OpenSolaris: If I wanted to upgrade everything by hand, I'd stick with Slackware.
Just got off the phone w/a Sun rep who called up to see how I was doing, did I need any coasters, etc. I took the opportunity to put a bug in his ear about Solaris.
If Oracle removes the entitlement to run Solaris on non-Sun hardware, then what the hell do I have to play with? I've got a bunch of Sun hardware, but only one machine running Solaris -- and that's in production, holding home directories on ZFS; I'm not playing with that.
OpenSolaris folks are asking for answers and not getting any. And saying "Go run OpenSolaris" ignores the problem of figuring out what's in Solaris proper, what's going to be there RSN, and what's two or more releases out.
If Solaris disappears, then I'm not going to figure out how it's better; that's just how:
all work.
I like Solaris for precisely two things: ZFS and DTrace. Solaris has more, I know, but those are the things that matter to me. In all other respects, for me and my situation, Linux or the BSDs are good enough or better. And oh: FreeBSD has DTrace; DragonFly BSD has HAMMER; Linux has *@#%$)%! packaging.
No good ending for this, so we'll just call it quits.
Reminder to myself: Got a file called .nfs.*? Here's what's going
on:
# These files are created by NFS clients when an open file is
# removed. To preserve some semblance of Unix semantics the client
# renames the file to a unique name so that the file appears to have
# been removed from the directory, but is still usable by the process
# that has the file open.
That quote is from /usr/lib/fs/nfs/nfsfind, a shell script on
Solaris 10 that's run once a week from root's crontab. Some
references:
I've finally got pkg-src working on the Solaris 9 machine at work. I've been banging my head against this stupid thing for two weeks, only to find that a) you really do need /usr/ccs/lib in your path, and b) you should check everywhere to make sure GNU's ld isn't in your path (if you're on Solaris). Now everything is compiling happily.
And in other news, I've been working on Nexenta for the last couple of weeks, trying to help knock down the bugs preventing a beta release. My development skills are limited but at least some of the problems are within my reach. There's not a lot of traffic on the mailing list, or on IRC, which worries me a little…but the commit log is nice and busy, so that's good. And I got that package of IceWM I was looking for. :-)
Brian Cain told me to get my ass in gear and try out a Nexenta (I'm elaborating on his words a little) and I'm glad he did. I've installed it on my desktop machine on a second hard drive, and I have to say I'm impressed so far. Debian plus Solaris…damn, girl. Damn.
Everything is a .deb package, including all the SUNW stuff, and there appear to be a ton more packages available. Mutt and Emacs are there, as is procmail and fetchmail; I may see if I can get a package going for icewm, which'd be just about all I need. (Of course, ratpoison's already available…) (Update: someone's already working on it; haven't made it to the end of the thread yet, but it may already be done.) There was a lot of Gnome stuff installed that I don't want, but that's okay; Nexenta's deliberately emulating/duplicating Ubuntu, and anyway the install disk (which comes with Tetris, btw) has a minimal option which I suspect'd be right up my alley (for server or desktop).
I'm in the process of creating a zone right now, into which'll go
Apache2 and MySQL. I did trip over these bugs in the
process, but apt-get dist-upgrade fixed the first and some judicious
editing of /usr/lib/nexenta-zones/elatte-unstable.bootstrap fixed
the second (I'm guessing they haven't made a new package since the
fix). (Update: My own damn fault for not noticing that the new
version was in unstable, not testing. I'm upgrading now.)
/export/home was set up with ZFS, and I've made a snapshot
already. The GRUB menu entry was not correct — it pointed at the
primary IDE drive (hd0) instead of the second (hd1) — but again, that
was easily fixed. I should file a bug on that.
I still have some questions. I'd like to know (and will try to watch to find out) how often they update their packages, especially security fixes. I'm curious to see how closely they follow OpenSolaris.org development…though since I only have a hazy idea how OS.org do it, I'm not really sure what to look for. And of course, this is an unstable distro; I might want to hold off on replacing the server with it.
But for desktop use and/or experimentation, this is neat stuff. I can always get my mail on my firewall if need be. :-)
People have been calling me out on my last post, and that's good; I love a good argument^Wdebate, and doubly so when it comes from people w/more experience than me. So I'm going to start responding to the comments, laying out where I'm wrong and where I still think I'm right.
I said:
OpenSolaris: If I wanted to upgrade everything by hand, I'd stick with Slackware.
Bzzt! As I found on on a recent episode of BSDTalk, NetBSD's pkgsrc is available for over nine hundred thousand operating systems, including Solaris and Slackware Linux. Tha's right, both premises in that statement were wrong.
Not only that, pkgsrc can be tucked out of the way so that it doesn't interfere with the rest of the system…so I could even throw it on Thornhill right now, Slackware and all, and start using it instead of my own half-assed build script for Apache/SSH/PHP/OpenSSL/mod_ssl (which, in my own defence, works pretty darned well).
In fact, tomorrow I'm heading out to The Other University to set up two new X4200 servers, and I'm seriously considering adding pkgsrc to them — if only to avoid having to compile (and botch) Lapack and Blas. If that goes well, I may start adding it to the main server here so that we can easily get more up-to-date versions of Firefox et al. (Though I could probably get them from Blastwave…this has been a low enough priority for me so far that I haven't really looked into all my options.)
That is not to say it's perfect:
It is possible, and in the case of updating a package with
hundreds of dependencies, arguably even likely that the process will
fail at some point. One can fix problems and resume the update by
typing make update in the original directory, but the system can have
unusuable packages for a prolonged period of time. Thus, many people
find 'make update' too dangerous, particularly for something like glib
on a system using gnome.
To use binary packages if available with "make update", use
"UPDATE_TARGET=bin-install". If package tarball is not available in
${PACKAGES} locally or at URLs (defined with BINPKG_SITES), it will
build a package from source.
To enable manual rollback one can keep binary packages. One method is
to always use 'make package', and to have "DEPENDS_TARGET=package" in
/etc/mk.conf. Another is to use pkg_tarup to save packages before
starting.From the Swedish NetBSD wiki.
It's nice that manual rollback is doable; that's always my big paranoia when it comes to source-based upgrades.
That last complaint is not as fair as it could be. I mean, I'm not going to be upgrading Gnome on either Thornhill or the two new Sun machines. And at around 80 packages, it would be damned difficult to try and recompile it all without starting with a clean slate. But this sort of nonsense with Gnome is what put me off the ports tree in FreeBSD.
(I was going to put in something about how Debian doesn't need that sort of thing, but I should research that first.)
libpst is a command-line tool that converts Outlook .pst files into standard mbox files, the way T&R intended. Wish I'd known about this before…
One of the outstanding feature requests is listing and extracting individual messages. Maybe I'll take a look at this.
In other news, I borked my home machine (Debian testing) by trying to extend a partition w/ReiserFS. That gave me a perfect excuse to upgrade to a bigger disk and reinstall Debian.
Next up is maybe looking at replacing my venerable copy of Slackware 9 with a Debian install, too; the ease of installing and upgrading Debian packages is just too good to pass up.
I did consider other OSs:
And yes, I realize I'm damned ignorant, and that a server should not be exciting. But I'm convinced that a big part of running a server successfully is ease of upgrading, whether security fixes or new app versions, and Debian is just wonderful.