Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, UNIX admin wrote: There is no reason gtar should be included when there is tar or star just for the reason of catering to Linux crowd. Uhmm, what about for compatibility with GNU specific extensions to the tar format? regards, -- Paul Jakma [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Key ID: 64A2FF6A Fortune: Bender: I need a calculator. Fry: You are a calculator. Bender: I need a good calculator. ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
Seems to me you already have your mind made up so why bother? still.. read on On Saturday 26 November 2005 17:38, Jake Maciejewski wrote: Dtrace is better than just for a developer, it's good for system Administrator as well. What would [i]I[/i] do with it [i]on a desktop[/i]. I use shell scripting frequently and the occasional PERL, but I rarely have the need to dig very deep. This is true until you strike some obscure problem and want to debug it. Oops, sorry, we're talking desktop here, ... Just reboot then. Well I wouldn't limit zones and SMF just for servers. Zones give you the ability to install an temporarily to test, when its done you simply delete the zone, it also allows you to wall off an application from the rest of the system, unsure an application is safe, wall it off inside a zone. Normally when I screw up my system with upgrades or new applications it's because of intricacies of my system that wouldn't easily be replicated in a zone. Also, setting up a zone for new software might be more trouble than just installing and hoping it works. Temporarily breaking GNOME on my desktop isn't as big of a deal as upgrading Apache and breaking a server, for example. It depends what you want, you might for example run wine in a zone to prevent windows viruses or poorly behaved widows apps from affecting the rest of your system. SMF makes it easier to maintain workstations and servers; you can use it to track problems your hardware and software so it makes sense on the desktop as well. I may have underestimated SMF. Probably, but it does work better on SPARC systems When you add in ZFS it also makes great uses for the desktop, snapshots, clones are perfect for working on projects. You can setup automatic snapshots of any project you are working on. It's then easy to go backward. I can see how ZFS would be useful, but not useful enough to run Solaris for it. The simplicity of administering ZFS is far over everything else. All other systems seem to have usability problems, even the windows practice of rooting all drives in the same place isn't particularly convenient especially when it breaks all you shortcuts. I think ZFS gives all the benefits of unix filesystem semantics without the drawbacks. Besides hardware support, what does Linux bring to the table? Solaris and Linux both use X.org as its graphics display subsystem. Well, I have 3D acceleration support from nvidia, who now offer Solaris drivers I see. I don't know about AGP support, though. I'm running amd64 with an nividia chipset, which I don't think is supported by Solaris agpgart. What I do know for sure is I'm not going to be playing Quake 4 in Solaris, and I as far as I know ATI isn't an option unless I want to pay for XiG's drivers. Time will tell, gee go buy a 59 buck GEFORCE and plug it in till something else comes along, dunno about agpgart but I think many chipsets implement this in pretty similar ways, so I'd expect reasonably broad support. On this note, Solaris does have more limited driver support, but the Solaris DDI is STABLE and drivers do not break between versions, (linux breaks drivers even between BUILDS), as far as I know drivers as far back as solaris 7 can still be loaded on S10. So when I upgrade Solaris I have a very good chance that all my hardware will work too. Somathing that can't be said for linux. I have found locating drivers for a PARTICULAR linux distro and revision almost impossible in some cases. Of course there is also the ABI stability - Guaranteed for a certain ABI subset. There's a bunch of stuff I haven't updated since solaris 7 ! As far as I know much of blastwaves stuff is linked for Solaris 8 and will run on everything up to 10. Try running an app linked for RH 7 on fedora, or say debian linux.. Actually try even _finding_ a modern version of anything linked for RH7 ! This is a very attractive feature in my book, that saves me an absolute heap of time. I know WINE supports Solaris, but I don't think CrossOver Office and Cedega do, so running MS Office and games gets significantly trickier. Far as I know these apps work fine in a straight wine environment these days. Crossover is a commercial product and codeweavers are open to a Solaris version if there is a market for it (or someone else like sun pays for it). Transgaming are open to a port as well, as I last heard (they just don't want to maintain it). I have considered porting Transgamings wine derivative once or twice. You are free to use any display manager you, thanks to Blastwave it has most if not all the standard desktop environments. Blastwave has over 1300 ready made applications. Great! I'd like GNOME 2.12 (with some degree of integration), gkrellm (with support for CPU temperature, for example), MPlayer with win32codecs and without pulling in esd, k3b and konqueror without pulling in arts, a cross toolchain for Linux PPC built
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
I may have underestimated SMF. Probably, but it does work better on SPARC systems Well SMF itself is no differnet from one architecture to the next; but it you're talking about fault managemet, the focus for hardware fault handling has traditionally been on hardware we developed and sold. And we only developed SPARC systems (the x86 systems sold under Sun's label were by and large made and developed by others). This is changing so hardware fault detecting is finding its way into x86; however, it should be clear that Sun is likely to make this only working on Sun developed hardware and hardware which is very much like it. With OpenSolaris, it becomes easier for others to make it work on their hwardware too. The simplicity of administering ZFS is far over everything else. All other systems seem to have usability problems, even the windows practice of rooting all drives in the same place isn't particularly convenient especially when it breaks all you shortcuts. I think ZFS gives all the benefits of unix filesystem semantics without the drawbacks. On this note, Solaris does have more limited driver support, but the Solaris DDI is STABLE and drivers do not break between versions, (linux breaks drivers even between BUILDS), as far as I know drivers as far back as solaris 7 can still be loaded on S10. So when I upgrade Solaris I have a very good chance that all my hardware will work too. Somathing that can't be said for linux. I have found locating drivers for a PARTICULAR