Does Sun have an 'official' position on ripping out their version and running your own? Does anyone have any experience dealing with Sun where it became known that you were running a different version than theirs (i.e., Sun tried to blame that for some other problem)?
Let's put it this way: unless you are either a Sun strategic partner or a bigass Sun customer with special contracts in place, I would not recommend you ask Sun for support if you rip out the stock IPF.
The engineers will try to help you, but if they run into a problem that's harder or more complicated than normal, the PTS engineer will be happy to point out that you're running non-stock stuff and close the support case.
Our university IT management are somewhat uncomfortable with running something this critical not provided through the OS vendor (esp. given that the vendor ships a version of it),
For once, I have to write that I agree with your management. In this at least I can say they're being prudent about it.
and would feel a lot better if they knew Sun didn't really care one way or the other. (Yes, they are very over-sensitive about open source software, but I still have to answer their concerns even when I think they may be misplaced).
They should be oversensitive about OSS SW. 95% of it is garbage.
The feeling seems to be that since it is actually installed by Sun as packages named SUNWwhatever is more of a 'stamp of approval' than, for example, the stuff in /usr/sfw.
And they're right.
Apologies if this is veering off-topic for the list...
Not at all; I've seen way too many hacked-up systems that were a complete mess because some sysadmin thought he was being smart by ripping out stock, optimized stuff and loading GNU garbage on a production system.
Needless to say, those guys were promptly seen vacating the premises.
