In NewBay I’m currently working on a project which uses Sun Solaris 10 in a multi-tier architecture. I’ve already used before this system in Italy, so it isn’t new for me; in Italy I was responsible for creating Sun packages for projects made by my ex company in behalf of Nokia and Vodafone Italy.

By the way, as I started working in Newbay, I was allocated to this project called MyFaves for T-Mobile International. This is based exclusively on Solaris 10 (both x86 and sparc architecture).
After a few months I’ve used, and I’ve became pretty confident, with most of the big new and historical features of Solaris 10 like the SMF, the ZFS file system, the Solaris zone/containers.

So what do I think about it?

Well, I think the only stuff really good in Solaris are the 3 I’ve mentioned above. All the other things I’ve seen around the system are pretty crappy. When I started using SMF I was thinking: «oh man! this is ridiculous! I’ve to type svcadm enable/disable svc:/blabla/blablala/myapp:default every fucking time i need to start or stop a service! /etc/init.d/service start/stop is much more better!». Then I studied a lot this SMF, and I have to admit is brilliant! I really would like to have it in enterprises Linuxes like Red Hat, or even, let’s say, in Debian!

ZFS is brilliant as well! I know it’s now stable and ready for production on BSD systems like FreeBSD. I’m not really sure if the Linux ZFS implementation, which use the fuse subsystem, is ready for production as well…

Zones and containers… well… I think they’re cool. Maybe I’m wrong but I think they’ve copied the FreeBSD jails and they’ve integrated it very nicely with the system, especially with the solaris resoure manager. So you can, for exapmle, decide the amount of memory, or the number of CPUs that can be used by a single process, user, or group, in each zone. Integration between ZFS and Zones is cool as well!

Despite all these stuff I have to say that I still don’t really like Solaris:

• I don’t like to have the f***ing old style vi written by Bill Joy.
• I dont’t like to have defined export EDITOR=ed and export PAGER=more by default.
• I don’t like the fucking ps command (but you have to use the one into /usr/ucb/).
• I don’t like the fact that your default shell is an old style c-shell instead of /bin/bash
• I don’t like the fucking OLD cron daemon which is not able to read the GNU syntax (for something like */5 to schedule a job every 5 minutes you have to write “05,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55“. So ridicolous!!!!!)
• I don’t like the fact that you don’t have ANY messages while booting!
• I don’t like the packaging system, is shit compared with APT/DPKG, or with the the BSD ports system.
• I don’t like CDE and JavaDesktop (or should I say GNOME! ).

Why the fuck aren’t they using the GNU subsystem instead of their own CRAP? Are they using this only on OpenSolaris maybe?

Someone might say that this is because big companies (like banks for example) are still using OLD software which needs to use old crap to work. So they need old crap shell interpreter, and stuff like that. And they obviously like to have all the old crap by default installation…

Fuck them I say! This is ridicolous! They have to do the effort to adjust their our systems to work with the new OS’s. Not me!

So this is what I think about Solaris 10. You can insult me now.

Cheers.
Angelo