linux distro and revision almost impossible in some cases. Of course there is also the ABI stability - Guaranteed for a certain ABI subset. There's a bunch of stuff I haven't updated since solaris 7 ! As far as I know much of blastwaves stuff is linked for Solaris 8 and will run on everything up to 10. Try running an app linked for RH 7 on fedora, or say debian linux.. Actually try even _finding_ a modern version of anything linked for RH7 ! There have been only a few major breakages in the DDI in Solaris; it was possible to write MT-Safe driver before Solaris 2.6 but in Solaris 2.6 we required drivers to be MT-Safe; the important breakage events were: - Solaris 2.6: all drivers need to be MT-Safe (but MT-Safe drivers could be developed well beforehand) - Solaris 7: introduction of a 64 bit OS required all drivers to be ported to 64 bit on SPARC (but you were able to run in 32 bit mode on then current hardware) - Solaris 10: introduction of AMD64 requires 64 bit drivers; but you can boot in 32 bit mode. This is a very attractive feature in my book, that saves me an absolute heap of time. Yep. Write once, run forever. The folks at nVidia were *really* surprised that they could write a version agnostic[1] driver for Solaris. You know linux is not an ideal OS for a dvd player you know, lots of companies use it just because it's free and they don't have to pay royalties. Thats pretty attractive to them, but when it comes to it, why should I care if my DVD player has linux in it or Win CE or QNX or some custom OS if it plays my dvds properly ? Yep, I'm not that impressed with the embedded Linux in my DVD player and the software on top of it; it needs to be rebooted often and has no software reboot switch. And if I power cycle it will it is recording, I need to reformat the harddisk. Casper ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
Paul Jakma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, UNIX admin wrote: There is no reason gtar should be included when there is tar or star just for the reason of catering to Linux crowd. Uhmm, what about for compatibility with GNU specific extensions to the tar format? There are few of them all include implementation details that make them needlessly incompatible with tar :-( - The ability to store long filenames The implementation in GNU tar ignores the POSIX.1-1988 standard that allows to store path names up to 256 chars. The POSIX draft did not change since January 1987 but GNU tar (created as a hack on the POSIX compliant PD-TAR / SUG(Sun User group) tar which _was_ POSIX.1-1988 compliant) included a POSIX incompatible implementation in 1989. This extension is the cause of most imcompatibility problems with real TAR implementation. Star is able to unpack all such archives automatically except for the MySql packages that have been created with a GNU tar version that is even called broken by the FSF maintainers, here you would need to call star -x H=gtar as format auto-detection does not work. All known Filenames from source projects fit into the POSIX.1-1988 scheme. The GNU tar implementation allows filenames up to 1023 chars but is outdated since POSIX.1-2001 that allows infinite filename length. - The ability to archive sparse files GNU tar's implementation could be called a full design bug as it ignores basic rules for tar archives and all tar implemenatations except star will stop reading the archive when encountering a sparse file. - The ability to create multi volume archives. GNU tar is only able to read back about 95% of all self created multi-volume archives. You better extract them using star ;-) - The ability to create incremental backups. This feature has been integrated 1992 but never tested/fixed. Even simple test cases fail with GNU tar. Better use star's incrementals. Conclusion: If Sun did do what has been planned and integrated star instead of GNU tar in Solaris-10, nobody would miss GNU tar. Jörg -- EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [EMAIL PROTECTED](uni) [EMAIL PROTECTED](work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
In regard to (b). One simple thing SUN could do is to dual license SUN libc as GPL and CDDL. The way FreeBSD, Mozilla and many others resolved it. This will immediately resolve publicity issue. That's not going to happen, and you should stop asking for it: every time you ask for it, you give credibility to this absurd idea that libc (and ld.so.1 for that matter) are somehow derived works of GPL'd work. Excellent! That's simply great news! :) Forward ever, GPL never! :) This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
I get tarballs all the time that require the non-standard GNU behavior to extract, and I would be annoyed if I had to install blastwave for something so trivial. And if the distribution is called GNU/Solaris, Actually, the distribution we're discussing here is SchilliX, which tries to follow the UNIX standards. Also, if you need GNU tar compatibility, `star` should do just peachy, and then some. I would expect some basic GNU tools, yes; Linux has nothing to do with that. And wouldn't it be OpenSoHurd? :) I guess it would be if the purpose was to make Solaris more homey to strictly GNU developers. Therein however lies the paradox, which is that the noise about GNU stuff isn't coming from GNU/FSF, but from users who came from Linux. It would at least appear that most people in the Linux world regard GNU and Linux to be synonymous. You and I may make the distinction, but we're a minority in that regard. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
On 11/26/05, Jake Maciejewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dtrace is better than just for a developer, it's good for system Administrator as well. What would [i]I[/i] do with it [i]on a desktop[/i]. I use shell scripting frequently and the occasional PERL, but I rarely have the need to dig very deep. Dtrace has features to meet your needs as well... Brendan G wrote a small Dtace script called execsnoop, it allows you to follow what scripts and programs are doing, everytime it executes another program it prints the arguments. Its amazing how many shell scripts there are in the system. DTrace can has been intergrated in to perl just need to build a dtrace enabled perl version then you can use the power of dtrace to debug and monitor your scripts. Well I wouldn't limit zones and SMF just for servers. Zones give you the ability to install an temporarily to test, when its done you simply delete the zone, it also allows you to wall off an application from the rest of the system, unsure an application is safe, wall it off inside a zone. Normally when I screw up my system with upgrades or new applications it's because of intricacies of my system that wouldn't easily be replicated in a zone. Also, setting up a zone for new software might be more trouble than just installing and hoping it works. Temporarily breaking GNOME on