Ok, so I've seen all the griping concerning reading documentation. I'm a new person to Solaris, so please excuse me. I've grown up on linux/freebsd/beos/so forth, from the .99 pre days of linux and so on, back when there was very little documentation and also extremely few users to ask for help.
Yet, having spent the last decade in the linux/freebsd/etc world, I've yet to have many simple (at least I think so) questions answered concerning *how* to do things the _right way_ in Solaris. I've hit freenode, docs.sun.com, etc, to no avail. Maybe I'm just a complete idiot when it comes to searching, but I don't even know what exactly I should be searching for! One of the biggest problems I encountered when evaluating Solaris for a large datacenter deployment: I could not find a single person/could not find in the documentation exactly how I was supposed to go about adding software (such as apache 2/php5/etc, and I don't mean outdated versions. I realize there is the whole "use the version that's been tested 8 bazillion times" mentality, but as I'm planning to use Solaris in an environment where sometimes new features are more important than 3 years of stability testing, I often need newer software than is provided with Solaris 10) to the system. I recieved a lot of "use blastwave" "use sunfreeware" responses, neither resource I care for (no offense to the projects, they just aren't my personal choice.) I've hand compiled/built everything, including all dependancies required by them, simply because I couldn't find a solution. This creates a HUGE headache anytime there is a security update released for ANY of the software, I have to go download the updated source/patches/so forth, and rebuild EVERYTHING one by one, making sure I get it all installed properly without messing up this or that. Imagine trying to do this by hand on 100 systems, as you said, this is NOT the right way to go about things. It's painfully obvious. Maybe it's contained in the docs, and maybe you can tell me exactly where, but the major problem I have is simply finding what I need in them! The documentation is excellent, I have undoubtably found the answer to MANY of my own questions digging through them. However, there are very general/basic things concerning the usage of Solaris that I am just unable to effectively locate. Mostly concerning to the "right way" to do things. You're preaching the "right way" now, and while I can respect your insistance on doing things in a clean/structured way, I think you'd promote doing things the "Right Way" a lot more effectively if you simply drew up a nice "howto" on the "right way" of doing things, and posted a link whenever you felt the urge to lambast somebody for not knowing the "right way" of doing things. Generally, positive corrections are accepted over negative criticism. Not only that, but I would be _eternally_ grateful if somebody could just point me in the right direction concerning the above mentioned issues. If you had explained the methods in which to handle this kind of thing, or even posted a direct link to Sun's documentation concerning the proper method to go about this, not only would devsk be able to do things the "right way" but I would finally have an answer to my question, and maybe other people would too. Not just a burning sensation. PS - Again, I'd like to stress how helpful I've found Sun's documentation, I think there is just SOO much that for people new to Solaris, such as myself, it makes it nearly impossible to find general answers on how to do things. Specific questions are easily answered, like how to add users, or how to disable dtlogin, etc. A simple search for "add user" or "dtlogin" quickly brings up the results. How do I search for the generally accepted "correct" way to go about installing software on a Solaris server in order to keep management of multiple machines a non-headache? Sorry for the tone of my response, as I'm mostly looking for information, I just found it a bit frustrating to see somebody chewed out for posting an attempt at helping others with a common problem, simply because he wasn't doing things the "right way". A simple helpful postive response with a little bit of guidance that would take somebody who _knows_ maybe 10 seconds to look up a link or two, would have gone a lot further, I believe. Cheers, David This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
