it gives you a minimal OpenSolaris-based server system with no bloat (i.e. SSH and nothing else on it) and then the sysadmin can use the package manager to quickly install postfix (if it's an e-mail server) or Apache (if it's a web server) and take the rest from there. Not having this kind of capability is turning into real dollars and cents losses for Sun because these are real paying customers who wanted to use Indiana 2008.11 in their servers but were dragged away kicking and screaming and forced to use Nexenta on their servers because Indiana totally neglects datacenter / server customers and the things we are interested in (like text based installers and quickly configuring static IP addresses and NOT having X-windows). There is no need to install GNU Chess and Thunderbird and a GNOME desktop and Compiz if it's going to be a mail server, so why force server users to install things that they dont want or need? And to make matters worse, they make it as difficult as possible to assign a static IP address to the server in one go without having to boot back up (into GNOME of course) and fiddle about with NWAM. Solaris 10 was and is (along with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD) probably the best server operating system to ever be used in the datacenter PERIOD.So why ruin it by making everything dependent on GNOME and X-windows? Why not go back to servers and the command line and text based interfaces that bring that steady stream of server revenue money right where it belongs at Sun Microsystems? Look at these links- this is how a server operating system traditionally gets set up: http://bitphonic.com/work/installing-zfs-as-root-filesystem-on-solaris-10/ http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-exinst.html http://www.openaddict.com/node/34 http://www.openbsd101.com/installation.html all text and no graphics, 'cause when you're an experienced data center tech, the graphics just slow things down and get in the way. When are we going to get this kind of thing in OpenSolaris? The closest thing we have right now is "sys-unconfig" and that doesn't count because you run it after you do the main install (i.e. it's too little to late). Now if we could just run "sys-unconfig" during the installation process and not have GNOME and X-windows installed then we might just be 99% of the way to having the best server operating system ever, because Indiana does become a really great server operating system after "svcadm disable gdm" starts to take effect. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
