[rescue] Solaris not stable till release 2.x?????? WAS::Re: [geeks] Rumors flying

[Jerry Kemp]

I'm kind of curious regarding comments of Solaris wasn't stable till release 2.? 
, where the ? is the particular version you choose.

A bit of my background.  I got started with Solaris during my time in the 
military with Solaris 2.4, which, from my recollection, shipped with enough bugs 
that in addition to the Solaris 2.4 CD, it shipped with a separate CD full of 
patches.  Solaris (SPARC) boxes were put into place to replace aging ATT 3B2 
600G & 600GR systems.

For our needs, those 2.4 systems ran without issue, at least anything specific 
to the OS, till they were upgraded to 2.5 then 2.5.1.

A few years down the road, I left the military, and found myself in a large oil 
company with responsibility of administering 5-600 Sparc servers and 
workstations, along with a handful of SGI Irix boxes and a one off AIX box that 
ran some simulation I never really understood.  Several floors of geologist, 
each having a Sparc based workstation on their desk, along with a PC/desktop to 
read Novell/Groupware email.

At that location I had a handful of small servers running Solaris 2.3, that took 
several years to replace/upgrade.  My request to upgrade the 2.3 boxes fell on 
deaf ears as they continually ran without issue.

The first big problem I did encounter (same oil company) was on some big file 
servers sharing out about 2 Tb of data, at least that (2 Tb) seemed large for 
the late 1990's.  The data was stored on Veritas foundation suite FS, and when 
these boxes were upgraded from 2.5.1 to 2.6, no one had checked with Veritas to 
check for compatibility.

It turns out that there were big kernel changes between 2.5.1 and 2.6.  But the 
problem was really a human one vs either a problem with Solaris or Veritas. 
There has been a few Solaris releases where I felt Sun went Mac OS X on us, AKA, 
the new release took away more features and support then providing new stuff. 
But, from 2.3 to present, baring hardware problems, Solaris has generally proven 
itself to be rock solid.

I realize that there are numerous issues, like when Solaris 2.0 came out and 
took away the BSD rc start up scripts to give us the Sys V scripts.  And similar 
things happened with Solaris 10 with SMF, although the Sys V start up scripts 
are still with us but depreciated.  These were unpopular decisions.

Closing out by repeating my original question, I'm  curious regarding comments 
of Solaris wasn't stable till release 2.? , where the ? is the particular 
version you choose.  What was so broken that you didn't consider the Solaris 
stable at that point?

Jerry



On 12/ 6/16 04:58 PM, Stefan Skoglund (lokal anvC$ndare) wrote:

>>
>> sparky:~$ uname -a
>> SunOS sparky 5.5.1 Generic_103640-27 sun4c sparc SUNW,Sun_4_75
>> sparky:~$ uptime
>>    4:36pm  up 77 day(s), 23:41,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.02, 0.02
>> sparky:~$
>>
>>     Gotta love that old 4c iron.
>>
>>     Cheers!
>
> Yes, i remember. 2.5.1 was the first one which was good enough if it
> wasn't awfully important to run SunOS 2.x for some reason or another.
>
> The workstations had a habit of hanging once in a month or so.
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