Previewing the Next Solaris OS

Eric Boutilier writes "Amy Rich has written an excellent Solaris Express (Solaris 10) how-to and general overview. It covers how the program works, using the community web site, and what's new in Solaris Express." Among many new features, the TCP/IP stack has been redesigned, IPv6 support improved, and both NFSv4 and USB 2.0 support added.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[benwb]

Solaris 9 has ssh by default, so I can only assume that 10 will as well.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[Anonymous Coward]

don't have Bash installed by default.

Solaris 7 and later. No, it's not by "default" (eg: part of the Core Software Configuration Cluster) but it's on every Solaris 8 box I've ever used.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[stephenbooth]

If you're not averse to free software then I suggest you try Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). It's a lot easier to set up than Hummbingbird eXeed. It's also free. I've been using it for a few years now to get X access to remote *nix boxen, never had any problems cos it's easy to setup and use. And did I mention that, unliek Hummingbird eXeed, it's free?

Stephen

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[larien]

Hrm:

# pkginfo SUNWbash
system SUNWbash GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash)

Perhaps not always installed by default, but it is available. That's on Solaris 8, BTW. As for other stuff, check out www.sunfreeware.com [sunfreeware.com]

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't speak for OpenSSL, but bash is certainly there in Solaris Express:

% uname -srv
SunOS 5.10 s10_49
% which bash
/usr/bin/bash
%

Wishlist - Global file system

[Moderation abuser]

Something like AFS which can scale across an entire enterprise.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[BrookHarty]

I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.

We keep a local sunfreeware mirror for new sunos installs. Bash, updated Perl with modules, wget, lynx, openssl, bzip, sudo, lsof, openssh, and ncftp. (no gcc) If it wasn't for sunfreeware [sunfreeware.com], I'd go nuts using Solaris. Anyone that has to move/push/alter data, needs common tools on all platforms, thank god for Sunfreeware.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[Gollum]

ssh access is all you really need to execute X11 commands. Install Cygwin and Xfree86 if Exceed is too complex. Then SSH in to the box, and check what your DISPLAY variable is set to (echo $DISPLAY). It should point back to your IP address (or hostname), followed by :0.0

if it is not, do "export DISPLAY=your.ip:0.0" and execute an xterm, or start gnome, or do whatever you want to.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[Anonymous Coward]

The same goes for OpenSSL

Why should it? How many servers need OpenSSL installed, let alone installed by default? Yes, it's optionally available.

We have Hummingbird Exceed, but it's such a HUGE pain to set up. Neither myself, a reasonably good programmer, nor any of the sysadmins at the very large bank where I work know how to set it up.

/usr/X/bin/xterm -sb -sl 5000 -display @D -T `hostname`. Start method is rexec

I won't comment on the bash statement as many already have.

Looks like between you (the users) and the sysadmins your place of work is full of cluebags. Where do you work? I would like to know so I never work there.

Well, AMD...

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been some rumors that AMD/Opteron is a possible position for Sun, but the practical difficulty in a 8-way and up machines with the Opteron is probably a significant limiting factor in that path.

I have a feeling Sun doesn't know what they hell they're going to do about a CPU.

Re:Nice

[ZxCv]

So you won't run linux because of the license philosophy, but Solaris, Windows, and OSX are OK? That's pretty screwy.

I saw him talk about Plan9 and Linux, but nowhere did I see "Solaris", "Windows", or "OS X". Did I miss something?

Re:devfs

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, Solaris is getting devfs support . . . just as it is marked deprecated in Linux 2.6

Solaris lack of change is one of the main reasons why it's so damn stable as an OS. They do not want to be like Linux where there is a new API every year. A new API or new low level things are not bad per-se but it's something else that needs to be debugged, something else that needs to be learned and something else that may not be compatible with current software.

Case in point: Oracle on Linux, or any commercial application for that matter. The reason Oracle is only certifed for RHAS is because it's very static. They don't have to verify it works with 50 different kernels and 50 different version of GLIBC. When you have to support your software in situations like this it can be costly not only in terms of money and manhours but also performance and proving customer support. This applies to almost any big name commercial software including BEA's WebLogic and IBM's Tivoli suite.

That's why Solaris is known for and maintains it's rock solid reputation. Sometimes, staying off the bleeding, or just the leading edge is a good thing.

Re:cool feature i am using

[Anonymous Coward]

that looks very usefull. maybe it's the implementation of this point from the article?

"Solaris Express is moving from always requiring superuser rights to a privilege-based model. The system now restricts processes to only those privileges that are required to perform the current task. This results in the vulnerability of fewer root processes and the reduction in the number of setuid root programs."

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[tfb]

Yes, they have bash and OpenSSL. Bash has been in at least the `everything' install since 8 (and probably smaller ones too, and of course you can always just add the packages), OpenSSL since 9 I think.

