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On servers, Solaris is better than Linux. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, resource management framework, RBAC, service management framework, among other things, are all bet

On servers, Solaris is better than Linux. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, resource management framework, RBAC, service management framework, among other things, are all better. Solaris already has most of the Linux userland available. A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH. If you change your default path, you can get access to a lot of the inferior Linux tools that you are used to. Yum and apt-get are better at patching and package installation than Solaris tools. However, the experience on Solaris isn't so bad that the whole OS has to be thrown away because if it. Besides, when IPS is released Solaris's package management will be better than both Yum and apt-get.

bretthoerner 18y ago
> "Solaris is better than Linux." That's a very blunt statement of fact. Yes, DTrace is great. ZFS has a lot of greatness if you overlook the bugs production systems have had (see: Joyent) to fix still (systems down for a week while they hand-fixed the FS - Yeah, fun stuff). Zones are cool, but has its drawbacks (and advantages) when compared to something like Xen. > "A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH." Uh, you know that when people talk about "Linux" they really mean "common GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL", right? You realize they mean more than gmake and gfind and gcc, right? Sorry, Solaris has absolutely nothing like the apt repositories available on Ubuntu (I know they're working on this, but that is still the not-so-stable-or-bug-free OpenSolaris, and it still isn't anywhere close, and we're talking about today, right?). Can I pull down svn, git, mercurial, bzr in a simple command? How about lighttpd, nginx, haproxy? What about a recent vim and emacs? Recent memcached, python/perl/ruby client for it? Those are all basic and well known, that isn't even the hard stuff. What about something a little more specific? PostGIS, GDAL, Proj? I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds. And of those you can compile from source yourself on Solaris, you'll find many a quirk because the project maintainers tend to run either a flavor of Linux or FreeBSD. Yeah, Solaris is "better than Linux on servers", and my time isn't worth anything.
- astrec 18y ago
  I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds. You're absolutely right, but when it's time to do something serious - in the Cal Henderson, irony laden, finger quote sense - you'll recompile them just the same.
  - bretthoerner 18y ago
    I will? Sorry, I've never bothered to recompile svn or python or many other things that my Linux install comes with. And I've use them every single day. For money. To feed my face hole. Yes, when the time comes I can recompile anything on Ubuntu, but you know what? I'll take their already existing package, add patches, and easily create a .deb I can distribute among all the machines I use. Based on the existing package, with existing Ubuntu patches added that fix existing problems for me. Rather than going from scratch all alone in Solaris land.
    - astrec 18y ago
      For the purposes of this discussion nothing you've mentioned falls under the serious banner. I mean no snark at all in saying that - just that those with half a dozen 12 CPU boxes packed with nearly 200Gb of RAM tend to be cutting their own path.
- joshwa 18y ago
  ...and Solaris doesn't even ship with GNU grep or find! I have to do crazy perl gymnastics to replicate grep -C (though that's mostly because our crazy systems group refuses to allow non-Sun binaries).
cabalamat 18y ago
On servers, Solaris is better than Linux In terms of the quality of the software this may well be the case. However I've got lots of experience with Linux (especially Ubuntu) and little with Solaris. Familiarity means I can develop more quickly on Linux than on Solaris. T|ime is money. Even if, on the same hardware, Solaris runs faster, with the money I've saved on quicker development times, I can buy more expensive (and therefore faster) hardware. BTW, of the programs you meantion, the only one I've ever heard of is ZFS; I've no idea what they others are or what they do -- maybe Sun need to be better about getting the message out on how good their system is.
tptacek 18y ago
By putting "Zones" in that list, you've given me the impression that you aren't really thinking this through, but rather are just parroting the Sun feature-function-benefit table. Are you really arguing that Sun has Linux beat on virtualization and isolation?
- patrickg-zill 18y ago
  For some classes of problems, Sun has a better, more robust solution in the form of Zones. Sun also has Xen and VirtualBox (not as good as VMWare yet). If you don't like Zones, fine. However many people are using them in a way that serves their needs - but perhaps not yours.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Zones are far less robust than Xen or VMWare. They're a short step up from chroot. Any Solaris kernel problem takes down all the zones, and there are a number of ways zones can influence other zones.
    - gaius 18y ago
      The flipside of that is update-on-attach, which Xen doesn't have.
- briansmith 18y ago
  My answer is the same as the last time you asked me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318592
  - tptacek 18y ago
    That was a different discussion, where I was simply pointing out the reasons I didn't like Zones. But this discussion is harder for Solaris to win, because you have to line Zones up against the very real and powerful virtualization systems Linux already has, like Xen. We consult all the time for F500 companies with pools of Solaris boxes. Some of them use Zones. None of them virtualize Solaris. All of them virtualize Linux, and can move entire Linux servers from machine to machine from a UI. It is hard to convince me that Solaris has any kind of edge in the server market.