my desktop isn't as big of a deal as upgrading Apache and breaking a server, for example. Zone creation is easy, once you have done it once or twice it takes 1minute to configure, 20 minutes to create, and then its ready to use. Want to test out the latest beta version of KDE or gnome, create a zone and test it out and see if they fixed a bug that gave you problems, if you don't like or the bug isn't fixed.. one command and the zone goes away. SMF makes it easier to maintain workstations and servers; you can use it to track problems your hardware and software so it makes sense on the desktop as well. I may have underestimated SMF. When you add in ZFS it also makes great uses for the desktop, snapshots, clones are perfect for working on projects. You can setup automatic snapshots of any project you are working on. It's then easy to go backward. I can see how ZFS would be useful, but not useful enough to run Solaris for it. only because you aren't hooked yet. The first time a snapshot saves your sanity you will be sold. Ever deleted a file that cost you hours of work? automated snapshots are the best unix undelete command, sure unix/linux gives you enough rope to shoot your self in the foot. but is this what you want on your desktop? Besides hardware support, what does Linux bring to the table? Solaris and Linux both use X.org as its graphics display subsystem. Well, I have 3D acceleration support from nvidia, who now offer Solaris drivers I see. I don't know about AGP support, though. I'm running amd64 with an nividia chipset, which I don't think is supported by Solaris agpgart. What I do know for sure is I'm not going to be playing Quake 4 in Solaris, and I as far as I know ATI isn't an option unless I want to pay for XiG's drivers. I know WINE supports Solaris, but I don't think CrossOver Office and Cedega do, so running MS Office and games gets significantly trickier. You are free to use any display manager you, thanks to Blastwave it has most if not all the standard desktop environments. Blastwave has over 1300 ready made applications. Great! I'd like GNOME 2.12 (with some degree of integration), gkrellm (with support for CPU temperature, for example), MPlayer with win32codecs and without pulling in esd, k3b and konqueror without pulling in arts, a cross toolchain for Linux PPC built automatically, fsv, cdrdao, dvd+rw-tools, and bittorrent without the GUI. Gentoo portage supports it all. Blastwave misses by a long shot. The closest I get is Nexenta and installing stuff like MPlayer manually, but that Linux PPC cross toolchain sure would be a pain. As far as kernel stability, mostly because everything is tested to extreme limits by Sun and its customers, who demand a stable, scalable solution. There hardware certification testing has been known to kill the product being tested in some cases. Linux runs on everything from many of the top supercomputers to embedded applications like DVD players and broadband routers. IBM, RedHat, and SUSE are all very much involved in enterprise Linux. I'd call this one a draw. how many of those do you have on your desktop? If you want to discuss scalilibility, stability and flexilibility on servers, Solaris excells at those as well.I sudgest you start a new thread, no need to bore the desktop users with talk of dynamic reconfiguration, alternate pathing, hot swapping, cpu's, ram, io cards, and diskdrives. Solaris does scale to 144 cpu cores and over 512 GB of ram. It doesn't do these things by accident. Solaris in the future will be a better
[osol-discuss] JDS/pkgbuild needs a distro? (Was: pkgbuild and a spec file repository)
[ Copying both opensolaris-discuss and desktop-discuss, but please post followups on desktop-discuss. ] It seems like the JDS ports repository (pkgbuild) is _very much_ in need of either joining forces with one of the 3 existing distros, or, if necessary, creating a 4th one. The way it is now, the project seems relatively un-inviting because contributors don't get to see their work published (distributed via a distro) ubiquitously and w/out delay... Eric ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
Is worshiping unix required for using solaris? What [b]exactly[/b] is wrong with having users in /home? It seems you're angry that Linux is more used, isn't it? This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On 11/26/05, Jakub Jirku [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is worshiping unix required for using solaris?What [b]exactly[/b] is wrong with having users in /home? It seems you're angry that Linux is more used, isn't it? the user see's there files in /home if done right, check out my blog entry on the subject http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/02/youre-never-far-from-home.html its a bit different, to get started but it ends up being a very powerful and flexible system once you get used to it, especially in places with more than one computer. James Dickens uadmin.blogspot.com This message posted from opensolaris.org ___opensolaris-discuss mailing listopensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
Yeah. I would be happy if someone build opensolaris distribution with standard sun system (= kernel and basic userland) and optional gnu and all other applications in some kind of port tree, like in bsd. No everyone here is fulltime admin, and spending hours with compiling some userland application is not allways good thing. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
I'll take a look, thanks. I was affraid that it means you have to use nfs via loopback on standalone machine to be unixlike :) This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
I'll take a look, thanks. I was affraid that it means you have to use nfs via loopback on standalo ne machine to be unixlike :) The Solaris automounter actually works correctly in that respect; it determines if a mountpoint is remote or local and will use an NFS or loopback depending on the outcome. For systems with a single home filesystem, I generally have a automount entry like: * localhost:/export/home/ Casper ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
Jakub Jirku [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah. I would be happy if someone build opensolaris distribution with standard sun system (= kernel and basic userland) and optional gnu and all other applications in some kind of port tree, like in bsd. Such a system existst since June 17th 2005 and is called SchilliX. Jörg -- EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [EMAIL PROTECTED](uni) [EMAIL PROTECTED](work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On 11/26/05, Joerg Schilling [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Conclusion: If Sun did do what has been planned and integrated star instead of GNU tar in Solaris-10, nobody would miss GNU tar. Hi Jörg, So I assume star has been tested pretty rigorously at this point, but are you sure it will extract all archives made with GNU tar? If so, I'm certainly sold. Also, have you ever looked into having GNU incorporate your fixes? Cheers, David ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
