Solaris 10 patch infrastructure broken?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

As of the 24th, both of my Solaris 10 systems on Sun support can no
longer get patches. They are covered by different contract agreements
with different termination dates some time in the future.

On the 24th, Update Manager (on an x86 system) showed me a large
number of new patches available. I tried applying one of them and
then there was a message about "no entitlement" and then it said that
there were zero patches available. Regardless, I was able to use
'smpatch' manually to apply that patch, although the file supporting
it might have already been cached on my system.

smpatch analyze

returns nothing on that system.

So I went to my other supported system (a SPARC system which is badly
in need of patching) and 'smpatch analyze' now reports that it does
not require any patches either.

Are other people seeing this problem lately or is it just me?

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Mike Riley]

They used to have database issues every so often back when I worked for them. This might be
another one. If it doesn't work tomorrow I would call in to Support and report it.

Mike

On 01/25/11 20:58, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>
> As of the 24th, both of my Solaris 10 systems on Sun support can no
> longer get patches. They are covered by different contract agreements
> with different termination dates some time in the future.
>
> On the 24th, Update Manager (on an x86 system) showed me a large
> number of new patches available. I tried applying one of them and
> then there was a message about "no entitlement" and then it said that
> there were zero patches available. Regardless, I was able to use
> 'smpatch' manually to apply that patch, although the file supporting
> it might have already been cached on my system.
>
> smpatch analyze
>
> returns nothing on that system.
>
> So I went to my other supported system (a SPARC system which is badly
> in need of patching) and 'smpatch analyze' now reports that it does
> not require any patches either.
>
> Are other people seeing this problem lately or is it just me?


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011, Mike Riley wrote:

> They used to have database issues every so often back when I worked
> for them. This might be another one. If it doesn't work tomorrow I
> would call in to Support and report it.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to deal with support, and
particularly not during daytime hours. I have already burned my
entire evening trying to figure out the abominable "My Oracle Support"
site. Eventually this had to be entered as a hardware issue since
that is all that the terrible form allowed me to do for my system
under "system" (hardware and software) support. Hopefully I will
never meet the maniac who designed the "My Oracle Support" site, which
offers nothing of value to anyone.

Next time I purchase hardware it will not be from a company where it
requires a full-time person just to deal with them.

I have already been trying to deal with Oracle contracts via email and
FAX for a month now. No response at all.

Sun had its problems, but in comparison, Oracle is a nightmare.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Chris Ridd]

On 26/01/2011 06:39, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2011, Mike Riley wrote:
>
> > They used to have database issues every so often back when I worked
> > for them. This might be another one. If it doesn't work tomorrow I
> > would call in to Support and report it.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to deal with support, and
> particularly not during daytime hours. I have already burned my
> entire evening trying to figure out the abominable "My Oracle Support"
> site. Eventually this had to be entered as a hardware issue since
> that is all that the terrible form allowed me to do for my system
> under "system" (hardware and software) support. Hopefully I will
> never meet the maniac who designed the "My Oracle Support" site, which
> offers nothing of value to anyone.

Have you tried the non-Flash version of the MOS site?
<https://supporthtml.oracle.com/>

Cheers,

Chris


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[Laurent Blume]

Le 26.01.2011 10:12, Chris Ridd a écrit :
> Have you tried the non-Flash version of the MOS site?
> <https://supporthtml.oracle.com/>

+1 to that.
And also PCA, which will not lie to you and pretend that you need no
patch when the problem is entitlement.

Laurent


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@freddy.simplesystems.org>, Bob
Friesenhahn writes:
>site. Eventually this had to be entered as a hardware issue since
>that is all that the terrible form allowed me to do for my system
>under "system" (hardware and software) support. Hopefully I will

In my last SR, MOS labeled the TAR as SPARC architecture despite
the asset being an x64 system. Whoops.
I assume one of Chuck Rozwat and company's helpdesk jockeys will
eventually clean up that metadata.

John
***@acm.org


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[Tim Evans]

On 01/25/11 23:58, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> As of the 24th, both of my Solaris 10 systems on Sun support can no
> longer get patches. They are covered by different contract agreements
> with different termination dates some time in the future.
>
> On the 24th, Update Manager (on an x86 system) showed me a large
> number of new patches available. I tried applying one of them and
> then there was a message about "no entitlement" and then it said that
> there were zero patches available. Regardless, I was able to use
> 'smpatch' manually to apply that patch, although the file supporting
> it might have already been cached on my system.
>
> smpatch analyze
>
> returns nothing on that system.
>
> So I went to my other supported system (a SPARC system which is badly
> in need of patching) and 'smpatch analyze' now reports that it does
> not require any patches either.
>
> Are other people seeing this problem lately or is it just me?

I posted this earlier this week to comp.unix.solaris:

I have a Sun software support contract.

Since the new My Oracle thing went alive, I've been unable to update
via smpatch or the update manager--voluminous Java error messages in /
var/adm/messages include:

Jan 23 16:33:41 osprey root: [ID 702911 user.error] =>
***@16c79d7
<=Downloader.getResponseCode() : IOExceptionNo route to host

Other messages seem to suggest failure to use a proxy server (I have
no proxy server here), although my network is behind a Solaris 10
'ipfilter' firewall that nat's the internal hosts.

I've tried re-registering both with sconadm and the update manager
(the former just fails authentication; the latter says it can't
connect and asks whether there's a proxy server involved (not in this
case). Both fail.

I can log in to My Oracle with my new login and password, but cannot
get to the recommended patch sets. Connections to
https://getupdates.oracle.com/patch_cluster/10_x86_Recommended_CPU_20...
just time out. Similarly, attempting to get the same patch set via
command-line 'wget' (using login and password) also time out.

smpatch merely reports "Error 500."

[end of post--see full thread at
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.solaris/browse_thread/thread/c3fde6b8df6550c9]

Since posting, I've verified my CSI exists in My Oracle; it's
purportedly provisioned to allow me patch and create-service-record
access. I can, however, do neither. So, I couldn't create an SR to
report the problem.
--
Tim Evans, TKEvans.com, Inc. | 5 Chestnut Court
UNIX System Admin Consulting | Owings Mills, MD 21117
http://www.tkevans.com/ | 443-394-3864
http://www.come-here.com/News/ | ***@tkevans.com


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@tkevans.com>, Tim Evans writes:
>Since posting, I've verified my CSI exists in My Oracle; it's
>purportedly provisioned to allow me patch and create-service-record
>access. I can, however, do neither. So, I couldn't create an SR to
>report the problem.

At the bottom of the MOS Profile page is a Contact Us link:
<URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com>
Profile -> Contact Us.

Does the "Create Non-Technical SR" form fail?
<URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ep/faces/secure/ml3/sr/SubmitNonTechSR.jspx?mc=true>

John
***@acm.org


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, John D Groenveld wrote:
>
> Does the "Create Non-Technical SR" form fail?
> <URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ep/faces/secure/ml3/sr/SubmitNonTechSR.jspx?mc=true>

I did fill out a report of this type and it did not fail. Someone
actually responded to it.

As this moment, both of my systems still fail to see any updates. I
am not sure why this issue would be particular to me.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@freddy.simplesystems.org>, Bob
Friesenhahn writes:
>As this moment, both of my systems still fail to see any updates. I
>am not sure why this issue would be particular to me.

What does Martin Paul's PCA tell you about what Chuck Rozwat
and company say are your entitlements?
<URL:http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4d3fdf86%240%2434944%243b214f66%40usenet.univie.ac.at>

John
***@acm.org



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[Matt Moldvan]

For what it's worth, all of our systems at work (~800 total servers and
workstations) are reporting that there are no patches available, when this
is obviously not true. Our entitlements are definitely valid, the process
just seems to be broken.

Pretty sad, but the PCA tool (a 3rd party app) is still working, whereas the
vendor product is not.

We're dumping the use of smpatch and I will be setting up a PCA Proxy
instead over the next few days ...

- Matt.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 9:54 PM, John D Groenveld
<***@elvis.arl.psu.edu>wrote:

>
>
> In message <***@freddy.simplesystems.org<alpine.GSO.2.01.1101262040520.16986%40freddy.simplesystems.org>>,
> Bob
> Friesenhahn writes:
> >As this moment, both of my systems still fail to see any updates. I
> >am not sure why this issue would be particular to me.
>
> What does Martin Paul's PCA tell you about what Chuck Rozwat
> and company say are your entitlements?
> <URL:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4d3fdf86%240%2434944%243b214f66%40usenet.univie.ac.at
> >
>
> John
> ***@acm.org <groenveld%40acm.org>
>
>
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, Matt Moldvan <***@...> wrote:
>
> For what it's worth, all of our systems at work (~800 total servers and
> workstations) are reporting that there are no patches available, when this
> is obviously not true. Our entitlements are definitely valid, the process
> just seems to be broken.
>
> Pretty sad, but the PCA tool (a 3rd party app) is still working, whereas the
> vendor product is not.
>
> We're dumping the use of smpatch and I will be setting up a PCA Proxy
> instead over the next few days ...
>
> - Matt.

Only ~800 servers and workstations service contract? Hardly enough to buy a failing basketball team or fix up an old dock in SF. :-)

---Bob




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[Brian Richman]

We have given up on Sun (sorry... Oracle) at my employer now. Everything is
harder/takes longer/more expensive now it's Oracle.


A good example, we have one server that Oracle refuse to admit is under support,
even though we have a signed contract and sent a copy away with the sales person
a few months ago... Now the sales staff don't even want to take our calls.
getting service for it if it breaks is going to be interesting...

I suppose with only just under 100 servers, we are too small a customer for
Larry's crew to bother with.


It's OK. We can take the hint.




----- Original Message ----
From: Matt Moldvan <***@matthewmoldvan.com>
To: ***@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, January 26, 2011 11:01:02 PM
Subject: Re: [solarisx86] Solaris 10 patch infrastructure broken?

For what it's worth, all of our systems at work (~800 total servers and
workstations) are reporting that there are no patches available, when this
is obviously not true. Our entitlements are definitely valid, the process
just seems to be broken.

Pretty sad, but the PCA tool (a 3rd party app) is still working, whereas the
vendor product is not.

We're dumping the use of smpatch and I will be setting up a PCA Proxy
instead over the next few days ...