bretthoerner 18y ago

> "Solaris is better than Linux." That's a very blunt statement of fact. Yes, DTrace is great. ZFS has a lot of greatness if you overlook the bugs production systems have had (see: Joyent) to fix still (systems down for a week while they hand-fixed the FS - Yeah, fun stuff). Zones are cool, but has its drawbacks (and advantages) when compared to something like Xen. > "A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH." Uh, you know that when people talk about "Linux" they really mean "common GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL", right? You realize they mean more than gmake and gfind and gcc, right? Sorry, Solaris has absolutely nothing like the apt repositories available on Ubuntu (I know they're working on this, but that is still the not-so-stable-or-bug-free OpenSolaris, and it still isn't anywhere close, and we're talking about today, right?). Can I pull down svn, git, mercurial, bzr in a simple command? How about lighttpd, nginx, haproxy? What about a recent vim and emacs? Recent memcached, python/perl/ruby client for it? Those are all basic and well known, that isn't even the hard stuff. What about something a little more specific? PostGIS, GDAL, Proj? I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds. And of those you can compile from source yourself on Solaris, you'll find many a quirk because the project maintainers tend to run either a flavor of Linux or FreeBSD. Yeah, Solaris is "better than Linux on servers", and my time isn't worth anything.

astrec 18y ago
I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds. You're absolutely right, but when it's time to do something serious - in the Cal Henderson, irony laden, finger quote sense - you'll recompile them just the same.
- bretthoerner 18y ago
  I will? Sorry, I've never bothered to recompile svn or python or many other things that my Linux install comes with. And I've use them every single day. For money. To feed my face hole. Yes, when the time comes I can recompile anything on Ubuntu, but you know what? I'll take their already existing package, add patches, and easily create a .deb I can distribute among all the machines I use. Based on the existing package, with existing Ubuntu patches added that fix existing problems for me. Rather than going from scratch all alone in Solaris land.
  - astrec 18y ago
    For the purposes of this discussion nothing you've mentioned falls under the serious banner. I mean no snark at all in saying that - just that those with half a dozen 12 CPU boxes packed with nearly 200Gb of RAM tend to be cutting their own path.
joshwa 18y ago
...and Solaris doesn't even ship with GNU grep or find! I have to do crazy perl gymnastics to replicate grep -C (though that's mostly because our crazy systems group refuses to allow non-Sun binaries).

cabalamat 18y ago

On servers, Solaris is better than Linux In terms of the quality of the software this may well be the case. However I've got lots of experience with Linux (especially Ubuntu) and little with Solaris. Familiarity means I can develop more quickly on Linux than on Solaris. T|ime is money. Even if, on the same hardware, Solaris runs faster, with the money I've saved on quicker development times, I can buy more expensive (and therefore faster) hardware. BTW, of the programs you meantion, the only one I've ever heard of is ZFS; I've no idea what they others are or what they do -- maybe Sun need to be better about getting the message out on how good their system is.

tptacek 18y ago

By putting "Zones" in that list, you've given me the impression that you aren't really thinking this through, but rather are just parroting the Sun feature-function-benefit table. Are you really arguing that Sun has Linux beat on virtualization and isolation?

patrickg-zill 18y ago
For some classes of problems, Sun has a better, more robust solution in the form of Zones. Sun also has Xen and VirtualBox (not as good as VMWare yet). If you don't like Zones, fine. However many people are using them in a way that serves their needs - but perhaps not yours.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Zones are far less robust than Xen or VMWare. They're a short step up from chroot. Any Solaris kernel problem takes down all the zones, and there are a number of ways zones can influence other zones.
  - gaius 18y ago
    The flipside of that is update-on-attach, which Xen doesn't have.
briansmith 18y ago
My answer is the same as the last time you asked me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318592
- tptacek 18y ago
  That was a different discussion, where I was simply pointing out the reasons I didn't like Zones. But this discussion is harder for Solaris to win, because you have to line Zones up against the very real and powerful virtualization systems Linux already has, like Xen. We consult all the time for F500 companies with pools of Solaris boxes. Some of them use Zones. None of them virtualize Solaris. All of them virtualize Linux, and can move entire Linux servers from machine to machine from a UI. It is hard to convince me that Solaris has any kind of edge in the server market.