On 11/26/05, Jake Maciejewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dtrace has features to meet your needs as well... Brendan G wrote a small Dtace script called execsnoop, it allows you to follow what scripts and programs are doing, everytime it executes another program it prints the arguments. Its amazing how many shell scripts there are in the system. DTrace can has been intergrated in to perl just need to build a dtrace enabled perl version then you can use the power of dtrace to debug and monitor your scripts. Okay, that's something to check out, but I rarely write anything compilcated enough to benefit. Zone creation is easy, once you have done it once or twice it takes 1minute to configure, 20 minutes to create, and then its ready to use. Want to test out the latest beta version of KDE or gnome, create a zone and test it out and see if they fixed a bug that gave you problems, if you don't like or the bug isn't fixed.. one command and the zone goes away. Zones would allow me to experiment with riskier programs and less stable versions, but can I easily replicate packages and installations not managed by Solaris in zones? depends on where and how the package is installed, /usr is shared (read-only) to the zones, so you shouldn't have any problems sharing a non managed package/program installed under /usr of course you can include other directories as needed to be shared read-only. only because you aren't hooked yet. The first time a snapshot saves your sanity you will be sold. Ever deleted a file that cost you hours of work? automated snapshots are the best unix undelete command, sure unix/linux gives you enough rope to shoot your self in the foot. but is this what you want on your desktop? I think I am hooked. If the performance improves, I'll convert my fileserver, and if Linux supported it I'd convert my desktop. If it had encyrption as easy as zfs set key=/rmdisk/whatever/secret_key pool/filesystem ; zfs set encryption=twofish pool/filesystem I'd probaby convert at least my fileserver regardless of performance. how many of those do you have on your desktop? If you want to discuss scalilibility, stability and flexilibility on servers, Solaris excells at those as well.I sudgest you start a new thread, no need to bore the desktop users with talk of dynamic reconfiguration, alternate pathing, hot swapping, cpu's, ram, io cards, and diskdrives. Solaris does scale to 144 cpu cores and over 512 GB of ram. It doesn't do these things by accident. My point was that serious customers depend on Linux for stability and scalability. You though it was important enough to mention as a point in favor of Solaris, but I understand Linux is used in many of the same roles. Linux exists in the low end. Solaris excels on the mid and high ends. Where Linux falls down is dealing with faults in the system, take a standard 4 cpu system and have a cpu fail, the majority of the time a Linux box crashes with a nice oops. Solaris catches the fault disables the cpu and keeps running. You can also hotswap the CPU should the hardware support it. I would put solaris security at approximately the same security as openBSD. Sun does a lot of work with banks, fininacial institutions, and 3 letter government agencies none of which take security lightly. Solaris 10 has many of the same features as trusted solaris, the up coming trusted solaris 10 will be more of a set of config files than a complete OS as it was when trusted solaris 8 came out yet security requirements are met. I think you're undersetimating OpenBSD. See http://openbsd.org/security.html for details. As far as I know Solaris doesn't have equivalents to many of those features, and if it does they aren't enabled by default. I'm sure I could get an insanely secure Solaris system by implementing manditory access control lists, but that's a lot of effort compared to the secure-by-default OpenBSD. While Solaris is not as tight as OpenBSD as default, you can run Sun's http://www.sun.com/software/security/jass/ scripts to tightened up the security to the same level if not more. But Solaris security is not locked into 10 year old technology. Solaris 10 includes a cyptographic frame work, that is integrated into the OS, which allows you to add hardware crpyto cards, or biometric identification or java cards and have the system automatically use the improved security with little or no change to the system. Solaris also supports many of the same security features that OpenBSD touts, but takes them to the next level. Zones is not just about making one server into many. Each zone is a walled off area that is independent of the others, it takes chroot jails to a whole new level. A comparison is made in http://www.karrot-x.net/jamesd/jailVzone.html. Even if a user gains root of a zone, there damage is limited to that zone, there is no escape from the zone, and the zone can be
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
On 11/26/05, James Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 11/26/05, Jake Maciejewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: depends on ... As usual, this is a well written and informative post. Part of the reason why I read your blog .. twice daily .. :-) Thanks ! Dennis Clarke ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
There have been only a few major breakages in the DDI in Solaris; it was possible to write MT-Safe driver before Solaris 2.6 but in Solaris 2.6 we required drivers to be MT-Safe; the important breakage events were: ... Yep. Write once, run forever. The folks at nVidia were *really* surprised that they could write a version agnostic[1] driver for Solaris. I'm really impressed too. I was amazed when SchilliX needed X support and the ancient aperture driver ended up working with very few changes. Yep, I'm not that impressed with the embedded Linux in my DVD player and the software on top of it; it needs to be rebooted often and has no software reboot switch. And if I power cycle it will it is recording, I need to reformat the harddisk. That's not necessarily Linux's fault. In many cases there's poor software running on top of Linux, and in other cases such as routers running out of memory to keep state, it's cutting corners with hardware that's the problem. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