- Matt.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 9:54 PM, John D Groenveld
<***@elvis.arl.psu.edu>wrote:

>
>
> In message
><***@freddy.simplesystems.org<alpine.GSO.2.01.1101262040520.16986%40freddy.simplesystems.org>>,
>
> Bob
> Friesenhahn writes:
> >As this moment, both of my systems still fail to see any updates. I
> >am not sure why this issue would be particular to me.
>
> What does Martin Paul's PCA tell you about what Chuck Rozwat
> and company say are your entitlements?
> <URL:
>http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4d3fdf86%240%2434944%243b214f66%40usenet.univie.ac.at
>t
> >
>
> John
> ***@acm.org <groenveld%40acm.org>
>
>
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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Yahoo! Groups Links







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[John]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, Brian Richman <***@...> wrote:
>
> We have given up on Sun (sorry... Oracle) at my employer now. Everything is
> harder/takes longer/more expensive now it's Oracle.
>
>
> A good example, we have one server that Oracle refuse to admit is under support,
> even though we have a signed contract and sent a copy away with the sales person
> a few months ago... Now the sales staff don't even want to take our calls.
> getting service for it if it breaks is going to be interesting...
>
> I suppose with only just under 100 servers, we are too small a customer for
> Larry's crew to bother with.
>
>
> It's OK. We can take the hint.
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Matt Moldvan <***@...>
> To: ***@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Wed, January 26, 2011 11:01:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [solarisx86] Solaris 10 patch infrastructure broken?
>
> For what it's worth, all of our systems at work (~800 total servers and
> workstations) are reporting that there are no patches available, when this
> is obviously not true. Our entitlements are definitely valid, the process
> just seems to be broken.
>
> Pretty sad, but the PCA tool (a 3rd party app) is still working, whereas the
> vendor product is not.
>
> We're dumping the use of smpatch and I will be setting up a PCA Proxy
> instead over the next few days ...
>
> - Matt.
>
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 9:54 PM, John D Groenveld
> <***@...>wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > In message
> ><***@...<alpine.GSO.2.01.1101262040520.16986%40freddy.simplesystems.org>>,
> >
> > Bob
> > Friesenhahn writes:
> > >As this moment, both of my systems still fail to see any updates. I
> > >am not sure why this issue would be particular to me.
> >
> > What does Martin Paul's PCA tell you about what Chuck Rozwat
> > and company say are your entitlements?
> > <URL:
> >http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4d3fdf86%240%2434944%243b214f66%40usenet.univie.ac.at
> >t
> > >
> >
> > John
> > ***@... <groenveld%40acm.org>
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Please check the Links page before posting:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisx86/links
> Post message: ***@yahoogroups.com
> UNSUBSCRIBE: solarisx86-***@yahoogroups.com
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
OK guys, you not get it yet; Oracle bought SUN for Java, they have no interest is OS development nor support...

An one might also say that developing a database system driven by Java is somewhat foolhardy, but thats just me..

Sorry for the negative vibes, but LOOK!






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[Brian Richman]

>OK guys, you not get it yet; Oracle bought SUN for Java, they have no
>interest is OS development nor support...
>
>An one might also say that developing a database system driven by Java is
>somewhat foolhardy, but thats just me..
>
>Sorry for the negative vibes, but LOOK!


Wow! That is nothing like subtle, is it?




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[John]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, Brian Richman <***@...> wrote:
>
> >OK guys, you not get it yet; Oracle bought SUN for Java, they have no
> >interest is OS development nor support...
> >
> >An one might also say that developing a database system driven by Java is
> >somewhat foolhardy, but thats just me..
> >
> >Sorry for the negative vibes, but LOOK!
>
>
> Wow! That is nothing like subtle, is it?
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
Sorry subtlety is not my strong point, I have to deliver good solid application/platforms and people or companies that obstruct that do not get subtle treatment :-)

John



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[Brian Richman]

"Sorry subtlety is not my strong point, I have to deliver good solid
application/platforms and people or companies that obstruct that do not get
subtle treatment :-)"


HAHAHA... I can't argue with THAT one little bit :-)

As I said on my previous post, we are moving away from OraSun now that the
attitude and delivery have gone the way they have - our CFO even calls them
'OribleSun (spoken with a true Cockney accent), and it's nice to bump into a
fellow "Norf Lahndener" and be able to discuss these things.

I am sure if we were going to put in a few Exa-whatevers each year, we'd get
more attention, but it's all good, we know what we need to do.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@web65816.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>, Brian Richman writes:
>I am sure if we were going to put in a few Exa-whatevers each year, we'd get
>more attention, but it's all good, we know what we need to do.

What do customers here think of Keith Block and company's sales pitch
for the Exadata systems?

Besides price, what makes it not part of the "low-end, low-margin part
of the systems racket" that Larry Ellison says he wants nothing to do
with when he's channeling the ghost of Ed Zander.

Does My Oracle Support perform better for Exadata customers than
for the legacy volume customers who deserve shit?

John
***@acm.org


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[Brian Richman]

>Does My Oracle Support perform better for
>Exadata customers than for the legacy

Compared to the support offered by Sun, I would say that everything from Oracle
stinks. It is hard to find what you want and at odd times for no obvious reason,
I lose all access to things like downloading patches and then after a few hours
it lets me in again. A colleague of mine in a different department has come to
me several times now asking of I can download a patch for him, as he has also
been locked out for no good reason and had upcoming scheduled down time on a
production server... This might not be the same if I were a long standing Oracle
customer looking for dbms patches, but as I am not, I don't know.


>... [Sun] customers who deserve shit?

Long time Sun customers are getting shit.

It's why we have so far this year (not even one month into 2011) committed our
annual hardware budget with Dell for servers to run Linux that will replace
about 80% of our Solaris base.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Tim Evans]

On 01/27/2011 05:28 PM, Brian Richman wrote:

> >... [Sun] customers who deserve shit?
>
> Long time Sun customers are getting shit.

I think I said the before in some other, similar, thread: It would be
soooo easy to just pop a CentOS or Fedora DVD into my Ultra 25 and just
be done with it.




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[Brian Richman]

>I think I said the before in some other, similar,
>thread: It would be soooo easy to just pop
>a CentOS or Fedora DVD into my Ultra 25 and
>just be done with it.

Yes Tim,

And incredibly cheaper on a regular, boring old bit of X86 hardware.

And to performance (a perennial subject), I can start up three identically
configured VM's on my old Dell Precision 390 (two different Linuxes and one
Solaris 10). Both the Linuxes are done booting and I am into them AND doing
stuff, before the Solaris VM has given me a login screen.

As a Sun admin person from well before Y2K days, I am deeply saddened by this
state of affairs.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Ian Collins]

On 01/28/11 11:28 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
> It's why we have so far this year (not even one month into 2011) committed our
> annual hardware budget with Dell for servers to run Linux that will replace
> about 80% of our Solaris base.
>
We couldn't face doing that, too big a retrograde step. Our entire
infrastructure is based around Solaris zones and replicated ZFS filesystems.

--
Ian.



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[Brian Richman]

>We couldn't face doing that, too big a retrograde step.
>Our entire infrastructure is based around Solaris zones
>and replicated ZFS filesystems.


Ian,

You are aware that you can run virtual servers inside of (for example) RHEL and
ZFS is available for a number of Linuxes? I see that http://zfs-fuse.net/ speaks
about this...




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Ian Collins]

On 01/28/11 11:48 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
>> We couldn't face doing that, too big a retrograde step.
>> Our entire infrastructure is based around Solaris zones
>> and replicated ZFS filesystems.
>
> Ian,
>
> You are aware that you can run virtual servers inside of (for example) RHEL and
> ZFS is available for a number of Linuxes? I see that http://zfs-fuse.net/ speaks
> about this...
>
Virtual servers != zones. I like zones!

Would you trust fuse with your data? The only viable alternative to an
OpenSolaris based distribution for ZFS is BSD.

--
Ian.



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[Brian Richman]

>Virtual servers != zones. I like zones!

Whatever you prefer.


>Would you trust fuse with your data?

I don't need to. I don't use ZFS, as our DBA's "don't trust it" - ZFS that is -
and interestingly, they are Oracle DBA's following advise thay had early in 2010
from ... Oh yes... Oracle's own db specialist consultants... Hmmm.



>The only viable alternative to an
>OpenSolaris based distribution for ZFS is BSD.

Ironic, considering the origins of Solaris...




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@web65818.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>, Brian Richman writes:
>I don't need to. I don't use ZFS, as our DBA's "don't trust it" - ZFS that is
>-
>and interestingly, they are Oracle DBA's following advise thay had early in 20
>10
>from ... Oh yes... Oracle's own db specialist consultants... Hmmm.

Are your DBAs hearing anything different from Chuck Rozwat and
company's professional services in 2011 or are they still on the
Unbreakable message to transition customers off John Fowler and
company's systems to Michael Dell and company's hardware?

John
***@acm.org


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[Brian Richman]

>>I don't need to. I don't use ZFS, as our DBA's "don't trust it" - ZFS that is

>>- and interestingly, they are Oracle DBA's following advise
>>thay had early in 2010 from ... Oh yes... Oracle's own db
>>specialist consultants... Hmmm.
>
>Are your DBAs hearing anything different from Chuck Rozwat and
>company's professional services in 2011 or are they still on the
>Unbreakable message to transition customers off John Fowler and
>company's systems to Michael Dell and company's hardware?

John,
How could you say such a thing? The answer is "easy", I know this because the
answer is "yes" to the unbreakable part of it and as we have a campus supply
contract with "Michael's Mafia" from Austin, we get to buy from them anyway.


We will be buying at prices that would make any competitors salesman/woman shake
in his boots; at least 60% under the same H/W configuration from Oracle. Makes
you wonder, doesn't it?
:-)


>




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@web65812.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>, Brian Richman writes:
>How could you say such a thing? The answer is "easy", I know this because the
>answer is "yes" to the unbreakable part of it and as we have a campus supply
>contract with "Michael's Mafia" from Austin, we get to buy from them anyway.
>
>
>We will be buying at prices that would make any competitors salesman/woman sha
>ke
>in his boots; at least 60% under the same H/W configuration from Oracle. Makes
>
>you wonder, doesn't it?

Larry Ellison has an agreement with Michael Dell to discount
Thomas Kurian and company's stack.
When I last checked in 2010, Keith Block and company's sales
critters for John Fowler and company's Solaris systems couldn't
match Michael Dell on Oracle RDBMS RTU and support.

Perhaps the situation is different for Keith Block and company's
Exadata sales team?

Does Judith Sim and company have plan to de-program Chuck Rozwat
and company's professional services of Judith Sim and company's
Unbreakable message.

What filesystem(5) does Judith Sim recommend for John Fowler
and company's new StorEdge systems?
<URL:http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=130054&src=7011670&src=7011670&Act=113>

John
***@acm.org


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[Brian Richman]

John,

You pose questions that I am not sure anyone will have answers to, unless the
people involved and strapped down and prodded with some form of sharp stick! I
also suspect this is not going to happen in our lifetimes...


:-)

>What filesystem(5) does Judith Sim recommend
>for John Fowler and company's new StorEdge
>systems?

Well.... We will see in the fullness of time, lawsiuts and settlements... And
your guess is?




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@web65815.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>, Brian Richman writes:
>You pose questions that I am not sure anyone will have answers to, unless the
>people involved and strapped down and prodded with some form of sharp stick! I
>
>also suspect this is not going to happen in our lifetimes...

Either Keith Block and company's sales critters answer your questions
and address your concerns or they don't, but it is helpful to other
customers as well as investors here that you report one way or the other.

>>What filesystem(5) does Judith Sim recommend
>>for John Fowler and company's new StorEdge
>>systems?
>
>Well.... We will see in the fullness of time, lawsiuts and settlements... And
>your guess is?

My guess is that Judith Sim and company's marketing wonks will
recommend ZFS for John Fowler and company's StorEdge systems
while Chuck Rozwat and company's professional services will
continue to recommend Unbreakable on Michael Dell's hardware.

