[geeks] solaris questions

[Shannon Hendrix]

Some questions about Solaris:

ZFS:

Is there any benefit to running ZFS on a single drive, or two  
dissimilar drives?

My new server has an 80GB primary and a 400GB data drive.  Currently  
everything is on the primary except /u, where my data will live.

Is there a way to have / be UFS to it can boot, but install the rest  
of the system (/usr, /var, etc) on ZFS?  I didn't see an option in the  
installer to make that choice.

How do you run ZFS on hardware RAID?  In the future I am thinking of a  
nice 3Ware RAID card.  I like the hardware RAID because it reduces the  
overhead bandwidth and so far I've found the good cards very fast,  
even some cheaper ones.

Can you turn off ZFS's RAID features and just use it to slice up a  
RAID array and manage it, or will it possibly "compete", and the  
double-layer of RAID cause problems?

Zones:

How can you create a zone without all the packages in the global zone  
being put in it?

Is there a sane way to handle Blastwave packages and dependencies with  
regard to zones?

Ditto pkgsrc, if anyone has tried that.

Compilers:

What's the best approach for having a compiler installed on the system  
that can be used by the zones and which will also work with the  
package systems like pkgsrc, or your own home-grown stuff?

Package system:

I have some packages in SFW that duplicate that is in CSW and pkgsrc.   
Not all packages I want can be found in one packages system.

For example, Sun's apache is a requirement for one of the packages I  
use, but Blastwave also has Apache as a dependency for one of its  
packages.

I don't want N copes on my system.

Has anyone found a way to make the package systems play nice, or is  
redundancy the order of the day?

What is a good way to handle /etc and svc issues with redundant  
packages?

I will probably pick one package system to be primary, so I'll want to  
disable /etc support for the duplicated packages (assuming I must keep  
them around).  Is there a decent guide to managing this?

This weekend I have to make up my mind: Solaris or FreeBSD, so I'm  
trying to push a little faster than I could figure it out for myself.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com