On Sat, Mar 02, 2002 at 01:45:31PM +1100, Craige McWhirter wrote: > - Manageability - Solaris is attrocius to administer and keep up to > date. Pkgadd just doesn't really cut it. Keeping a Debian/SPARC box
I really think this is one of those "what-you-know" things. I've admin'ed Linux boxes in the past, and Solaris boxes at the moment. Personally I think Solaris is more difficult to learn, but once you know what you're doing it's easier to admin. > up-to-date and patched is trivial. Doing the same work on Solaris can Umm.. with one command I can patch any of our machines to up to the latest release from Sun. Personally I'd call that trivial :) > take hours. Then try making packages out them. Valuable sysadmin time is > wasted on Solaris for tasks that are trivial on Debian. Building packages on Solaris is trivial - once you know how to do it. (http://www.docbert.org/Solaris/Pkg/Packages.txt for very rough details on how to do it) > - Performance - Solaris is comparatively slow (refer hardware specs > above) and responsiveness to the tasks we use our boxes for (SAMBA / MTA > / DNS / NIS / Radius / LDAP / Apache / Netsaint / other stuff) is much, > much better on SPARC hardware running Linux. This supprises me a little - I would have expected these to be about the same between the two OSes. The one which people used to always use as an example of Linux > Solaris was filesystem performance, and the reason is a good example of why Solaris is sometimes slower for some things. Under Linux filesystem metadata is cached, which means that if you're doing a lot of metadata updates (eg, deleting a pile of files) it will result in only a small number of writes to disk occuring. The disadvantage of this method is that if your machine crashes during the operation, you've got one very corrupt filesystem to look after. Under Solaris metadata updates are not cached, so they are written to disk as soon as they occur. This gives slightly worse performance for most filesystem operations, but far worse performance for edge-cases - like deleting large numbers of files. However, if a machine crashes during such an operation, it will come back a lot cleaner than it if the metadata writes were delayed. What most people don't know is that it's actually possible to enable caching of metadata updates in Solaris, which improves performance in those edge-cases by several orders of magnitude. It's also not at all recommended due to the filesystem corruption issue... (Filesystem logging, which has been available for Solaris for about 7-8 years, gets around this. Unfortunately it's use has only recently become mainstream). The point is that Solaris will often implement things in a "better" way whilst Linux will normally implement them in a "faster" way. Neither of these options is wrong, they are just different. > IMHO the Solaris desktop is rough as guts, even with GNOME it almost > feels usable. Subjective stuff though, we could banter this for days. Again, it comes down to experience with each. Neither is "better" in a general sense of the word - but everyone will have their preference (in case you didn't guess, my preference is Solaris :) Scott. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
