Jeff A. Earickson wrote: > Like I said, there is generally other evidence of hardware malfunction. > I've just noticed that Sun engineers, at least in the Solaris 9 era, > have been quick to blame ipfilter. If I have 13 machines that have been > running version 3.4.31 for months and one of them suddenly starts > falling over, then I'm less inclined to blame ipfilter than Sun engineers > are. Other evidence usually sorts out the issue.
Well, there have been a few bad versions of IPFilter that left bad memories. I remember one that trashed a filesystem (reproduceably). Some of them could work for a while before panicking, too. I can understand that somebody who had met one of those would be tend to accuse IPF first. But of course you're right that engineers should not blame it first without any analysis. > My track record with S10 and Ipfilter 4.x is pretty spotless so far. > I have one box where ipfilter seems to interfere with Sun Update Manager; > I've been investigating that. I've had a V1280 with obvious and serious > hardware problems (hopefully fixed) caused by a power spike. It was S9, > now running S10. S10 has not yet paniced on me for any reason; ipfilter > or otherwise. Count yourself lucky. I've had (and I'm having) problems with IPF 4, including a few panics. But not on S10, where I'm leaving Sun's version so far. > My reasons are more cosmic than pragmatic. I don't need any of the new > features of the latest ipf, so I probably should run Sun's version. But > if nobody uses Darren's releases then he gets no feedback or practical > evaluation of his work. He then has no incentive to improve ipfilter. Both are Darren's versions, so he does have incentives, I guess :) http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/avalon?catname=%2FSolaris+IPFilter > I eagerly await the June 2006 of S10, with ZFS. I have two machines > slated for installation of this release, an E220R test box running S9 > now and the V1280. I may leave Sun's version of ipfilter in place > on one or both for comparison/testing. But I will continue to support > Darren's public-domain efforts by using his work. S10 06/06 should include some updates to IPF, IIRC. Notably IPv6 support. Haven't had time to test it, though. Laurent
