OpenSolaris fork imminent?
opensolaris.org
opensolaris.org
I know some of its features (DTrace and ZFS) are quite impressive but they are not really deal breakers. A kernel is great but it doesn't do much on its own. You still need applications and drivers to have a complete system.
For one, you can find the libraries you want and they actually work.
Postgres 8.4 on FreeBSD? No problem. With plperl? No problem. OpenSolaris? Well, if you want to run 32bit Postgres on a system with 48GB of RAM sure. No 64bit for you though. And Oracle shutdown the Postgres build farm servers they were hosting.
Just because FreeBSD stores it's package information in makefiles and pkg stores it in a catalog doesn't change the end result. Ports are as easy to use (if you bother to read the very simple README), and offer far more robust support and packages than any flavor of Solaris I'm familiar with.
There was a time I'd have agreed about Ports, but 30 minutes later I had read the README and realized I was just being lazy. ;-)
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 (or scroll down)
I hadn't heard of a FreeBSD kernel issue, but if that's true, it might just be for the best for the next 6 months at least. de-dupe is kinda a useless feature if you're not a hosting company anyway. A hosting company could take advantage of storing tons of mostly-the-same VMs. It's not the few hundred GB in our dozens of base VM images that concerns me though. It's the terra-bytes of multimedia and databases.
Plus de-dupe takes a lot of RAM. A lot. There was a time where it would've been very nice, but as it stands, it's really a niche product to come up with a situation where it's RAM requirements, and it's rather small storage savings might make sense.
It's the only OS that can boot from a ZFS volume and that also has a sane package management system.
In Red Hat-ish distros, I can do "yum update". In Debian-ish distros, I can run "aptitude safe-upgrade". On Debian, I can even do a dist-upgrade and update the box to a new release without having to reinstall it (or boot into the installer). Everything is downloaded, installed and, if needed, restarted. Very close to zero downtime.
In plain english, OpenSolaris (the right version at least, avoid de-duplication) is the only free platform I'm aware of that will give you a fast, stable, iSCSI server with a file system that's basically impervious to corruption.
The only one. Seriously. COMSTAR and ZFS are that big of a deal. They aren't "nice to have"s. They're solutions that allow you to spend a couple grand on a box, put a lot of RAM in it, attach a JBOD, shove in a few SSDs for read-cache and write-logs and you can duplicate the performance million dollar storage systems on the cheap.
You can do this with very little effort on commodity hardware. You can start as small as you want and scale as large as you want. You get snapshots, clones and replication with barely any effort.
Sun's whole storage strategy (Sun Unified Storage) was built on nothing more than exactly this with a pretty Web interface sitting on top.
OpenSolaris is a real pain for a lot of things, but when it comes to storage nothing else comes close (that I'm aware of).
Don't be scared that you'll lose an alternative to Linux. OpenSolaris isn't any good as an application host if you're expecting anything close to modern GNU tools. Be scared that you'll lose an alternative to NetApp.
Sun looked like the ultimate geek-cool environment to work. Oracle is pretty much the ultimate uncool company to work for as a developer.
This is the model that made Red Hat possible. It would not happen on top of BSD.
I looked it up and it looks like they have gnome 2.30 since their 2009.06 release[1] which is actually the latest version.
[1] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=opensolaris
And it seems that Nexenta developers would like to make Debian/Solaris a reality:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2010/06/msg00022....
Very promising!
Have you ever accidentally deleted your MP3 collection? ;-)
The few times I have deleted things accidentally - perhaps 3 times in the past 5 years - I've recovered in a few moments from backups. I've lost more data to hard drive failures with somewhat stale backups than accidental deletion. The redundancy of ZFS raidz / raidz2 / mirroring etc. is useful to reduce the risk disk failure, but of course offsite backup is the gold standard.
http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs
It they aren't done already, I suppose integrating these parts to newer versions of Gnome is, at least, in the pipeline for *BSD folks (and, once ported to current Gnome, they would be rather easy to adapt it to BtrFS, which is to be fully supported by canned linux distros by the end of the year).
Just now, OpenSolaris is a very cool server OS with a slightly old Gnome desktop on top of it.
btw, who will write and debug all the new device drivers?
It is dead. As dead as Irix or Tru64 or even OpenVMS.
Looks a lot like apt
I'm not that savvy, but I know of nothing for Linux or FreeBSD that starts everything up, makes sure it gets restarted if it crashes, notifies you, has maintenance states, supports simple, robust dependencies (process or file-based). The SMF covers these bases very well.
Runit seems to come closest on the service side, but it's not nearly as well documented. Monit is almost a suitable substitute (even though that's not really it's goal), but robust dependency support is lacking last I checked.
XML config files? Java when a regular Unix system language like C or Python (or Perl for older folks) would suffice?
And who cares what it's implemented in as long as it doesn't fall over? I mean, ideally sure. C FTW on resource utilization, but honestly, if the choice is between something that's a bit of a pig, eating up 100MB of RAM vs what...? Really simply put: There is no competition that checks the same boxes that I'm aware of.
I'd be genuinely grateful if you can show me an alternative, especially for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, but most of the alternatives are new early-phase projects with grand goals that may never materialize, or unmaintained.
So sure, SMF isn't perfect. What's better?
Try to recognize the differences between text file and XML file.
Try to understand the difference between 'file /bin/sh' , 'ldd /bin/sh' and /usr/bin/java.
Here's the output of one of our services:
fmri svc:/application/harbor/unicorn:default name Unicorn Rack Server enabled true state online next_state none state_time Sat Aug 07 12:52:45 2010 logfile /var/svc/log/application-harbor-unicorn:default.log restarter svc:/system/svc/restarter:default contract_id 18664 dependency require_all/none svc:/milestone/network:default (online) dependency require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local:default (online) dependency require_all/refresh file://localhost/var/harbor/unicorn.conf (online) dependency require_all/refresh file://localhost/var/harbor/config.ru (online) dependency require_all/refresh file://localhost/var/harbor/log (online)
See the dependencies? It took one of my guys all of a couple hours to grasp the documentation and set this up. Without ever having seen it before.
If you want the plain XML, just 'svccfg export unicorn'
You're a fool if you think a maintained, documented simple service like this has no value just because angle-brackets scare and confuse you.
If you had a more open mind, you might even ask yourself why it was done this way? Perhaps it's because with XML you can spend all of a few minutes in practically any programming language and have something that can manage the services?
And perhaps that might come in handy if you were managing a lot of servers, or building a cluster that you wanted to manage, install, and update services on?
Sure you could go the usual route of inventing your own syntax. tcl, lisp, or python compatible if you're lucky. Or you might just consider that maybe interoperability isn't the fall of Rome while you dismiss one of the most robust service management tools around just because you might have to write a bit of XML.
Unfortunately I didn't goto school. I did it the old fashioned way. I read people smarter than me. I'm glad I could do the same for you. :-)