[geeks] operating systems to replace Solaris

[Shannon]

On Apr 11, 2011, at 20:24 , Dr Robert Pasken wrote:

> I guess you didn't catch the later post that said that the hardware is Sun
Ultra-24's, x2270's and Dell Precisions; quality hardware in other words.

I did, but that doesn't mean there are no hardware or usage issues. If other
people can do this and you can't there has to be some difference that can be
identified to help you out.

If you tell me a Mazda3 cannot move with 400 pounds under the hatch, and I and
several others here run with 500 in the back, I'm going to have to believe you
did something wrong, or there is some issue that might be fixable.

In any case, "Dell Precision" is meaningless. The hardware behind that
nameplate varies a lot, and includes everything from decent motherboards and
components to total crap. How well anything runs on it depends on exactly
which parts Dell chose for that particular run of serial numbers. Dell is the
ultimate in random JIT manufacturing of PCs.

The Suns are fairly nice, although the Ultra 24 was fairly mid-level for a PC
in terms of power, quality, and cooling. Most high end gaming and server
motherboards are nicer.

The x2270 is nice, and shouldn't give you issues. I have been playing with
some but would like to have some of my own, or something close.  It does have
some bugs in the drive controllers (a lot of PC hardware/chipsets do) and I
imagine that Solaris has been patched for that. Maybe its some information
that the others have not gotten yet, or is otherwise related.

Having said that, I know people running other OS on them without issue, so no
idea given current information why you see issues.

> Solaris is the most stable on this hardware followed by BSD, and linux.

Evidently this part varies for people.

I generally find Solaris and BSD equally stable, by which I mean both run 24/7
for me without issue. Linux it depends on the distribution and how much crap
came with it. There are distributions that are better for this than others.

A week ago I could have tested about anything you wanted but I no longer have
access to the x2270s a friend let me play with. I'm curious why they are
failing for you because they are fairly nice little servers and other people
do run BSD and Linux on them.

> The linux machines exist so that I can figure out what the output should be
from the programs written assuming that the only linux in existence is today's
flavor of fedora. Given what should happen I then rewrite the code so that it
will compile with a reasonably standards conforming Fortran and C compilers.

That's a huge issue with UNIX software, and people writing code as if Linux
and GNU were the standard are second only to Microsoft Windows programmers
there. It doesn't help either that UNIX has some issues in general, and even
the base shell (Bourne) is a screwed up, insecure, poorly designed, and
non-standard mess all around.

Of course, Solaris has had its share of non-standard issues too... like
threading and threaded and asynchronous I/O. I had to deal with weeks of pain
because of how they did some of that a few years ago.

Likewise I had to un-GNU a ton of simulation software once. Just the build
relied on GNU-isms in the bash shell that varied even from one version of bash
to another.

GNU is pretty bad about having some really bad standards issues on all
platforms they support. The irony is that often they end up the standard
because it can be easier to install the GNU runtime than to fix the issues.

> No My experience is pretty near what I see elsewhere: people moving away
from eye-candy Ubuntu/Centos/Fedora/RedHat linux flavor of the day to the far
more reliable Solaris and BSD based clusters.

I've never seen any clusters using "eye candy" distributions of anything
myself except one cluster of Windows servers. Ick.

Most of them user server builds of Linux for that kind of thing, and of course
base NetBSD is about as bare server as you can get, a lot more than Solaris by
default.

FreeBSD and Solaris desktop builds, assuming that is what you mean by "eye
candy" are just as much "eye candy" oriented as any Linux system, with all the
same associated problems.  Sun is good part of that given their big push on
Gnome with a very bloated Gnome install the desktop default now. I don't see
Oracle changing that.

You shouldn't be using anything like that in a cluster. Turns them into
clusterfubars really quick... :)



--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com