depends on where and how the package is installed, /usr is shared (read-only) to the zones, so you shouldn't have any problems sharing a non managed package/program installed under /usr of course you can include other directories as needed to be shared read-only. I'll try it when [i]Open[/i]Solaris supports zones properly. Linux exists in the low end. Solaris excels on the mid and high ends. Where Linux falls down is dealing with faults in the system, take a standard 4 cpu system and have a cpu fail, the majority of the time a Linux box crashes with a nice oops. Solaris catches the fault disables the cpu and keeps running. You can also hotswap the CPU should the hardware support it. The whole debate is about desktops where $1,000 is expensive. The cheapest hardware that would provide the features you describe above is more expensive than a dual core desktop with high-end graphics and more storage space than I'd ever use. While Solaris is not as tight as OpenBSD as default, you can run Sun's http://www.sun.com/software/security/jass/ scripts to tightened up the security to the same level if not more. But Solaris security is not locked into 10 year old technology. Solaris 10 includes a cyptographic frame work, that is integrated into the OS, which allows you to add hardware crpyto cards, or biometric identification or java cards and have the system automatically use the improved security with little or no change to the system. OpenBSD also supports numerous crypto cards and the crypto instructions on VIA CPUs. And OpenBSD isn't locked into 10 year old technology. New security features are being developed and integrated all the time. Solaris also supports many of the same security features that OpenBSD touts, but takes them to the next level. Zones is not just about making one server into many. Each zone is a walled off area that is independent of the others, it takes chroot jails to a whole new level. But services aren't zoned by default. OpenBSD privseps and jails as much as possible by default. RBAC (role based access control) is another part of Solaris security designed for security. Unlike sudo, that grant a user access to a program. RBAC is integrated into the kernel. basiclly with RBAC you grant individual privileges to a user, if a program only needs privileges to open a secure port ( less than 1024). That is what is granted, not superuser prevlidges, like it would in OpenBSD. OpenBSD has systrace for similar purposes. It functions on the system call level, and in addition to restricting system calls, it can also be used to temporarily elevate privilages. It has a learning mode too, so rules don't have to be written manually. Linux has selinux, grsecurity, and systrace. There are other features that are not security by design, but do create a more secure and stable system one such being projects, where you can limit a zone or a group of processes to certain CPU's and limit its ram usage, much more thoroughly than the ulimit interface that traditional Linux/Unix uses. I agree that Solaris allows better micro-management of resources and system behavior in general. Not true, Solaris generally stays a few versions back, that have been debugged more thoroughly, thus avoiding bugs occur in the bleeding edge, thus there are much fewer patches and problems. Solaris uses lots of software that was part of the original UNIX distribution that have been fixed and audited many times over the years so are less likely to have bugs and security problems of GNU applications that are new in comparison. Some Linux distributions like RHEL also stay back a few versions, but there's also the option to use, in the case of RedHat, Fedora for more current software. Gentoo is my desktop distro of choice, however, and it allows fine-grained control over stability vs. versions with new features. I could, for example, select stable versions of the base system and install bleeding-edge GNOME, yet still have it managed by portage. I prefer the opposite, using unstable versions with all the new features, and masking versions that don't work. Right now, for example, I use the latest GNOME but keep eog version 2.10.x because 2.12 isn't stable. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
Jake Maciejewski wrote: depends on where and how the package is installed, /usr is shared (read-only) to the zones, so you shouldn't have any problems sharing a non managed package/program installed under /usr of course you can include other directories as needed to be shared read-only. I'll try it when [i]Open[/i]Solaris supports zones properly. It doesn't now? Ian ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
On Sunday 27 November 2005 08:26, Jake Maciejewski wrote: depends on where and how the package is installed, /usr is shared (read-only) to the zones, so you shouldn't have any problems sharing a non managed package/program installed under /usr of course you can include other directories as needed to be shared read-only. I'll try it when [i]Open[/i]Solaris supports zones properly. Linux exists in the low end. Solaris excels on the mid and high ends. Where Linux falls down is dealing with faults in the system, take a standard 4 cpu system and have a cpu fail, the majority of the time a Linux box crashes with a nice oops. Solaris catches the fault disables the cpu and keeps running. You can also hotswap the CPU should the hardware support it. The whole debate is about desktops where $1,000 is expensive. The cheapest hardware that would provide the features you describe above is more expensive than a dual core desktop with high-end graphics and more storage space than I'd ever use. You talked about security and scalability ... So here are some answers, remember opensolaris opens the door to bringing these high end features to the low end. FWIW does anyone know whether x86 cpu management is in smf now ? While Solaris is not as tight as OpenBSD as default, you can run Sun's http://www.sun.com/software/security/jass/ scripts to tightened up the security to the same level if not more. But Solaris security is not locked into 10 year old technology. Solaris 10 includes a cyptographic frame work, that is integrated into the OS, which allows you to add hardware crpyto cards, or biometric identification or java cards and have the system automatically use the improved security with little or no change to the system. OpenBSD also supports numerous crypto cards and the crypto instructions on VIA CPUs. And OpenBSD isn't locked into 10 year old technology. New security features are being developed and integrated all the time. But you already claimed OpenBSD has unacceptable limitations for the desktop that Solaris doesn''t have. BTW Solaris has roots in a 30 year old technology not 10. Having said this Solaris is far more modern than that in just about everything, and with OpenSolaris now, is Solaris locked into technology any more than OpenBSD ? Solaris also supports many of the same security features that OpenBSD touts, but takes them to the next level. Zones is not just about making one server into many. Each zone is a walled off area that is independent of the others, it takes chroot jails to a whole new level. But services aren't zoned by default. OpenBSD privseps and jails as much as possible by default. This is a semantic point, create your own