[SunRescue] Q on "optimal" OS for Sun4c machines, now that Solaris 8 won't run

[Jonathan Katz]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, P.A.Osborne wrote:

:Uuurk the formatting of the original mail has gone mad - ho hum.

Since I work for Sun Professional Services I can give the official 
unofficial view :^) [ we have guys posting here from *.sun.com on
occasion, so I don't feel bad about piping up... ]

:I like OpenBSD.

Me too... and if you can't find a copy of SunOS 4.1.[3,4] for your sun4c
box that's what I recommend.

:>     Solaris 2.5.1 is still viable, as most widely-available SOlaris
:> "freeware" is built
:>     for that release level.
:
:Fair comment but I have not used it of late.

Yes... lots of what's on sunsite is built for 2.5.1 and was built for 
2.5.1 before anything else. But Sun wants to stop supporting older OSes 
and start supporting the newer (Solaris 7, 8, etc) ones. [ this is a 
known fact; I hope I'm not starting any scary rumours for folks ]

:I wont install a 7 box without putting the latest cluster patch on
:straight afterward.

Correct. A lot of people agree that Solaris 7 was shipped a little bit
prematurely. Most PS guys (me included) won't recommend 7 for production
boxes unless someone patches the hell out of it(tm.) However, if I'm at
a site that is pushing high-end Ultra's I'd sometimes prefer 7 because 
it has better support than 2.6 for some of the higher-end gear (fuller
64bit support, etc.) It depends on the apps which are running, too. 

:>     Solaris 8 is not an option for this type of system.
:
:Havent looked at it yet - I dont want to test a new system until its
:been around a little while - conservative attitude I know but I have
:neither the time or hardware to take the risk at the moment.

If there was more app support for Solaris 8 from other commercial vendors
more Sun PS folks would be pushing 8 out to people. I'm involved with a 
very complex e-commerce project right now and we wanted to use 8, but
because there were a few apps which won't be supported under 8 until
2001 we're SOL.... and we went back to 2.6.

Solaris 8 has a heck of a lot of nifty crap(tm) in it. I'll spare you the
whitepaper. Needless to say, even on a box like an SS2000 with 4 SM41s (or
something along those lines) I'd rather run Solaris 8 than 2.5.1.

:I installed redhat 6.1 for sparc on a SunStation 5 a little while ago with
:the KDEworkstation and it idled with a load of 1.5 - I wasnt best impressed.

FWIW when I was sysadminning @cadence.com I had a SS5/170 w/ only 64M of
RAM. I ran OpenBSD (2.4? 2.5? it was a while ago) w/ afterstep and it fared
quite a bit better than Solaris 2.6 and 7 (which had *just* come out.)

:I havent tried NetBSD but OpenBSD on a SparcStn2 feels considerably faster
:than Solaris 7 on a SparcStn2.   Yes I know that 'feels' is a matter of
:opinion but I cant put it better than that.   Running X and fvwm2 on a 
:SparcStn2 with a cg6 video card feels loverly - no its not lightening quick
:but its a darn sight less painfull that Solaris's CDE - yes Solaris comes
:with twm - but even that felt more than a tad sluggish to me.

If you were to tweek the hell out of Solaris you could get better 
performance on your SS2 or IPX. RAM helps... a lot of RAM helps a lot.
Beyond that you're looking at tweaking which daemons run (turn off sendmail,
etc.) and even fixing various sizes in /etc/system. Unless you really
want/need Solaris on the box it wouldn't be worth the effort.

:Having tried Solaris on a SparcStn2 I wouldnt want to do so again.

I did 2.5.1 on an IPX. Ugh. That wasn't too terrible, though... add in
CDE and friends and that can get ugly.

-- 
Jonathan Katz
e-mail: jon at jonworld.com 
website: http://jonworld.com
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