+------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | On 2009-04-10 21:02:32, Drew Tomlinson wrote: | | I'm a FreeBSD guy but somewhat recently began work at a Solaris shop. | We're running mostly Solaris 8 and 9 but even still have Solaris 6 & 7 | on some servers. Machines are not patched as they should be. Thus I'd | like to begin upgrading. | | I've fiddled with Solaris 10 a bit but find difficulty with the whole | package system for software and patches. Coming from FreeBSD, I'm used | to what its call a "ports" system which is basically a collection of | shell scripts that downloads source and then compiles. Compile time | options can be set so software is compiled with desired options. It | also pulls in and builds any dependencies. From an admin perspective, | all one has to do is type "portupgrade" with appropriate options and the | system takes care of the rest.
Use NetBSD's pkgsrc. For the vast majority of non-GUI apps, you won't have a problem. I've been running a Solaris 10 shop for two years (migrating from Linux), and haven't run into a package I couldn't get built with pkgsrc on it. Update 6 has zfsroot, which makes Live Upgrade (and thus patching) much less of a doom. You also probably want to use Martin Paul's pca for patching purposes. | Thus I am interested in OpenSolaris and its IPS package system. It | appears that it provides similar function to package managers from the | Linux world such as rpm, yum, and apt-get. I am also encouraged by this | OpenSolaris help list to guide me along the way. I have not found any | such reliable list or forum for Solaris. | | So, is OpenSolaris a viable OS for a production shop? It would | basically host common unix services such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, Samba, | DNS, DHCP, LDAP, etc. Are SPARC and x86 processor support equally | stable? Thoughts, opinions, nudges to appropriate links, etc. all | appreciated. I would argue no. At the very least, not until the Automated Installer project gets more mature. Ditto sparse zones. Some other stuff. It depends on your expectations and requirements, but I'll be sticking with Solaris 10 for my production systems. That said: The opensolaris.org infrastructure all runs on OpenSolaris (from what I understand); one of their people is giving a talk at OSCON this year about it. Could be interesting. -- bda cyberpunk is dead. long live cyberpunk.