I don't know whether that would be a bug or a feature, but
Hamish Barwick recently reported that analysts want
Steve Au Yeung and company to grow Solaris x86 system sales volume:
<URL:http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/374399/skies_clear_sun_oracle_local_server_market_analysts/>
| IDC Australia senior program manager, Matt Oostveen, agreed.
|
| "It's important to remember that Sun was number one in the
| reduced instruct set computing (RISC) Unix space but that segment
| of the market is in an overall decline," he said. "Sun/Oracle
| needs to look to their x86 server lines if they are going to have
| a sustained server business in Asia Pacific," he said.

Does Matt Oostveen believe Mr Au Yeung can do that while Larry Ellison
divorces Oracle from the "low-end, low-margin part of the systems
racket"?
And if so, how? And with what ramifications for customers?

John
***@acm.org



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[Brian Richman]

>Either Keith Block and company's sales critters answer
>your questions and address your concerns or they
>don't, but it is helpful to other customers as well as
>investors here that you report one way or the other.

Broadly speaking, they don't.

My experience is that it is the ex-Sunnies who are still with Oracle but not in
the sales operations who have any kind of concern for ex-Sun customers such as
ourselves. No matter what the official company line is, our experience is one of
"Pay more - MUCH MORE - or we are not interested in you." As I say
before/elsewhere... It's OK as we know where that leaves us and the general
direction of the New Oracle and we can act accordingly.


>My guess is that Judith Sim and company's marketing
>wonks will recommend ZFS for John Fowler and company's
>StorEdge systems while Chuck Rozwat and company's
>professional services will continue to recommend
>Unbreakable on Michael Dell's hardware.

Can't argue with that prediciton....

Why NOT run Solaris x86/x64 on the Austin Mafia's gear? As many would attest, it
has been the best O/S out there... No need to answer... I'm only stirring the
pot...



>Does Matt Oostveen believe Mr Au Yeung can do that while
>Larry Ellison divorces Oracle from the "low-end, low-margin
>part of the systems racket"? And if so, how? And with what
>ramifications for customers?

Larry and bunch are not in the low (or even medium) sized data center market. We
have over 100 Sun machines (no Exa-whatever) a Petabyte SAN and several hundred
x86/x64 serves and we are effectively being ignored by Oralce/Sun/hardware sales
critters. Much as I sympathize with them and the targets they are pushed to meet
(I used to be a "sales support" bod - slang for the techhie who does the stuff
while the salesman buys lunch), the last 18 months have seen a distinct change
in attitude from the Ora-Sun brigades.









[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[pcsol1996]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, John D Groenveld <***@...> wrote:
>
> In message <***@...>, Brian Richman writes:
> >How could you say such a thing? The answer is "easy", I know this because the
> >answer is "yes" to the unbreakable part of it and as we have a campus supply
> >contract with "Michael's Mafia" from Austin, we get to buy from them anyway.
> >
> >
> >We will be buying at prices that would make any competitors salesman/woman sha
> >ke
> >in his boots; at least 60% under the same H/W configuration from Oracle. Makes
> >
> >you wonder, doesn't it?
>
> Larry Ellison has an agreement with Michael Dell to discount
> Thomas Kurian and company's stack.
> When I last checked in 2010, Keith Block and company's sales
> critters for John Fowler and company's Solaris systems couldn't
> match Michael Dell on Oracle RDBMS RTU and support.
>
> Perhaps the situation is different for Keith Block and company's
> Exadata sales team?
>

Unlike about 4 months ago, Solaris is no longer listed as an OS option on Dell's webpage for the systems Solaris is so supposed to be supported on (T610, R710..etc).





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[Ian Collins]

On 01/28/11 09:21 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
> As I said on my previous post, we are moving away from OraSun now that the
> attitude and delivery have gone the way they have - our CFO even calls them
> 'OribleSun (spoken with a true Cockney accent), and it's nice to bump into a
> fellow "Norf Lahndener" and be able to discuss these things.
>
We're everywhere mate!

I can't help but agree with the depressing theme of this thread. One of
my clients almost gave up after a day trying to get a consistent quote
from them. Worse than pulling teeth and they actually wanted to buy stuff!

--
Ian.



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[Brian Richman]

>>> fellow "Norf Lahndener" ...
>>>
>>>
>>We're everywhere mate!
>
>I can't help but agree with the depressing theme of this thread.

Ian,

My sentiments exactly.

The IT biz is moving on, evolving, whatever-ing. Sun was so 1990's and early/mid
2000's... Such a shame really...




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <ihsh4q+***@eGroups.com>, "John" writes:
>Sorry for the negative vibes, but LOOK!

Look for what?

John
***@acm.org


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[Brian Richman]

>From: John D Groenveld <***@elvis.arl.psu.edu>
>To: ***@yahoogroups.com
>Sent: Thu, January 27, 2011 1:48:24 PM
>Subject: Re: [solarisx86] Re: Solaris 10 patch infrastructure broken?
>

>In message <ihsh4q+***@eGroups.com>, "John" writes:
>Sorry for the negative vibes, but LOOK!
>
>Look for what?
John,


There are parts of the city where I grew up, that a remark like "Look for what?"
would have got you bumped off, unless of course, you were saying it with a
deeply sarcastic tone ... Were you?







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Tim Evans]

On 01/26/11 21:54, John D Groenveld wrote:

> What does Martin Paul's PCA tell you about what Chuck Rozwat
> and company say are your entitlements?

# ./pca --supplevel
Determining MOS Support Levels

OS: Solaris patches and updates
PUB: Oracle Open Office/StarOffice and patch utilities

(MOS tells me the same thing.)

However, pca cannot actually connect to download anything:

# ./pca -si missingrs
Downloading xref file to /var/tmp/patchdiag.xref
Trying https://getupdates.oracle.com/ (1/1)
Failed (Unknown Error)

I mentioned earlier failures to connect with Update Manager, with
no-route-to-host errors in /var/adm/messages, as well as failures to
connect with a browser after having authenticated in MOS and with 'wget'.

Earlier in the thread, I mentioned my systems are behind a Solaris 10
'ipf' firewall that NAT's the internal hosts. Any possibility of a
conflict here?
--
Tim Evans, TKEvans.com, Inc. | 5 Chestnut Court
UNIX System Admin Consulting | Owings Mills, MD 21117
http://www.tkevans.com/ | 443-394-3864
http://www.come-here.com/News/ | ***@tkevans.com


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@tkevans.com>, Tim Evans writes:
>Earlier in the thread, I mentioned my systems are behind a Solaris 10
>'ipf' firewall that NAT's the internal hosts. Any possibility of a
>conflict here?

Possible.
From outside your firewalled Solaris network, can you reach MOS?
<URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com/>

Patches & Updates -> Patch-ID "119060-57" / Platform "Solaris on x86-64"
<URL:https://getupdates.oracle.com/all_unsigned/119060-57.zip>

John
***@acm.org


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[Tim Evans]

On 01/30/11 11:35, John D Groenveld wrote:
> In message <***@tkevans.com
> <mailto:4D448627.7020102%40tkevans.com>>, Tim Evans writes:
> >Earlier in the thread, I mentioned my systems are behind a Solaris 10
> >'ipf' firewall that NAT's the internal hosts. Any possibility of a
> >conflict here?
>
> Possible.
> From outside your firewalled Solaris network, can you reach MOS?
> <URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com/>

No problem.
>
> Patches & Updates -> Patch-ID "119060-57" / Platform "Solaris on x86-64"
> <URL:https://getupdates.oracle.com/all_unsigned/119060-57.zip>

Cannot connect to getupdates via browser; just times out. (As does
'wget' connection.)


--
Tim Evans, TKEvans.com, Inc. | 5 Chestnut Court
UNIX System Admin Consulting | Owings Mills, MD 21117
http://www.tkevans.com/ | 443-394-3864
http://www.come-here.com/News/ | ***@tkevans.com


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Tim Evans wrote:
>> Possible.
>> From outside your firewalled Solaris network, can you reach MOS?
>> <URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com/>
>
> No problem.
>>
>> Patches & Updates -> Patch-ID "119060-57" / Platform "Solaris on x86-64"
>> <URL:https://getupdates.oracle.com/all_unsigned/119060-57.zip>
>
> Cannot connect to getupdates via browser; just times out. (As does
> 'wget' connection.)

Make sure that you use the same authenticated browser session (without
logging out) when you go to get the patch. That is what I did. Does
that make it work?

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, John D Groenveld wrote:
>
> Possible.
> From outside your firewalled Solaris network, can you reach MOS?
> <URL:https://supporthtml.oracle.com/>
>
> Patches & Updates -> Patch-ID "119060-57" / Platform "Solaris on x86-64"
> <URL:https://getupdates.oracle.com/all_unsigned/119060-57.zip>

I am able to get there via FireFox and download the patch.

Using dtrace I observed accesses that are taking place during 'smpatch
analyze'.

The file /var/cc-ccr/nonprivileged.properties is updated by 'smpatch
analyze' and I see that it contains this:

cns.transport.serverurl=https://cns-transport.sun.com

I am not able to connect to this address via either Firefox or

telnet cns-transport.sun.com 80

>From my location, the IP address of this host is currently
198.232.168.137.

In /var/cc-ccr/ccpatchsvr.properties there is mention of

cns.patchsvr.patchsource.default=https://getupdates1.sun.com/

which is also unreachable via TCP and currently has IP address
192.18.110.14.

If someone actually has 'smpatch' working, I would appreciate it if
they would share all URLs mentioned in files in /var/cc-ccr.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
> I am not able to connect to this address via either Firefox or
>
> telnet cns-transport.sun.com 80

I am not able to

telnet getupdates.oracle.com 80

yet I can connect from a browser so it seems that some firewalling
breaks testing for connectivity via telnet.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Tim Evans]

On 01/30/2011 01:11 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

> I am not able to
>
> telnet getupdates.oracle.com 80

But you could try port 443. I just did so from a system outside my
firewall and got connected.



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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Tim Evans wrote:

> On 01/30/2011 01:11 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>> I am not able to
>>
>> telnet getupdates.oracle.com 80
>
> But you could try port 443. I just did so from a system outside my
> firewall and got connected.

I still don't get connected for this incanation:

% telnet cns-transport.sun.com 443
Trying 198.232.168.137...

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
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[Tim Evans]

On 01/30/2011 03:00 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Tim Evans wrote:
>
> > On 01/30/2011 01:11 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> >
> >> I am not able to
> >>
> >> telnet getupdates.oracle.com 80
> >
> > But you could try port 443. I just did so from a system outside my
> > firewall and got connected.
>
> I still don't get connected for this incanation:
>
> % telnet cns-transport.sun.com 443
> Trying 198.232.168.137...

getupdates.oracle.com

I can get there from a system outside my firewall, but not from within.



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[Tim Evans]

I wanted to let everyone know 'smpatch' is now working for me.

Can't say why. As I previously noted, MOS told me my contract was
provisioned for patch access, and I was able to verify this with 'pca'
as well. Still I could not download them either with a browser or with
'wget' or with 'pca' (using my MOS login and password).