distro that is ! Of course the original thread was about why you should choose Solaris over Linux so BSD isn't very relevant. RBAC (role based access control) is another part of Solaris security designed for security. Unlike sudo, that grant a user access to a program. RBAC is integrated into the kernel. basiclly with RBAC you grant individual privileges to a user, if a program only needs privileges to open a secure port ( less than 1024). That is what is granted, not superuser prevlidges, like it would in OpenBSD. OpenBSD has systrace for similar purposes. It functions on the system call level, and in addition to restricting system calls, it can also be used to temporarily elevate privilages. It has a learning mode too, so rules don't have to be written manually. Linux has selinux, grsecurity, and systrace. A pretty non-integrated solution, perhaps its telling that the only platform systrace doesn't target is Solaris. Maybe there is no market for it :-) There are other features that are not security by design, but do create a more secure and stable system one such being projects, where you can limit a zone or a group of processes to certain CPU's and limit its ram usage, much more thoroughly than the ulimit interface that traditional Linux/Unix uses. I agree that Solaris allows better micro-management of resources and system behavior in general. Not true, Solaris generally stays a few versions back, that have been debugged more thoroughly, thus avoiding bugs occur in the bleeding edge, thus there are much fewer patches and problems. Solaris uses lots of software that was part of the original UNIX distribution that have been fixed and audited many times over the years so are less likely to have bugs and security problems of GNU applications that are new in comparison. Some Linux distributions like RHEL also stay back a few versions, but there's also the option to use, in the case of RedHat, Fedora for more current software. Gentoo is my desktop distro of choice, however, and it allows fine-grained control over stability vs. versions with new features. I could, for example, select stable versions of the base system and install bleeding-edge
[osol-discuss] Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
My thanks to everyone for their replies - this has been an instructive discussion. More questions: 1. What are the resource requirements for all this wonderful Solaris 10 software to work and perform reasonably well? Is it all available for x86 systems? Does it require a 64-bit dual or quad processor system, 4 GB of RAM and a 200 GB HDD? Or would it all work on a 1.8 GHz Intel Celeron single processor system with 512 MB of RAM? E.g. is the power of the zones technology fully available on such a low-powered desktop system? 2. And what about documentation? Are good tutorials available for Solaris newbies covering the unique aspects of Solaris 10, or do you have to be a long time, seasoned Solaris sys admin to catch on to these Solaris esoterica? I found the Sun Solaris 10 User's Guides and Sys Admin Guides to be pretty dense on these subjects. 3. So far the discussion has only been about Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. What about new distros such as Nexenta and BeleniX that retain only the Solaris kernel and core libraries? Pure Solaris is renowned for its stability; part of the reason presumably is the fact that Sun Q/A applies to every single aspect of the entire OS. Does this quality and stability necessarily carry over into a hybrid OS with Solaris kernel and GNU utilities, applications, etc.? Potentially such an OS could be incredibly buggy and unstable, completely negating the advantages of a very stable Solaris kernel, couldn't it? Can such a hybrid indeed be made as stable as Solaris itself? Robert ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
On 11/26/05, Robert Glueck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My thanks to everyone for their replies - this has been an instructive discussion. More questions: 1. What are the resource requirements for all this wonderful Solaris 10 software to work and perform reasonably well? Is it all available for x86 systems? Does it require a 64-bit dual or quad processor system, 4 GB of RAM and a 200 GB HDD? Or would it all work on a 1.8 GHz Intel Celeron single processor system with 512 MB of RAM? E.g. is the power of the zones technology fully available on such a low-powered desktop system? Solaris Express ( with new grub based boot) requires 256MB of ram, i have ran it on systems as old as a p2-450 its still usuable though gnome does add its own requiements. The most important part is to check that nics and sound drivers are availible. That information can be found at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl A full install of Solaris requires about 7GB of disk space. 3rd party and most freeware software will need more. 2. And what about documentation? Are good tutorials available for Solaris newbies covering the unique aspects of Solaris 10, or do you have to be a long time, seasoned Solaris sys admin to catch on to these Solaris esoterica? I found the Sun Solaris 10 User's Guides and Sys Admin Guides to be pretty dense on these subjects. http://docs.sun.com is the official sun doc's site my blog has lots of good links in the quick solaris links section http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/03/solaris-links.html you can also join #opensolaris on freenode.net to ask questions interactively. 3. So far the discussion has only been about Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. What about new distros such as Nexenta and BeleniX that retain only the Solaris kernel and core libraries? Pure Solaris is renowned for its stability; part of the reason presumably is the fact that Sun Q/A applies to every single aspect of the entire OS. Does this quality and stability necessarily carry over into a hybrid OS with Solaris kernel and GNU utilities, applications, etc.? Potentially such an OS could be incredibly buggy and unstable, completely negating the advantages of a very stable Solaris kernel, couldn't it? Can such a hybrid indeed be made as stable as Solaris itself? each will have there own chareristics... while they all have the same kernel and base tools. But they will each have to deal there own security problems outside of the kernel and combined packages. Check each site for more details on that. James Dickens uadmin.blogspot.com Robert ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
