Ray Clark writes: > OK Glenn and James, your opinion is better than any informed decision I am > apt to make. > --- > I have used UNIX since Bell Labs V6, through BSD, SunOS 4.1.3c, Linux for the > last few years, currently Open Suse 10.2 and 10.3.
That roughly matches me, but throw in AIX, DG/UX, ICL, Debian and a few other martians for good measure. ;-} > I am pretty happy, but sick of fiddling, and want data security. I have run > Solaris 2 as a user, and poke around on a Solaris U4 server at work which was > installed by someone else. Right now I have a difficult time finding how to > do anything on Solaris, but I am going there. OK. Perhaps the number one thing you need to know as a user is that not everything is installed in /usr/bin. You need to set up your $PATH to pick up the things you want. A lot of stuff comes with the system, but it's not found by default. The other thing to know is that man pages and docs.sun.com are your friends. > I have two applications: > > [1] File server with ZFS hosting all of my old IDE disks ( I have obtained > out-of-production ITE8212 PCI IDE cards from a guy in Hong-Kong and reflashed > with a special BIOS from ITE to make them work under Solaris to get over the > HW support hump). I need NFS, Samba. I am used to maintaining the > configuration files of both of these by hand, but have never installed them. > CUPS would be very nice. LDAP would be nice for central authentication > across Solaris, Linux, Mac, and perhaps Windows, and finding of home > directory, but I don't have a clue how to make it go. I need an iSCSI > initiator to access two SATA disks on another machine so I can backup to a > ZFS disk that is not local. Whew. Any other bits you want to throw in? Starting with ZFS, you need to find out what the names are for the disks you've installed. "format" will tell you this. Then use the "zpool" command to set up one or more ZFS storage pools (one should be fine) and "zfs" to set up and export the ZFS file systems using NFS. Samba is annoying to maintain in the best of worlds, but it works basically the same on Solaris as on anything else. It's over in /usr/sfw. CUPS is on the Companion CD or available from Blastwave. There's an integrated CIFS server that's supposed to be easier to run and generally better than Samba, but I haven't tried it yet. Not sure about iSCSI, but iscsiadm(1M) looks like a starting point. > [2] My family's desktops. Right now we run Suse Linux 10.x with KDE and are > pretty happy. You can get KDE for Solaris as well -- blastwave has one compiled version of it. By default, the modern versions of Solaris use GNOME and also have CDE. > My very immediate need is to get the server going. The desktop I expect to > lag until Indiana is out and dependable. > > Can you tell me what you think I should do for the server (What Solaris > should I run), why, and what the tradeoffs / caveats are? I am ready to go. I'd use SXCE. It gets updated a bit more often than SXDE, and is more likely to have the bits you want. Solaris 10 would make more sense if you were a commercial outfit trying to deploy a datacenter with a hundred servers and needed on-site paid service. Indiana is still just a project. It hasn't been through internal reviews yet. It seems to work well, but it may have unpredictable changes until the project is done. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