At first, I thought this might be a firewall-related problem, rather
than mis-provisioned support contract. My systems are behind a Solaris
'ipf' firewall, and while I have never had any trouble accessing *any*
web site before, I simply could not access 'getupdates.oracle.com' with
a browser or with 'wget' or with 'pca'. "No route to host."

Using a system outside my local firewall, I was able to download the
January, 2011, Recommended Patch set (proving my support contract is
properly provisioned in MOS, at least), then download it from the other
system.

Having applied it to my systems manually, I can report 'smpatch' now
works again, and the no-route-to-host-error with 'wget' has also gone away.

Not sure what the patch set did--or if Oracle somehow fixed things
otherwise with the unreachable URL's.


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

After much nashing of teeth, Update Manager seems to be working on
both of my systems now. This seemed to require some action on the
part of contracts/support as well as ensuring that the CSI number for
the support contract is listed in the support tool at
oracle.support.com. If the CSI number is not listed then you can not
successfully register.

Update Manager is so terribly written that it provides no useful
indication of a problem. The 'smpatch' program will at least provide
some indication via an error message:

# /usr/sbin/smpatch download -i 144489-07
Error: One or more of the updates specified do not have entitlement permissions.

Note that 'smpatch analyze' simply provides no output when there is a
problem.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
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[John Taylor]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 5:53 PM, Bob Friesenhahn
<***@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
>
>
>
> After much nashing of teeth, Update Manager seems to be working on
> both of my systems now. This seemed to require some action on the
> part of contracts/support as well as ensuring that the CSI number for
> the support contract is listed in the support tool at
> oracle.support.com. If the CSI number is not listed then you can not
> successfully register.
>
> Update Manager is so terribly written that it provides no useful
> indication of a problem. The 'smpatch' program will at least provide
> some indication via an error message:
>
> # /usr/sbin/smpatch download -i 144489-07
> Error: One or more of the updates specified do not have entitlement permissions.
>
> Note that 'smpatch analyze' simply provides no output when there is a
> problem.

If you want a simple tool that works, I can highly recommend pca (Patch
Check Advanced). I dumped smpatch (when I was working for Sun)
a year or so after Solaris 10 was released because it botched too many
of my home systems. I have used pca exclusively for the last 4 years.


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[Ian Collins]

On 02/ 2/11 03:27 PM, John Taylor wrote:
> If you want a simple tool that works, I can highly recommend pca (Patch
> Check Advanced). I dumped smpatch (when I was working for Sun)
> a year or so after Solaris 10 was released because it botched too many
> of my home systems. I have used pca exclusively for the last 4 years.
>
I'm sure most regular posters here would endorse your recommendation.

It must be embarrassing for Oracle that a third party script (I was
going to say simple, but pca is over 4300 lines!) has consistently
managed to do what their on tools couldn't.

--
Ian.



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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, Ian Collins <***@...> wrote:
>
> On 02/ 2/11 03:27 PM, John Taylor wrote:
> > If you want a simple tool that works, I can highly recommend pca (Patch
> > Check Advanced). I dumped smpatch (when I was working for Sun)
> > a year or so after Solaris 10 was released because it botched too many
> > of my home systems. I have used pca exclusively for the last 4 years.
> >
> I'm sure most regular posters here would endorse your recommendation.
>
> It must be embarrassing for Oracle that a third party script (I was
> going to say simple, but pca is over 4300 lines!) has consistently
> managed to do what their on tools couldn't.
>

The patch process was embarrassing for Sun also. Oracle just inherent the issue. But that is what IPS is suppose to resolve. Which when IPS works it is much better. Now what Oracle should be embarrassed about is they have no track record claiming enterprise companies see IPS as a solution to the "customer problems" as opposed to the overall claim IPS solves both the customer issues and the supplier. Maybe Oracle can come up with some success stories about IPS in the future but I guess it depends on how long you can hold your breath.

---Bob




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[John D Groenveld]

In message <iib6b0+***@eGroups.com>, "palowoda" writes:
>h better. Now what Oracle should be embarrassed about is they have no track r
>ecord claiming enterprise companies see IPS as a solution to the "customer pro
>blems" as opposed to the overall claim IPS solves both the customer issues and
> the supplier. Maybe Oracle can come up with some success stories about IPS i
>n the future but I guess it depends on how long you can hold your breath.

Does Chuck Rozwat and company's volume Unbreakable Linux patch
system suffer from same or similar Sun patch issues that IPS
might resolve?

And do Judith Sim and company's marketing wonks have anything
to be embarrassed about if Solaris 11 is destined only for
Ed Zander's favorite low-volume, high-margin niche customers?

Does Sam Palmisano and company have these issues with their
low-volume, high-margin niche server solutions?

In the sales quotes produced by Keith Block and company's
sales critters for the Exadata solution, are customers required
to buy Oracle professional services to apply patches to
their systems?

John
***@acm.org


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <AANLkTikT_ZWMngTcLShiongfquQv323gLe=***@mail.gmail.com>, John
Taylor writes:
>If you want a simple tool that works, I can highly recommend pca (Patch
>Check Advanced). I dumped smpatch (when I was working for Sun)
>a year or so after Solaris 10 was released because it botched too many
>of my home systems. I have used pca exclusively for the last 4 years.

Kudos to Martin Paul for some handy Perl.

And kudos to the other customers who demanded that Chuch Rozwat
and company not break "wget(1)" access to patches during the
transition from SunSolve/OSC to My Oracle Support and from
Solaris 10 to Solaris 11.

John
***@acm.org



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[Bob Hodges]

Please forgive my "newbness" in advance, I am not any kind of expert in Linux or Solaris. I just know may way around both enough to adequately administer them for the needs of my company. However, I want to centralize to one OS - Solaris or Linux (SUSE - sorry, I just don't like Ubuntu).

My Dumb Question: With two decades of Linux hype, what is my incentive for continuing with Solaris when Linux seems to work so smoothly for pretty much the same purposes I'd use Solaris for on the x86 platform? I'm sure there is a good answer, or Linux would have killed Solaris long ago.

So to be fair before making a decision about ditching Solaris in favor of Linux, I'd like to ask:

What's the "Solaris Advantage" over Linux at this point?

And please: I am NOT trying to start any kind of flame war. Just trying to make an educated decision and thought I'd take it straight to the gurus.

Again, thanks for suffering somewhat of a noob.


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[Ian Collins]

On 02/ 3/11 06:17 PM, Bob Hodges wrote:
> Please forgive my "newbness" in advance, I am not any kind of expert in Linux or Solaris. I just know may way around both enough to adequately administer them for the needs of my company. However, I want to centralize to one OS - Solaris or Linux (SUSE - sorry, I just don't like Ubuntu).
>
> My Dumb Question: With two decades of Linux hype, what is my incentive for continuing with Solaris when Linux seems to work so smoothly for pretty much the same purposes I'd use Solaris for on the x86 platform? I'm sure there is a good answer, or Linux would have killed Solaris long ago.
>
> So to be fair before making a decision about ditching Solaris in favor of Linux, I'd like to ask:
>
> What's the "Solaris Advantage" over Linux at this point?
>
That really depends what you want to use the system for.

Most of the production x86 systems I look after are either good sized
file servers, so ZFS is a big win for Solaris, or used to consolidate
older systems, so zones are a big win for Solaris. I'd hate to have to
do what I do on these systems with Linux.

--
Ian.



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[Jeff Brower]

On 2/3/2011 1:27 AM, Ian Collins wrote:
>
> Most of the production x86 systems I look after are either good sized
> file servers, so ZFS is a big win for Solaris, or used to consolidate
> older systems, so zones are a big win for Solaris. I'd hate to have to
> do what I do on these systems with Linux.
>
> --
> Ian.
>

My $0.02 :

Ian knows a lot more about Solaris than I do and I normally yield to his
experience, but:

Xen is free and is the basis of most of the really good VMs out there.
It really works well and I use it with Debian VERY successfully so that
has really taken the sting out of loosing zones if you opt out of
Solaris. Debian has LOADS of packages that are easy to install and it
is very stable since they don't jump on the latest stuff just because it
is the latest stuff - but you can always use their "bleeding edge" Sid
version if your nerves are up to that and you REALLY think you need the
latest and greatest. I prefer a longer release cycle and a release I
can just install, tune and run for a long time (one of the things that
attracted me to Solaris in the first place). Debian names their
releases after Toy Story characters and Sid is the kid next door who
breaks toys - so their pre-release version is always named Sid.
Appropriate. Anyway, with Xen, I have Debian, Windows and Solaris all
on the same machine and I use VNC for a desktop (sized to my laptop,
allowing me to use the virtual desktop from my laptop or my actual
desktop computer and just pick up where I left off - even between
keystrokes). With Xen you can even move a running server from one
physical machine to another physical machine without shutting it down
and with no downtime. That pretty well rocks. I am not sure, but I
think that the Solaris VM is actually a Xen implementation.

As far as ZFS is concerned, you can now get that on Debian as well:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/zfs-fuse

I also like Debian's package update system. It has an alert then a
couple of clicks and you are done and the machine never hiccups.

From an admin point of view, Debian seems to have what you expect where
you expect it and the logs are easy to find and use.

The terminal seems to run better on Debian with better support for
unmarried-to-solaris graphics cards and keyboard support with line wraps
for long commands acting as expected and the ability to scroll-lock and
look back at the stuff that scrolled off of the screen. This could just
be me.

The thing I would miss most would be the predictive self-healing that
Solaris has. The Solaris boxes I deal with are solid as they can be and
they never seem to ever go down. They just run and run and run. I have
had Debian machines that quit, but since I have gotten in the practice
of rolling the machines over at least once a quarter I have had no problem.

Of course Windows is much better than it was, but if you can memorize
the Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard stroke, you are doing it too often. Just sayin'.

I guess my bottom line is this. There is no perfect. There IS a best
for your circumstances. If you want real UNIX, Solaris wins with the
BSDs close behind. If you doing development, Solaris has great tools
that let you drill down to see what is really going on. If you are
running a Glassfish server, Solaris wins there too. If you are doing
big databases or file servers, Solaris wins again. Read all that as
"wins for me". On the other hand, of the Linux alternatives - If you
are looking for an easy to maintain solid server for http perhaps with
Drupal managed by Aegir - go Debian. If you want the latest and
greatest without regard to stability and security go with almost
anything other than these two and have your head examined. <grin>
Sorry, couldn't resist - go ahead and flame me.

As a disclaimer and to tell you where I stand (kind of a "I own this
stock" kind of moment): I still run Solaris here and on customer
implementations (Solaris 10, no 11's so far). I have pretty much always
liked Sun everything. Oracle has not shown they even want me or my
customers as customers. They don't show the love even as a person who
might recommend them to a customer - and at $1,000 per socket per year
for modern OS's that RARELY needs anything but security patches after
they are installed, I find it easy to make proposals that cost $1,000
per socket less (or redirect that money to my own pocket). I do find
myself drifting, and I seem to be drifting to Debian for those machines
that don't require bullet-proof Solaris.

Your mileage may vary.