This is true until you strike some obscure problem and want to debug it. Oops, sorry, we're talking desktop here, ... Just reboot then. How about file a bug report and let the developers handle it? If I knew how to fix the sorts of things Dtrace would help fix, I'd be more than a desktop user, I'd be a developer. Or Dtrace is as convenient as shell scripting and PERL, could help with everyday administration tasks, and I just don't know it yet. So far from what I've seen it's very powerful but requires more knowledge of the OS than I currently have. It depends what you want, you might for example run wine in a zone to prevent windows viruses or poorly behaved widows apps from affecting the rest of your system. Good idea, but I don't run enough Windows programs for it to be worthwhile. The simplicity of administering ZFS is far over everything else. All other systems seem to have usability problems, even the windows practice of rooting all drives in the same place isn't particularly convenient especially when it breaks all you shortcuts. I think ZFS gives all the benefits of unix filesystem semantics without the drawbacks. I agree. I have very little experience with volume management, no experience with snapshots, and zfs was really easy to learn. I only need to know two commands. No config files, no memorizing switches, intuitive syntax, I'm glad ZFS was delayed to improve the interface (not that I know what it was like the first time around, but I'm that pleased with the current version). Far as I know these apps work fine in a straight wine environment these days. Crossover is a commercial product and codeweavers are open to a Solaris version if there is a market for it (or someone else like sun pays for it). Transgaming are open to a port as well, as I last heard (they just don't want to maintain it). I have considered porting Transgamings wine derivative once or twice. I'll have to see what I can do with the winehq version and possibly WineTools. Last time I tried compiling WINE on Solaris 11 I had to make quite a few minor changes in the source. Of course you choose deliberately difficult configurations but. 1. Far as I know you can build gnome up to the cvs version if you like 2. Don't know gkrellm, there are only one or two drivers for the system management bus around so it's unlikely you will get your cpu temperature. A digital thermometer in the air stream works well :) 3. Mplayer works fine without esd or kde components using the sun audio plugin, and works with all the windows dlls up to WMV3, was just browsing a bunch of video files with it just today. Solaris was quite a bit faster than linux doing it too. 4,5,6 Cross gccs are possible on any OS so go for it. dvd+rwtools works out of the box, for cdrdao,substitute cdrw or cdrecord The others I don't know, though I'm pretty sure there are multiple bittorent clients around. fsv is documented to work, but I've never tried it. 1. Gentoo offers recent versions in portage. GNOME is such a mess I wouldn't bother compiling it manually. 2. I guess that gets back to the relative lack of drivers. 3. My point was that I don't want MPlayer to depend on esd or arts, but I do want it to support the win32 codecs. I just built MPlayer on Nexenta and I had to make a few minor source changes to get it to compile, and the win32 codecs aren't working. DMO and Quicktime, for example, are crashing it. Perhaps the CVS version would have better Solaris support. I might just start a new thread about my MPlayer issues. 4,5,6. I know cross gcc is possible, as I've built a Linux compiler on BSD, but it's difficult. Gentoo has a tool to build cross toolchains automatically, and then they're managed by portage so you don't have to start over to update. dvd+rw-tools might work, but it isn't managed by any of the major package systems, is it? I'll look into cdrdao substitues. Sometimes I need bin/cue support. Doesn't sound very desktopish to me, if you are doing these things then you might appreciate other Solaris features like RBAC (including ACLS), secure zones, smf and any number of other security features that linux doesn't have. You need to make up your mind, are you interested in server grade security and administration or not ? Somehow we got talking about OpenBSD. I use it as a router (including stateful ipv6, and back at college I had it also doing outbound load balancing). Thats not exactly true, Solaris is secure and still usable, AFAIK trusted Solaris is being rolled into standard Solaris. OpenBSD enables lots of randomness and other things by default that necessarily slow down the system and break some apps like recent versions of WINE. This may also be a good reason to use RBAC and other Solaris security features so you can fix your grandmas machine over the internet without opening the entire system to hacking through your account. I don't think my account would be much of
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
James Dickens wrote: A full install of Solaris requires about 7GB of disk space. 3rd party and most freeware software will need more. About half of that... df -kl Filesystemkbytesused avail capacity Mounted on /dev/dsk/c0d0s3 8258469 3080187 509569838%/ Ian ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, Jake Maciejewski wrote: Yep. Write once, run forever. The folks at nVidia were *really* surprised that they could write a version agnostic[1] driver for Solaris. I'm really impressed too. I was amazed when SchilliX needed X support and the ancient aperture driver ended up working with very few changes. I'm neither impressed, surprised, or amazed. Why? Because it is exactly what I would expect from a world-class, properly engineered OS. Solaris clearly passes this test with flying colours. -- Rich Teer, SCNA, SCSA, OpenSolaris CAB member President, Rite Online Inc. Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638 URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
Robert Glueck wrote: Most of the contributors to this thread, I believe, have been talking about Solaris 10. How much of the full functionality of Solaris 10 is presently available in OpenSolaris? And whatever is available, is it only available as source? Is there a full-fledged free version of Solaris for x86 available at present that can be installed, as binaries, from CD or DVD media? You should be asking the question the other way round, how much of the full OpenSolaris functionality is available in Solaris 10? Try the current community build linked form the opensolaris site. There is a lot more x86 support in recent releases than there is in Solaris 10. Ian ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Fwd: [osol-discuss] Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
oops meant this to go to the full list -- Forwarded message -- From: James Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Nov 26, 2005 9:08 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions. To: Robert Glueck [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 11/26/05, Robert Glueck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Most of the contributors to this thread, I believe, have been talking about Solaris 10. How much of the full functionality of Solaris 10 is presently available in OpenSolaris? And whatever is available, is it only available as source? Is there a full-fledged free version of Solaris for x86 available at present that can be installed, as binaries, from CD or DVD media? Solaris 10 and Solaris Express and Solaris Express Community build are availible free for both SPARC, x86/x64 If you want the source... opensolaris is what you want. James Dickens uadmin.blogspot.com Robert ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Fwd: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
