after level 50 there are black & white tiles that increase/decrese the value when you step on them.
Not so easy anymore
337 karma · joined August 2, 2012
Not so easy anymore
Using pkgsrc at our company since a bit over a year has been excellent thanks to the great work from jperkin and many others. It is one of the tools i wish i had known earlier about since it makes life sooo much easier.
- Quartly stable releases mean that you have recent software most of the time.
- It is available on many platforms (OS X, Linux, SmartOS/Illumos, the BSDs, ...) so you can use the same packages on all your systems.
- Very easy to build binary packages of custom software / custom options / different versions / add your own patches. This is critical for most sysadmins/ops people - and if you ever tried to setup koji for CentOS you will love the simplicity of pkgsrc...
In my opinion pkgsrc is the most underappreciated "devops"-tool out there. It gave us much more control over our software stack and reduced the amount of work we had to put in to archive our goals.
I also expect the effort to reduce bulk-build times to further improve the software quality of all things in pkgsrc. Instead of weekly/daily bulk-builds (depending on the platform) it will be possible to have 4 or more reports a day. This quick feedback will make determining if/which commit broke/fixed something more immediate. Great stuff!
Give it a try, you might like it (because it rocks!)
On the other hand they have been - and still are - very good at building a community around it. There are multiple people and organisations building their own SmartOS images/derivates ([1], [2]). Pull-requests on github come in from a diverse enough group that I think it would survive even without joyent.
For OmniOS I don't have enough insight to make that judgement. They have a very clear and detailed release plan and recently hired some good people just to work on OmniOS. These things definitly add some confidence but of course is not a guarantee forever. But if that would be needed one can always buy support from them.
OmniOS on the other hand is pretty solid and with pkgsrc (default package system on SmartOS and NetBSD) you get nearly 13k packages of open-source software.
My List is also missing a few other commercial players that use and contribute to Illumos:
- Delphix, uses ZFS snapshots to do fancy things with big databases
- Pluribus has "Netvisor OS" that is some SDN Router/Networking appliance [3]
And then there is the long tail of small hobby distributions:
- Tribblix, "Retro with modern features" [4]
- DilOS, which has a focus on Xen and Sparc [5]
and probably more that I forgot and don't know.
It is a very nice community and lots of interesting technology gets developed. Our company migrated nearly all servers from Linux to SmartOS in the last 2 years and we could not be happier.
[1] http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Hipster
[2] http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/installing.html#installing-on-illum...
Illumos is the de-facto upstream of open-zfs and has many features not found in oracle solaris. [1]
So it is well worth checking out at least one of those:
- SmartOS, which is a fantastic Cloud-Hypervisor [2]
- OmniOS, a classic server distribution, probably best for what OP is building. [3]
- NexentaStor, a storage appliance - but i have not tried it yet [4]
I can definitely recommend using ZFS on a Illumos system as it has much better integration with things like kstats and fault management architecture that I would miss on any other OS.
Getting a GbR (Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts ) setup is also possible at the Bürgeramt and similarly easy.
Also: as mentioned in the interview getting a "Steuerberater" once you have some income is a good thing to do. They can advice you in many financial and basic legal things and do most of the paperwork for you so one can concentrate on actual work ;-)
What other formats don't need to start at offset 0?