I will add that the lines between all of these alternatives are blurring
to me. As they say, there are several ways to skin a cat - but they all
result in pretty much the same thing. As all these platforms find
homogeneity, I think the Cloud will become even more attractive and make
the distinction mute - but that is another discussion entirely.

Hope that helps.

-- Jeff



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[Ian Collins]

On 02/ 4/11 07:48 AM, Jeff Brower wrote:
> On 2/3/2011 1:27 AM, Ian Collins wrote:
>> Most of the production x86 systems I look after are either good sized
>> file servers, so ZFS is a big win for Solaris, or used to consolidate
>> older systems, so zones are a big win for Solaris. I'd hate to have to
>> do what I do on these systems with Linux.
> My $0.02 :
>
> Ian knows a lot more about Solaris than I do and I normally yield to his
> experience, but:
>
> Xen is free and is the basis of most of the really good VMs out there.

Xen != zones.

I've used it on OpenSolaris (xvm) until Oracle foolishly dropped it.
Unlike hypervisor based solutions, zones have a negligible resource
impact on the host and suffer a negligible performance impact compared
to a physical instance. So Xen is the best option for heterogeneous
virtualisation, but zones win in all areas for a homogeneous environment.

Oh, I forgot to mention crossbow: zones+crossbow is an unbeatable
combination!

> It really works well and I use it with Debian VERY successfully so that
> has really taken the sting out of loosing zones if you opt out of
> Solaris. Debian has LOADS of packages that are easy to install and it
> is very stable since they don't jump on the latest stuff just because it
> is the latest stuff - but you can always use their "bleeding edge" Sid
> version if your nerves are up to that and you REALLY think you need the
> latest and greatest. I prefer a longer release cycle and a release I
> can just install, tune and run for a long time (one of the things that
> attracted me to Solaris in the first place). Debian names their
> releases after Toy Story characters and Sid is the kid next door who
> breaks toys - so their pre-release version is always named Sid.
> Appropriate. Anyway, with Xen, I have Debian, Windows and Solaris all
> on the same machine and I use VNC for a desktop (sized to my laptop,
> allowing me to use the virtual desktop from my laptop or my actual
> desktop computer and just pick up where I left off - even between
> keystrokes). With Xen you can even move a running server from one
> physical machine to another physical machine without shutting it down
> and with no downtime. That pretty well rocks. I am not sure, but I
> think that the Solaris VM is actually a Xen implementation.
>
> As far as ZFS is concerned, you can now get that on Debian as well:
>
> http://packages.debian.org/sid/zfs-fuse
>
I wouldn't trust an organisation's data to fuse... Being a user-space
implementation, it can only be second best.

if you want ZFS and a Linux userland, or supported ZFS without the
Oracle tax, use Nexenta. It has been around a long time and it is well
supported. If I had to chose an alternative OS for storage servers,
they would be my first choice.

> I guess my bottom line is this. There is no perfect. There IS a best
> for your circumstances. If you want real UNIX, Solaris wins with the
> BSDs close behind. If you doing development, Solaris has great tools
> that let you drill down to see what is really going on. If you are
> running a Glassfish server, Solaris wins there too. If you are doing
> big databases or file servers, Solaris wins again. Read all that as
> "wins for me". On the other hand, of the Linux alternatives - If you
> are looking for an easy to maintain solid server for http perhaps with
> Drupal managed by Aegir - go Debian. If you want the latest and
> greatest without regard to stability and security go with almost
> anything other than these two and have your head examined.<grin>
> Sorry, couldn't resist - go ahead and flame me.
>
That's probably fair although I'd opt for a BSD if I couldn't use
Solaris in a data centre.

> As a disclaimer and to tell you where I stand (kind of a "I own this
> stock" kind of moment): I still run Solaris here and on customer
> implementations (Solaris 10, no 11's so far). I have pretty much always
> liked Sun everything. Oracle has not shown they even want me or my
> customers as customers. They don't show the love even as a person who
> might recommend them to a customer - and at $1,000 per socket per year
> for modern OS's that RARELY needs anything but security patches after
> they are installed, I find it easy to make proposals that cost $1,000
> per socket less (or redirect that money to my own pocket). I do find
> myself drifting, and I seem to be drifting to Debian for those machines
> that don't require bullet-proof Solaris.
>
I don't have any arguments with that either!

--
Ian.



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[Jeff Brower]

On 2/3/2011 2:43 PM, Ian Collins wrote:
>
>
> > Xen is free and is the basis of most of the really good VMs out there.
>
> Xen != zones.
>

Xen is most definitely not zones - but without zones it became my second
choice. Chroot jails were not a real alternative once I had been
spoiled by zones and Xen gave me the warm and fuzzy back.

> I've used it on OpenSolaris (xvm) until Oracle foolishly dropped it.
> Unlike hypervisor based solutions, zones have a negligible resource
> impact on the host and suffer a negligible performance impact compared
> to a physical instance. So Xen is the best option for heterogeneous
> virtualisation, but zones win in all areas for a homogeneous environment.
>

I have to totally agree here. Xen is very resource friendly, but
nothing gives you free rides. Zones win over Xen on resource
utilization in almost every instance where you are talking multiple
Solaris containers. It is kind of cool to see Solaris, Debian and a
Windows server all running on the same box at the same time though. <grin>

>
> Oh, I forgot to mention crossbow: zones+crossbow is an unbeatable
> combination!
>

Oooh! Something I have never tried! Got to look that one up!

> I wouldn't trust an organisation's data to fuse... Being a user-space
> implementation, it can only be second best.
>
> if you want ZFS and a Linux userland, or supported ZFS without the
> Oracle tax, use Nexenta. It has been around a long time and it is well
> supported. If I had to chose an alternative OS for storage servers,
> they would be my first choice.
>

Never used ZFS on anything but Solaris. I thought I would let some
other pioneer take the arrows for a while. <grin> Have to break down
and take a serious look at Nexenta when life slows down just a skootch.

>
> That's probably fair although I'd opt for a BSD if I couldn't use
> Solaris in a data centre.
>

I use several FreeBSD boxen and love them. In fact, I keep trying to
use them over the Debian, but the Debian is faster to turnkey (for me).

--
-- Jeff


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[Brian Richman]

"Xen != zones.

I have been experimenting with RHEL and setting up a couple of 'guest' systems.

One of my low end PC's (a simple Core 2 1.8Ghz 3Gb RAM PC) can handle two or
three guests doing stuff like basic Apache serving right out of the box. Just
like using Virtual Box. I moved two web sites for non-profits I look after onto
it and let it run them for a day. Nothing too serious workload speaking, but it
handled it. A friends i5 3Ghz machine (4Gb RAM) eats it up.


The RHCE courses from my local training and testing operation use low end
networked Lenovo laptops as workstations for the RHEL courses. You have the host
and two guests to work with, part of the course (and exam) is setting up another
guest. Its a nor very real-world example (setting up things like IP Tables or
installing and configuring packages is not really going to stress anything), but
what all this reveals is that you CAN use that set up for basic tasks like web
server consolidation and running basic shell level scripts and file edits in all
of the O/S instances at the same time on low end (read VERY CHEAP - much cheaper
than Oracle) hardware.

Sure it isn't a zone, but so what? Worrying about the details of differences
between Xen and a zone is pointless considering the issues we have actually
getting an Oracle sales-bod try to sell us anything that costs less than an
Exa-whatever level box, and the alternatives, the NON Oracle alternative looks
very attractive.

Now to convince our DB's to look at moving off the M and T series servers they
insist they must use.


Hmmm... Once the contract for maintenance comes in at the end of the year and we
can put those numbers side by side with the commodity boys numbers in a meeting
with out CFO, that'll be an easy 'sell'.

As I said a week ago... the way ahead is clear. We can take the hint.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Ian Collins]

On 02/ 4/11 09:39 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
> "Xen != zones.
>
> I have been experimenting with RHEL and setting up a couple of 'guest' systems.
>
<snip>

> Sure it isn't a zone, but so what? Worrying about the details of differences
> between Xen and a zone is pointless considering the issues we have actually
> getting an Oracle sales-bod try to sell us anything that costs less than an
> Exa-whatever level box, and the alternatives, the NON Oracle alternative looks
> very attractive.
>
I'm not worrying about the details - some of my systems have dozens of
zones, imaging administering and patching that may VMs!

Zones require next to bugger all disk space or RAM, can be up and
running in next to no time and their only real resource consumption is
that of the processes they run.

--
Ian.



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[Brian Richman]

>some of my systems have dozens of
>zones, imaging administering and
>patching that may VMs!

When I was working at a certain British Telecoms company a decade ago, we had
about 180 Solaris boxes in my area and interestingly, moving then all to Red Hat
3 dot something or other, we removed a huge amount of patching overhead, mostly
the time it took to put patches onto things like SPARC 5 and 10 pizza box
machines (remember those?)... Running the RH auto updater programs took just a
few minutes per server and each was set to run at specific times in our
maintenance window (Sundays were often never quiet days for me) and the boxes
auto-rebooted if needed. Each RH box sent an email when they were done
restarting (poped a short rc script in there to do it) and the machine where
the mailbox is that gets them, runs a PERL script to ensure all of them
responded within a certain time... if not, it emailed us admins. Silence from it
meant everything was good. Ahhh Memories... but I digress.

At work now (I am in an entirely different situation and employer now), I am
considering resurrecting that same set of stuff for the RHEL we are now looking
at putting in for our web and app layers. Interestingly, there isn't much
interest in running VM's... Especially as we can buy sufficient iron by not
buying it from Oracle to let us do it "bare metal".

>Zones require next to bugger all disk
>space or RAM, can be up and running
>in next to no time and their only real
>resource consumption is
>that of the processes they run.

True... But disk and RAM on the dell 710 and 910 machines we are putting in is
such a cheap resource now, it's pointless to worry about it. A complete RHEL 5
set up loads into about 0.5Gb RAM and can easily fit into 5Gb of disk (I used to
run Solaris 9 x86 in entire machines that were no bigger than that). Personally
I'd call that more or less "bugger all" these days.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Ian Collins]

On 02/ 4/11 09:39 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
> Sure it isn't a zone, but so what?

By strange coincidence, I had a classic case of zones saving expensive
and embarrassing downtime today.

An admin in a zone on a remote machine had fat fingered a crontab entry
so instead of setting the ownership and permissions in a specific
directory, they clobbered root! The zone was still serving its files
(give or take some permission issues) but because pam.conf and utmpx had
the wrong owner, no one could log in. Now being a zone, it was easy to
fix the ownership from the global zone and re-enable logins. Also being
on ZFS, there was a snapshot from just before the command was run, so I
can restore all the ACLs.

Now if this hadn't been a zone on ZFS, my morning would have been a lot
busier!

--
Ian.



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[Brian Richman]

Oh yes. There are always opportunities for mistakes.





________________________________
From: Ian Collins <***@ianshome.com>
To: ***@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thu, February 3, 2011 6:47:41 PM
Subject: Re: [solarisx86] What's the "Solaris Advantage"?


On 02/ 4/11 09:39 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
> Sure it isn't a zone, but so what?