James Dickens wrote: Solaris 10 and Solaris Express and Solaris Express Community build are availible free for both SPARC, x86/x64 If you want the source... opensolaris is what you want. OK, Solaris 10, Solaris Express, Solaris Express Community build, OpenSolaris community build, I'm getting confused now. If I want to try out the current Solaris in whatever shape or form, as a binary distribution for x86 (not building it from source a la Gentoo), what should I install? Robert ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Fwd: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
On 11/26/05, Robert Glueck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: James Dickens wrote: Solaris 10 and Solaris Express and Solaris Express Community build are availible free for both SPARC, x86/x64 If you want the source... opensolaris is what you want. OK, Solaris 10, Solaris Express, Solaris Express Community build, OpenSolaris community build, I'm getting confused now. If I want to try out the current Solaris in whatever shape or form, as a binary distribution for x86 (not building it from source a la Gentoo), what should I install? Binary Only versions: Solaris 10 ( aka Solaris 10 GA, Solaris 10 HW1 and soon Solaris 10 update 1) is the most stable release of solaris 10 Solaris Express is the beta version of the next release of Solaris Solaris Express Community build is the absolute latest public release, current draw to this version is that it has ZFS in it. Source Only: ( has to be installed on top of Solaris Express) OpenSolaris is the opensource version of Solaris Express Community build. James Dickens uadmin.blogspot.com Robert ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Fwd: [osol-help] Solaris Express build 27 screen res was 1600x1200 now 640x480
damm i did it again... meant this to go to the full group -- Forwarded message -- From: Gregory Benjamin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Nov 26, 2005 8:44 PM Subject: [osol-help] Solaris Express build 27 screen res was 1600x1200 now 640x480 To: opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org I set the screen resolution during install to 1600x1200 during install and it worked just fine with the Nvidia FX-5200 video adapter in my X-86 box. When I rebooted after installation completed, resolution is stuck at 640x480. 640x480/60Hz. is the only available option now from inside the Gnome display resolution dialog. Couldn't figure out how to change resolution from inside CDE. It seems as though the auto-detection that worked well during install was somehow bypassed or wiped out as part of the complete installation process. Any ideas? This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Fwd: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care? More questions.
James Dickens wrote: Binary Only versions: Solaris 10 ( aka Solaris 10 GA, Solaris 10 HW1 and soon Solaris 10 update 1) is the most stable release of solaris 10 Solaris Express is the beta version of the next release of Solaris Solaris Express Community build is the absolute latest public release, current draw to this version is that it has ZFS in it. Source Only: ( has to be installed on top of Solaris Express) OpenSolaris is the opensource version of Solaris Express Community build. Thanks for clarifying this. It appears Solaris 10 would suit me best, and I would download it from http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp Robert ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
But you already claimed OpenBSD has unacceptable limitations for the desktop that Solaris doesn''t have. BTW Solaris has roots in a 30 year old technology not 10. Having said this Solaris is far more modern than that in just about everything, and with OpenSolaris now, is Solaris locked into technology any more than OpenBSD ? I'm not advocating OpenBSD for the desktop. And if you want to talk about roots, OpenBSD has its roots in NetBSD which has its roots in BSD. Solaris from what I know has its roots in the merging of BSD derived SunOS with SVR4 because SVR4 was more advanced at the time. Whereas Solaris got refreshed with the more advanced codebase, OpenBSD enjoys the benefits of a complete security audit to eliminate vulnerabilities from the old BSD days when security wasn't much of a concern. I admit that Solaris is more scalable (OpenBSD often performs worse with SMP enabled, for example) and possibly more stable, but that's because the developers care more about security. A pretty non-integrated solution, perhaps its telling that the only platform systrace doesn't target is Solaris. Maybe there is no market for it Systrace requires kernel hooks. That hasn't been possible with Solaris for very long, and it probably never will happen if Solaris has an equivalent mechanism in place already. As there is now the option to use Solaris Express or OpenSolaris if you want the bleeding edge, of course with all the comfort that the stable DDI and ABI guarantee gives you about being able to use your existing binaries and drivers at the bleeding edge. Using a bleeding edge solaris is far less a risk that a bleeding edge linux. The latest Solaris Express and OpenSolaris give me the core features like ZFS, but I need distros like Nexenta to deliver recent versions of GNOME, for example. You can use the latest packages if you like but you'll need to build them. If you want portage like support then use pkgsrc. At least you know you can run the unstable ones in a zone I can use pkgsrc on OpenSolaris if I don't want to run GNOME, KDE, Firefox, etc., and if I want to fight to compile Xorg. portage rarely breaks even for large packages. pkgsrc rarely works. I give them credit for supporting so many platforms and compilers, and it works well on NetBSD, but SchilliX is largely a no-go with pkgsrc. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
Jake Maciejewski wrote: The latest Solaris Express and OpenSolaris give me the core features like ZFS, but I need distros like Nexenta to deliver recent versions of GNOME, for example. Or Blastwave. Ken Mays does a great job of keeping GNOME and KDE packages up to date. Ian ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: OpenSolaris - Why should I care?
It doesn't now? It's come up on the forums often enough. We need lucreatezone or a suitable replacement. BeleniX has a crude but supposedly functional replacement, but neither SchilliX nor Nexenta do as far as I know. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