If you install the Sun bonus CD (? I forget the name, anyway its one of the ones that comes with the media if you have that, and you can also download it), you also get a load of free software packages including emacs (both of them), most of the gnu stuff including gcc &c &c, kde and so on. And there's yet more at sunfreeware of course.

If you want to get remote access from a PC, get cygwin and install the XFree86 packages. Then is't pretty much as simple as
XWin :0 -query host
Although you may need to set font paths.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[4of12]

??

When I do

$ ssh -X solarisbox

my X network traffic is nicely hidden taken caer of by ssh; the Solaris box puts X traffic onto a fake local framebuffer DISPLAY like

solarisbox:10.0

before sending it back to my realbox:0.0.

It might be slower than what you suggest, but I think it's a lot more secure. Without ssh doing the job of making your X network traffic secure you'll have to worry about Xauthority. Too many people (and I was one once) get around Xauthority hassles with an

$ xhost +

and I can't begin to tell you just how Bad that is.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[nutznboltz]

Some of the Sun-supplied non-GNU tools have been given GNU options too now. The "-h" flag for du and df and the "-u" flag for diff.

Sun is now reverse-engineering GNU instead of the way it was in the 80's when the GNU Project goal was to reverse-engineer UNIX.

Re:devfs

[binford2k]

udev FAQ [kernel.org]

Re:Wishlist - Global file system

[Anonymous Coward]

An article at aces's hardware [aceshardware.com] has managed to pick up some information about ZFS (the zettabyte file system). If it's really as good as it promises (as other rumours indicate), then ZFS+NFSv4 will be an amazing combination.

Solaris != SPARC

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems many in this forum still cling to the mantra "solaris sucks because sun hardware is expensive." If you haven't looked at Sun's x86 offerings recently, you're missing the boat here - their boxes are easily priced at the same level as those from Dell, and they have the opteron-based v20z coming. Plus, you can use commodity hardware with little trouble if you stay within the HCL [sun.com]. Sun may have screwed the pooch when they dropped x86 support a few years ago, but they've cleary reversed their position and now seem fully committed to the platform. I've been running Solaris express on my laptop and home dell machine for several months now. I love DTrace [sun.com], and am looking forward to playing with Zones (a.k.a. "N1 Grid Containers") in the next SX release.

So please, if you want to make intelligent comments about an operating system, be sure to separate it from the hardware upon which it runs, or at least be aware of all platforms on which it runs.

Re:Hope they have Bash, OpenSSL

[cxvx]

Does this work as transparently as Exceed does? What I really want is a little daemon, preferably just running down in my task tray, that provides an X server. Nothing else. Let Windows handle the windowmanager aspect of it, and don't do anything with the desktop by default. Basically, just allowing me to run X programs side-by-side with my Windows ones. Oh - and share my X clipboard with my Windows one. The last time I looked around (which was several years ago), Exceed was the only product that came close to this. If Cygwin/XFree has a package that does the same thing, I'd be very interested in finding out.

Yes it does now, 2 weeks ago I installed cygwin on a winxp box, and it comes default with a XServer installed, configured to run in rootless mode, so it just uses winxp itself for the windowmanagement.

The last time I tried to do that (maybe one year ago, something like that), it was a lot more work for sure.

Re:Vapor ports on Sun's!

[pajs]

As someone sitting in front of a sun with a microsoft mouse (and yes, even the wheel works) i can say that is wrong.

Also, provided the usb device supports the mass storage spec, it will also work on a sun.

man scsa2usb

Re:Solaris doesn't suck...

[Paul Jakma]

Unless you have written your application to run in multiple threads, or forks...

Surprisingly, while a single application might not be able take advantage of SMP, often an expensive computer will run /many/ applications and hence take advantage of SMP that way. And the fork model doesnt cover a huge swathe of apps, eg apache serving a dynamic content site - lots of php/perl/whatever processing going on in lots of seperate processes, perhaps using a database backend (typically also either threaded or multi-process+shared memory). Or what about thin-client application servers? (eg client server for X-terminals or SunRays) - SMP is a /huge/ win there.

If you are CPU limited across a bundle of processes, SMP can help - and it's easily determinable by looking at top. And Sun have a whole bundle of hefty SMP boxes they can sell you.

Solaris Express != Solaris 10!

[greygent]

RTFA

Solaris Express is Sun's program to allow users to preview upcoming versions of Solaris. It IS NOT Solaris 10.

Now you know.

Re:devfs

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris "devfs" has nothing to do with Linux "devfs". The only reason that Linux devfs was deprecated was because the code was cruddy.

ouch!

[HP-UX'er]

I like the HP Superdome (hardware platform)for this reason: it can concurrently run HP-UX, RHE, and Windows2k3 in separate partitions. Can Sun hardware do that?

blastwave.org over sunfreeware

[bolthole]

Better than sunfreeware.com, is blastwave.org

automatic package dependancy handling, bugtracking, and staffed by 30 volunteers instead of just 1 person.

Plus, 64bit versions of libraries, if you ever need that sort of thing.