By strange coincidence, I had a classic case of zones saving expensive
and embarrassing downtime today.

An admin in a zone on a remote machine had fat fingered a crontab entry
so instead of setting the ownership and permissions in a specific
directory, they clobbered root! The zone was still serving its files
(give or take some permission issues) but because pam.conf and utmpx had
the wrong owner, no one could log in. Now being a zone, it was easy to
fix the ownership from the global zone and re-enable logins. Also being
on ZFS, there was a snapshot from just before the command was run, so I
can restore all the ACLs.

Now if this hadn't been a zone on ZFS, my morning would have been a lot
busier!

--
Ian.







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Jeff Brower]

On 2/3/2011 7:47 PM, Ian Collins wrote:
>
> On 02/ 4/11 09:39 AM, Brian Richman wrote:
> > Sure it isn't a zone, but so what?
>
> By strange coincidence, I had a classic case of zones saving expensive
> and embarrassing downtime today.
>
> An admin in a zone on a remote machine had fat fingered a crontab entry
> so instead of setting the ownership and permissions in a specific
> directory, they clobbered root! The zone was still serving its files
> (give or take some permission issues) but because pam.conf and utmpx had
> the wrong owner, no one could log in. Now being a zone, it was easy to
> fix the ownership from the global zone and re-enable logins. Also being
> on ZFS, there was a snapshot from just before the command was run, so I
> can restore all the ACLs.
>
> Now if this hadn't been a zone on ZFS, my morning would have been a lot
> busier!
>
> --
> Ian.
>
>

Wow. Talk about timing!

Thinking about it, I did have an issue with a Xen virtual machine a few
months back. I keep the images on an LVM so I can move them about. I
had to shut down the offending VM, mount the LVM disk image and get into
it that way to make things right. A lot more thought and work than
simply going into the zone from the global zone - let alone the time it
took to figure it out and fix it with the machine down.

I think the ideal would be Solaris zones running on a Xen VM. You have
a tiny bit of overhead on Xen but you can slide the Solaris VM images
around and allocate CPUs on the fly to balance the load - plus you can
move the running zones to another physical machine for uninterrupted
PM. I guess you had that with XVM until Oracle dropped it, but going
straight to Xen might still be an option for you.

Aw heck, I am leaning back to Solaris again now. When will the madness
stop!

I guess I need to buckle down and look at the branches you were talking
about.

--
-- Jeff


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[Gary R. Schmidt]

On Fri, February 4, 2011 07:39, Brian Richman wrote:
[SNIP]
> Hmmm... Once the contract for maintenance comes in at the end of the year
> and we
> can put those numbers side by side with the commodity boys numbers in a
> meeting
> with out CFO, that'll be an easy 'sell'.
>
> As I said a week ago... the way ahead is clear. We can take the hint.
>
This is the problem that Oracle have created for themselves, treating
anyone *except* the big accounts as second (or third or ...) class
citizens means that people who have previously gone in to bat for Solaris
against no longer have the will to do so.

How many people in this list have had problems getting answers to simple
questions like, "How do I renew my support contract?"

Assuming that something as large as 1% of all Solaris sites are
represented on this list, then there is the proverbial metric shit-load of
customers who are all now potential ex-customers (e.g. Brian quoted
above).

Hell, if my job didn't have the service arm of (large company in Japan) as
its major customer, who run Solaris on lots and lots of SPARC64 systems, I
suspect we'd be de-emphasising Solaris development and support quick
smart.

Cheers,
Gary B-)




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[peter evans]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 02:10:04PM +1100, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
> Hell, if my job didn't have the service arm of (large company in Japan) as
> its major customer, who run Solaris on lots and lots of SPARC64 systems, I
> suspect we'd be de-emphasising Solaris development and support quick
> smart.

Poor company.

If they are really unlucky, they will have brought them through
the reseller of doom, CTC (Itochu). Fortunately, I have never had
to rely on them and the only solaris box I have today is actually
solaris express 11 (now, was opensol for ~3 years before) and jsut
for home.

I am not sure there is a "solaris advantage" any more, which is
pretty sad since I used to use it for production stuff, and amazingly
even have an Ultra 60 here at home (free to a good home but you have
to take it, those are heavy!) Worse, I used oracle! Twice!(1)

But is there a disadvantage?

For all the hype about opensolaris being open sauce, despite using it
from snv_8x? I have never ever needed to look at the source. About the
most dangerous thing has been digging around in that nightmare of the
website to find the exact compile options used for mysql to install a
version that didn't explode on left joins.

Do you really need the sauce? How many people with linux need it?


Price wise, however, one can probably talk about the Solaris Disadvantage
without any complaints from the peanut gallery. I hear GMO stopped buying
their favourite thumpers because the yacht fund tax doubled the price.





P



(1) oracle 8 and 9, so long ago I had hair!


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[Gary R. Schmidt]

On 4/02/2011 8:54 PM, peter evans wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 02:10:04PM +1100, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
> > Hell, if my job didn't have the service arm of (large company in
> Japan) as
> > its major customer, who run Solaris on lots and lots of SPARC64
> systems, I
> > suspect we'd be de-emphasising Solaris development and support quick
> > smart.
>
> Poor company.
Not really - they make them. (That should give it away!)

Cheers,
Gary B-)


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[peter evans]

On Sat, Feb 05, 2011 at 12:17:11AM +1100, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
> > Poor company.
> Not really - they make them. (That should give it away!)

F_j_t__,


Aren't their sparc chips just a little bit different?



I once crashed their supercomputer ^^;
This would be oh, 1994 maybe, down towards Kawasaki at their
office. I haven't been back there since. It was running some
early version of unix.

By modern standards, anyone unfortunate enough to own a
"smartphone" probably has more computing power in their hands.

I also used PFU "oem" sparc boxes, the earlier ones were just
a little bit different and needed their own flavour of sunos or
the power button didn't work.

These days, does having a sparc processor make any sense? No one
can afford the yacht tax to go for enormous numbers of cores and
x86 with infiniband can probably outperform them.




P




Isn't progress wonderful. Now, if only "smartphones" were smart
enough to detect their user was a MORON and make them walk in
front of a train instead of into other people, Darwin would be
a lot happier.




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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@www.mcleod-schmidt.id.au>
, "Gary R. Schmidt" writes:
>This is the problem that Oracle have created for themselves, treating
>anyone *except* the big accounts as second (or third or ...) class
>citizens means that people who have previously gone in to bat for Solaris
>against no longer have the will to do so.

If you are running an engineering company trying to disrupt the
market, then you want a vibrant eco-system to hawk your innovations
at the grassroots to sell more systems with low sales and marketing
costs.

If you're a sales and marketing company who's discovered Ed Zander's
amazing plan to become another Big Blue, then you need a boat load
of cash to buy mismanaged innovators like Sun Microsystems at a
ridiculous fire-sale price and a cattle prod to get Keith Block,
Loic le Guisquet, and Steve Au Yeung's sales critters to hawk your
new wares to Fortune 500 CIOs.

Since culture and direction is set from the top, the only question
is whether Larry Ellison will have a change of heart in the face
of Ed Zander proved to be a loser yet again and before the last of
the engineering talent says goodbye.

John
***@acm.org


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[Brian Richman]

>From: John D Groenveld <***@elvis.arl.psu.edu>
>To: ***@yahoogroups.com
>Sent: Fri, February 4, 2011 8:31:59 AM
>Subject: Re: [solarisx86] What's the "Solaris Advantage"?
>
>Since culture and direction is set from the
>top, the only question is whether Larry
>Ellison will have a change of heart in the face
>of Ed Zander proved to be a loser yet again
>and before the last of the engineering talent
>says goodbye.

John,

In light of the Oracle policy to stamp on the reproductive organs of employees
who express a view other than the company line (just like a certain other IT
company I know), I wonder if there is a board or group where employees
contribute anonymously? It would make an outstanding and informative read for us
"Sun" customer, especially those who are committing our employers money - and
putting our reputations on the line over recommendations...

A private email with links (I'd be very happy with read only access) would be
most welcome.

If anyone wants me to verify I am NOT an Oracle employee/informant/Larry, I can
do that too.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[peter evans]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 09:31:59AM -0500, John D Groenveld wrote:
> Since culture and direction is set from the top, the only question
> is whether Larry Ellison will have a change of heart in the face
> of Ed Zander proved to be a loser yet again and before the last of
> the engineering talent says goodbye.

Do I detect a hint of optimism with a delicate smattering of
finely roast sarcasm?

I think what is needed is for some big companies to tell Oracle
to take their yacht tax and piss off. I am sure any company that
decides to do so will be welcomed by the competition who will
be thrilled to sell them cheaper, better, faster boats.

P



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@ixp.jp>, peter evans writes:
> Do I detect a hint of optimism with a delicate smattering of
> finely roast sarcasm?

Ed Zander has a poor track record at Sun and Motorola and for all
his "good" vs "excellent" business acumen, Scott McNealy advice to
look at track record is sound.

> I think what is needed is for some big companies to tell Oracle
> to take their yacht tax and piss off. I am sure any company that
> decides to do so will be welcomed by the competition who will
> be thrilled to sell them cheaper, better, faster boats.

Judith Sim and company is spewing Ed Zander's low-volume,
high-margin message for the best UNIX on the planet for favored
Solaris customers and Unbreakable for customers who don't want
to get stuck with low-volume, high margin solutions.

In the 21st century, what company, big or small, wants to be stuck in
Ed Zander's niche with no ecosystem beyond Thomas Kurian and company's
software stack and Chuck Rozwat and company's professional services?
And what company doesn't want the best UNIX on the planet?

I'm optimistic that something has to give and in the end it will
be Larry Ellison's hot-tub time machine mainframe wet dream.

John
***@acm.org


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[Ian Collins]

On 02/ 5/11 11:19 AM, John D Groenveld wrote:
> In the 21st century, what company, big or small, wants to be stuck in
> Ed Zander's niche with no ecosystem beyond Thomas Kurian and company's
> software stack and Chuck Rozwat and company's professional services?
> And what company doesn't want the best UNIX on the planet?
>
You've lost me there, who? Maybe you should add a key to your signature!

Unfortunately those who see selling one big system to one big customer
as easier than selling ten to small customers don't appear to realise
big customers start small.

--
Ian.



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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@ianshome.com>, Ian Collins writes:
>> In the 21st century, what company, big or small, wants to be stuck in
>> Ed Zander's niche with no ecosystem beyond Thomas Kurian and company's
>> software stack and Chuck Rozwat and company's professional services?
>> And what company doesn't want the best UNIX on the planet?
>>
>You've lost me there, who? Maybe you should add a key to your signature!

It is the customers of Thomas Kurian's software stack that Judith Sim
tells us is the low-volume, high-margin market for Exadata systems.
<URL:http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/Executives/016380.htm>

It is the customers of Chuck Rozwat's support services who keep
hearing that Unbreakable is the preferred platform for customers who
want want to migrate away from low-volume, high-margin solutions.
<URL:http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/Executives/016394.htm>

>Unfortunately those who see selling one big system to one big customer
>as easier than selling ten to small customers don't appear to realise
>big customers start small.

