[geeks] Solaris 10 x86

[Patrick Giagnocavo 717-201-3366]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 17:45, Bryan Fullerton wrote:
> I could probably post about this to the sunhelp list, but figured I'd
> probably get more of the answers I was looking for here... :)
> 
> I have several servers running FreeBSD and am contemplating moving to
> Solaris 10 x86. Mostly this is because I'm a little leery of how
> FreeBSD development is progressing (lots of core developers no longer
> seem to have time to fix critical issues), and Solaris 10 has neato
> things like containers that seem more fully developed than FreeBSD's
> jail.

I moved to Solaris from Linux for my customers and they loved it once I changed their PATH variable to point to the GNUish stuff.  Zero stability problems at this point.

And rebooting a zone in less than 10 seconds is valuable - you can restart something as if from a warm boot without anyone noticing.

> However, I'm really going to miss the FreeBSD ports. Sunfreeware is a
> good bootstrap, but it only gets you so far.

True.

> Anyone have any pros/cons for Solaris 10 x86, and advice about
> gotchas? My primary servers are Dell PE2850's (PERC 4e/i) and I have
> some HP NetServers (no RAID). They're used for web serving (Apache,
> PHP, MySQL/Postgres). I'm installing a test server in my basement now
> on a HP NetServer LP1000r, and will start playing with it
> tonight/tomorrow.

Only thing I can see not working is the PERC 4e/i - probably it is supported, but you will want to check the HCL and look specifically for it working under 10.  Solaris 9 had better support for SCSI RAID controllers in some cases.

Also, there are freeware ethernet drivers that cover many common chipsets, such as the Broadcom ones that may be on the 2850's motherboard.  So you will want to look that up as well.