Yes, I believe that's one reason why Ed Zander's plan failed at Sun
and will fail at Oracle.

And no-one wants to think that they're in Ed Zander's rolodex or
Larry Ellison's CRM system as a Top 50 Sucker.

John
***@acm.org


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
>
> How many people in this list have had problems getting answers to simple
> questions like, "How do I renew my support contract?"

This little question has surely been the most annoying issue for the
past three years. Several times I have had to investigate since my
contracts were fat-fingered out of existence so that support did not
know about them any more. Most recently, it took over a week to get
my systems re-enabled for patches, and it took three weeks to get a
response from my contracts person that she had indeed received my
renewal so that I would be able to legally continue to use my computer
and attach it to the Internet for another year.

I have spent more time on dealing with Sun/Oracle support contracts
than I have spent on administering all my non-Solaris systems. That
is pretty pitiful.

>From a software standpoint, Solaris has been wonderful for the past 19
years except as relates to upgrades and patching. Other than these
issues, Solaris is still a wonderful OS with a kernel and runtime
which is far more mature than Linux.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, Bob Friesenhahn <***@...> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
> >
> > How many people in this list have had problems getting answers to simple
> > questions like, "How do I renew my support contract?"
>
> This little question has surely been the most annoying issue for the
> past three years. Several times I have had to investigate since my
> contracts were fat-fingered out of existence so that support did not
> know about them any more. Most recently, it took over a week to get
> my systems re-enabled for patches, and it took three weeks to get a
> response from my contracts person that she had indeed received my
> renewal so that I would be able to legally continue to use my computer
> and attach it to the Internet for another year.
>

You have to remember the rule of thumb with big corporations. The bigger they get the more punch cards they drop on the floor.

The real problem maybe that management had too many hip replacements and cannot bend down to pick them up so they use one of those three foot long picker-uppers and can only pick up so many cards a day. On the brighter side old fart managers can read punch cards from a mile away.

---Bob


---Bob




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[Gerard Henry]

On 02/03/11 06:17 AM, Bob Hodges wrote:
> Please forgive my "newbness" in advance, I am not any kind of expert in Linux or Solaris. I just know may way around both enough to adequately administer them for the needs of my company. However, I want to centralize to one OS - Solaris or Linux (SUSE - sorry, I just don't like Ubuntu).
>
> My Dumb Question: With two decades of Linux hype, what is my incentive for continuing with Solaris when Linux seems to work so smoothly for pretty much the same purposes I'd use Solaris for on the x86 platform? I'm sure there is a good answer, or Linux would have killed Solaris long ago.
>
> So to be fair before making a decision about ditching Solaris in favor of Linux, I'd like to ask:
>
> What's the "Solaris Advantage" over Linux at this point?
>
> And please: I am NOT trying to start any kind of flame war. Just trying to make an educated decision and thought I'd take it straight to the gurus.
>
> Again, thanks for suffering somewhat of a noob.
>
>

it depends on where you want to waste your time. From a technical point
of view, solaris gives you more satisfaction than linux. If you're just
an non-it person as in many small companies, windows is a better choice
than linux :) Re-read your question and it applies also for windows,
unfortunately...


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[Paul Floyd]

Hi

Quoting Bob Hodges <***@rrhodges.com>:

> Please forgive my "newbness" in advance, I am not any kind of expert in Linux
> or Solaris. I just know may way around both enough to adequately administer
> them for the needs of my company. However, I want to centralize to one OS -
> Solaris or Linux (SUSE - sorry, I just don't like Ubuntu).

I tend to go with that as well - SUSE seems to me to be the least bad of the
major distros (SUSE, RedHat and Ubuntu) that I've tried.

> My Dumb Question: With two decades of Linux hype, what is my incentive for
> continuing with Solaris when Linux seems to work so smoothly for pretty much
> the same purposes I'd use Solaris for on the x86 platform? I'm sure there is
> a good answer, or Linux would have killed Solaris long ago.
>
> So to be fair before making a decision about ditching Solaris in favor of
> Linux, I'd like to ask:
>
> What's the "Solaris Advantage" over Linux at this point?

Personally the reason that I like Solaris is that it sticks to the standards
(like POSIX/Single Unix Standard). Linux (and I'd extend that to GCC and glibc)
as a rule is POSIX/SUS compliant. But whenever the Linux developer sees the
chance to gain a bit of performance or add some cool feature, and there is the
choice between say speed and conformance, speed almost invariable wins.

Due to the overwhelming difference in popularity between Linux and all the other
UNIX and clones (Mac OS X excepted), then the Linux way is becoming the de facto
standard. Not quite as de facto as Windows, if I may make an unfavourable
comparison.

Where is Solaris headed under Oracle? On x86/x64, it hasn't picked up any
significant market share, and is probably declining. Solaris on non-Oracle
x86/x64 hardware costs $US1000 per year per socket list. On SPARC where it's
almost a monopoly then Oracle seems to be retrenching to large database machines
only. None of which seems very encouraging to me as a non-database user.

Outside of Oracle, there are some OpenSolaris based distros that might be worth
keeping an eye on, like Illumos/OpenIndiana and Nexenta. Time will tell if they
can pick up traction or not.

A+
Paul
--
Paul Floyd http://paulf.free.fr


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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, Paul Floyd <***@...> wrote:
>

> Outside of Oracle, there are some OpenSolaris based distros that might be worth
> keeping an eye on, like Illumos/OpenIndiana and Nexenta. Time will tell if they
> can pick up traction or not.
>

I tend to agree. Oracle is spending a lot of the stock holders pennies on getting Andriod in line which is a good indication Oracle wants to be recognized in the mobile marketplace. At least that is what the current trend is.

---Bob




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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, "Bob Hodges" <***@...> wrote:

>
> My Dumb Question: With two decades of Linux hype, what is my incentive for continuing with Solaris when Linux seems to work so smoothly for pretty much the same purposes I'd use Solaris for on the x86 platform?

Only two decades? Awe come on, tell us your real age. :-)

---Bob




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[Al Hopper]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Bob Hodges <***@rrhodges.com> wrote:

> .... snip ....
> What's the "Solaris Advantage" over Linux at this point?
> .... snip .....


Where'as a couple of years ago I spent almost 100% of my time interacting
with, developing on, administrating etc on Solaris boxes (mainly x86) - in
the past 18 months + I've probably typed a couple of dozen commands into a
Sol x86 box.

Do I miss zones, ZFS, DTrace and the OpenSolaris project and community -
you bet. But it was time to move on.

A couple of reasons why:

- Oracle does not give a snit about any company under a billion dollars (you
pick the number) in annual revenue.

- there is no-one to talk to at Oracle - no concept of a
conversation/discussion. No possibility of expressing an opinion; no
concept of opensource; no respect for technical excellence or ability.
Oracle has brought a large percentage of cash rich, name brand companies
back into the dark days of corporate computing and moved the industry 10
years backwards in time.

- I can't recommend Solaris to anyone I care about because its a dying
ecosystem:
+ the brain drain of technical talent that was once Sun is well under way
+ multi-core SPARC based systems are frighteningly expensive and becoming
more so
+ it's becoming very, very difficult to find Solaris expertise
+ almost all software innovation is happening elsewhere (mainly Linux)
+ opensource support for Solaris is scarce and dwindling by the hour
+ Solaris based systems are more expensive than the alternatives
+ there are just too many viable alternatives to justify running Solaris -
except in very specialized niches

So, what am I using for personal and professional computing today, and, am I
eating my own dog food?

a) I sit in front of a workstation (Intel i920) with a 30" Dell LCD panel
and it runs Ubuntu 10.10. Yep there are bugs that drive me crazy; yes I
have to apply patches at an annoying frequency and I find it disruptive.
But it works and allows me install almost any opensource tool or technology
in minutes. I run VMware workstation for windows instances which are fired
up only when needed. I try out other technology on VMware VMs.

b) I just put together a NAS system thats based on a mini ATX motherboard
with a single core AMD CPU. $60 for the motherboard/CPU combo[1]. FreeNAS
works really well - I'm using it to provide iSCSI targets, Samba shares and
an AFS (Apple) share. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD.

c) On my left is a "resurrected" Intel based iMac - plastic case, 20"
screen, Core Duo - one of the first Intel based iMacs. Runs surprisingly
well under Mac OS X 10.6.6 with only 2Gb of RAM. Everything just bloody
works!! And the upgrade to 10.6 cost me $29 for the DVD. While I was busy
with Solaris - guess what - MacOS grew up and is now part of an entire, user
friendly eco-system.

d) as a single-point-of-entry (gateway) + file xfer machine, I run netBSD on
an Intel SBC - dual core Atom 330 with a compact flash card for the boot
filesystem and a single hard disk. Its been very, very reliable.
Performance sucks[4] - but is adaquate for the intended use.

At work:

1) I built a kick ascii dev/production box based on a bare bones server from
a company in California (you may have heard of it) called Intel. It's
the Intel Modular Server Chassis (MFSYS25) with 14 2.5" slots (yes you get
the drive sleds and yes you can push in SAS or SATA drives[2). Everything
is front/back accessible, hot swap and "mostly" redundant. And it cost me a
little more than $500 over an equivalent Dell 2U server with the same
CPU/memory and I didn't have to use "only Dell drives" and buy Dell drives
to get the disk carriers. The original blade holds a 6-core 5660 (2.8GHz)
CPU and has 24Gb of Kingston memory installed and runs CentOS 5.5. And the
2nd CPU/memory slots are un-populated (Intel includes two CPU heatsinks - so
it'll take all of 10 minutes to remove that blade, install a 2nd CPU and
fill the remaining memory slots.)

1a The CentOS blade runs VMware workstation and runs a shitload of legacy
windows instances (various flavors) which allowed us to unplug the
corresponding legacy hardware platforms. We also encapsulate several
CentOS, Ubuntu and even a Fedora development "machines" as VMs. Performance
is awesome - who cares if Xen is faster or zones are so much nicer. VMware
is very, very good. [3]

2a Later we needed to run some more VMs - but were not concerned about
performance. So, pushed in a 2nd blade into the modular server, populated
with a (cheap) $200 4-core Xeon and 8Gb of RAM. Thats running (the now
free) VMware ESXi bare metal hypervisor and performance is good (not
awesome), but perfectly meets our needs.

2) The front-end ecommerce system now runs under ubuntu 10.04 on a Amazon
Web Services (AWS) EC2 large (reserved) instance. It's associated mySQL DB
is an AWS RDS instance. If/when our EC2 instance dies, we spin up a another
EC2 instance, run a script to install Ubuntu and all required tools, mount
the EBS volume that encapsulates the apps/data/config etc and our downtime
will be < 30 minutes (already tested). S3 for backups, Amazons Cloudfront
for our CDN, and route53 for our enterprise level DNS.

3) we use other "rented" machines - one from linode.com (awesome/fast
modern hardware - very cost effective).

4) we run a huge variety of mainly opensource tools and technologies and are
migrating the codebase from some really sucky stuff like Visual Basic and
stuff I'll bet money on that almost no-one on this list has ever heard of,
while replacing it with some state-of-the-art technology like Redis and
Qbit.

OK - so bottom line if you please:

- Oracle sucks, Solaris is dying, SPARC is too expensive
- loosing ZFS and zones sucks
- Innovation is all Linux based (today)
- choose your unix flavors best suited to solve your problems. My picks:
+ Amazons AMI (CentOS based) and Ubuntu in the cloud
+ Ubuntu and/or Mac OS on the desktop (Windows as a VM)
+ Ubuntu, CentOS for server type workloads
+ FreeBSD for niche applications (firewalling, NAS)
+ netBSD for high security, high reliability and (almost) zero maintenance
where security is paramount
- providing good performing and cost effective computer services requires
the modern practitioner to become something of a systems integrator.

[1] recent special from newegg.com
[2] with a $30 SAS->SATA converter thingy
[3] also has a free tool to create a VMware image of a running legacy box
[4] 5.5Mb/sec for SCP.

Regards,

--
Al Hopper


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Brian Richman]

Al said:

= = = = = = = =

- Oracle does not give a snit about any company under a billion dollars (you
pick the number) in annual revenue.

- there is no-one to talk to at Oracle - no concept of a
conversation/discussion. No possibility of expressing an opinion; no
concept of opensource; no respect for technical excellence or ability.
Oracle has brought a large percentage of cash rich, name brand companies
back into the dark days of corporate computing and moved the industry 10
years backwards in time.

- I can't recommend Solaris to anyone I care about because its a dying
ecosystem:
+ the brain drain of technical talent that was once Sun is well under way
+ multi-core SPARC based systems are frighteningly expensive and becoming
more so
+ it's becoming very, very difficult to find Solaris expertise
+ almost all software innovation is happening elsewhere (mainly Linux)
+ opensource support for Solaris is scarce and dwindling by the hour
+ Solaris based systems are more expensive than the alternatives
+ there are just too many viable alternatives to justify running Solaris -
except in very specialized niches

So, what am I using for personal and professional computing today, and, am I
eating my own dog food?

= = = = = = = =

I agree with nearly all of what you say, others will argue (I am sure), that
things like support for Open source code on Solaris doesn't matter, but if you
use that stuff (we certainly do), then it does. The 'communities' are going away
and as you also say, support from Oracle is a nightmare, as I and others have
said several times here. Apart from hardware support, which seems to be
responsive to Sun needs, I dread trying to place a software call (sorry "support
case") with them now. Once it's in the system, you'd have thought its not all
that bad, but once again, as I and others have said, getting to that point can
be a nightmare and even then, until it gets to someone in the back-line, who
isn't following a help-desk script it is still a nightmare. A good example is
several months ago, we went though a period that they seemed to be training new
people in those jobs or were insisting they all read "Help desk responses for
dummies", and use it exclusively. I gave up on the call. Our dev people worked
round it and we have moved our focus on, leaving the bug in place. It's too hard
to try and get it fixed now.

I have to hang around the Oracle/Solaris world for a couple of years yet, as we
won't be dumping our last Solaris installs until the existing contracts for
maintenance etc are out, but our DBA's (last hold outs for Oracle as they are
mostly responsible for the Oracle DBMS in our set up) get the idea now that the
world around them has changed - hell - if even our PeopleSoft admins prefer
their favorite app system on RHEL/x64 to Solaris, there is something SERIOUSLY
wrong in the state of Oracle.

It's such a shame, as Sun and Solaris have given me well over a decade of
motivation, interest and even fun to my career, as well as employment (as a
sysadmin for clients, I should add) so I can't grumble about the past too much,
only shed a tear for what might have been and move on.




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Bob Friesenhahn]

If I was not clear, if a system does not show any patches, then you
must re-register it. If it still does not show any patches, then you
must seek help. Several rinse and repeat cycles may be requried.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, Tim Evans wrote:
>
> Since the new My Oracle thing went alive, I've been unable to update
> via smpatch or the update manager--voluminous Java error messages in /
> var/adm/messages include:
>
> Jan 23 16:33:41 osprey root: [ID 702911 user.error] =>
> ***@16c79d7
> <=Downloader.getResponseCode() : IOExceptionNo route to host

On my SPARC system I see this from last night:

[ID 702911 user.error] =>
***@11bed71
<=Downloader.getResponseCode() : IOExceptionConnection timed out

On my AMD_64 sytem I see this from the 24th:

root: [ID 702911 user.crit] =>
***@16dfa45 <=One or more of the
updates specified do not have entitlement permissions.

and that message was all she wrote for seeing/obtaining patches on
that system.

> Since posting, I've verified my CSI exists in My Oracle; it's
> purportedly provisioned to allow me patch and create-service-record
> access. I can, however, do neither. So, I couldn't create an SR to
> report the problem.

I learned the hard way that on the system on which I have "system"
support (which supposely means hardware & software), if one selects
the system in order to obtain support, it is only possible to open a
SR against the hardware. It is not clear how to open a SR against the
software.

The form requires that all fields be filled (to its satisfaction)
before one can submit the SR. It is not possible to submit the SR
without also submitting to its will.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[Chris]

This message has just been posted on the Oracle OS Community Forum

http://is.gd/egVPam which will take you to:

<https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=224&mode=2&threadid=169224&aggregatorResults=T168708T169366T169176T163184T166543T161085T169224T165270D77119T169059&sourceCommunityId=388&sourcePortletId=366&doPagination=true&pagedAggregatorPageNo=1&returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fcommunities.oracle.com%2Fportal%2Fserver.pt%3Fopen%3Dspace%26name%3DCommunityPage%26id%3D1%26psname%3DOpener%26psid%3D0%26cached%3Dtrue%26in_hi_userid%3D129814%26control%3DSetCommunity%26PageID%3D0%26CommunityID%3D388%26&Portlet=Category%20Content&PrevPage=Communities-CategoryHome#169224>

It suggests reviewing document 1288579.1: Unable to register & download patches via MOS using smpatch/updatemanager .

Chris Gerhard



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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, "Chris" <***@...> wrote:
>
>
> This message has just been posted on the Oracle OS Community Forum
>
> http://is.gd/egVPam which will take you to:
>
> <https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=224&mode=2&threadid=169224&aggregatorResults=T168708T169366T169176T163184T166543T161085T169224T165270D77119T169059&sourceCommunityId=388&sourcePortletId=366&doPagination=true&pagedAggregatorPageNo=1&returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fcommunities.oracle.com%2Fportal%2Fserver.pt%3Fopen%3Dspace%26name%3DCommunityPage%26id%3D1%26psname%3DOpener%26psid%3D0%26cached%3Dtrue%26in_hi_userid%3D129814%26control%3DSetCommunity%26PageID%3D0%26CommunityID%3D388%26&Portlet=Category%20Content&PrevPage=Communities-CategoryHome#169224>
>
> It suggests reviewing document 1288579.1: Unable to register & download patches via MOS using smpatch/updatemanager .
>

Are you sure the document says something important?

---Bob




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[Chris]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, "palowoda" <***@...> wrote:

> > It suggests reviewing document 1288579.1: Unable to register & download patches via MOS using smpatch/updatemanager .
> >
>
> Are you sure the document says something important?

I'm sure it says that Oracle are aware of the issues and offers help to resolve them that people may find useful.

--chris



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[palowoda]

--- In ***@yahoogroups.com, "Chris" <***@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- In ***@yahoogroups.com, "palowoda" <palowoda@> wrote:
>
> > > It suggests reviewing document 1288579.1: Unable to register & download patches via MOS using smpatch/updatemanager .
> > >
> >
> > Are you sure the document says something important?
>
> I'm sure it says that Oracle are aware of the issues and offers help to resolve them that people may find useful.
>

I'm glad that Oracle is aware of issues and now documents them. Things are looking up.

---Bob




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[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2011, Chris wrote:
>>
>> Are you sure the document says something important?
>
> I'm sure it says that Oracle are aware of the issues and offers help to resolve them that people may find useful.

Ultimately it says:

"Then please open a non-technical Service Request in My Oracle Support
(https://support.oracle.com), to get your MOS account, CSI and machine
setup correctly."

However, it does some to provide some clues to at least get useful
error info to report in the service request.

There is still no improvement to my patching situation here.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@freddy.simplesystems.org>, Bob
Friesenhahn writes:
>"Then please open a non-technical Service Request in My Oracle Support
>(https://support.oracle.com), to get your MOS account, CSI and machine
>setup correctly."
>
>However, it does some to provide some clues to at least get useful
>error info to report in the service request.
>
>There is still no improvement to my patching situation here.

What did Martin Paul's PCA report about what Chuck Rozwat and
company says are your entitlements?

In my case, MOS patch and SR access working correctly, I see:
./pca --supplevel
Determining MOS Support Levels

SW: Existing Oracle software and Sun middleware
OS: Solaris patches and updates
PUB: Oracle Open Office/StarOffice and patch utilities
FMW: Firmware, drivers, bios, system controller software, ALOM/ILOM, diagnostics

John
***@acm.org


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[Apostolos Syropoulos]

> What's the "Solaris Advantage" over Linux at this point?

If you really want to use Solaris do not use the closed source
version, that is, Solaris 11. Instead, try the OpenSource version,
that is, Illumos/OpenIndiana.

A.S.

----------------------
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Bob Friesenhahn]

Today I see AMD_64 patch 123631-04 (SPARC 123630) show up in Update
Manager.

Title:
SunOS 5.10_x86: HTTP proxy settings patch

Problem Description:
7010205 cannot register with sconadm using valid MOS credentials

Perhaps this patch will fix patch access for many systems (or not). I
can't tell what effect it has for me since downloads are currently not
working (again):

# smpatch download -i 123631-04
The following patches were not downloaded:
123631-04: Request to download update failed. Status code 500
returned. An unexpected error occurred inside the server that
prevented it from fulfilling the request.

Feb 5 09:55:29 freddy root: [ID 702911 user.crit] =>
***@1712651
<=null at com.sun.patchpro.util.State.run(State.java:266)
Feb 5 09:55:29 freddy at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)
Feb 5 09:55:29 freddy root: [ID 702911 user.error] =>
***@10efd7c
<=Downloader.getResponseCode() : IOExceptionRead timed out

At least I can see that the patches exist now.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
***@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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[John D Groenveld]

In message <***@freddy.simplesystems.org>, Bob F
riesenhahn writes:
>Today I see AMD_64 patch 123631-04 (SPARC 123630) show up in Update
>Manager.
>
>Title:
> SunOS 5.10_x86: HTTP proxy settings patch
>
>Problem Description:
> 7010205 cannot register with sconadm using valid MOS credentials
>
>Perhaps this patch will fix patch access for many systems (or not). I
>can't tell what effect it has for me since downloads are currently not
>working (again):

Martin Paul's PCA reports these:
121119 17 < 18 RS- 3 SunOS 5.10_x86: Update Connection System Client 1.0.18
123006 08 < 09 RS- 3 SunOS 5.10_x86: Basic Registration Update
124187 07 < 08 R-- 3 SunOS 5.10_x86: SCN Base cacao module patch

I don't use smpatch(1M) so won't test.
John
***@acm.org


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