* David J. Orman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > 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I don't mean outdated versions.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'm curious what you expect to find in terms of a 'how-to' for your problem. If you don't want to use the version of bundled software that ships with Solaris, your 'on your own' to roll your own solution (as you've done) or leverage the work of others (such as blastwave, sunfreeware, etc). Although, I suppose if you wanted to pay Sun enough money, our Professional Services division might be able to ease some of this burden (but I'd expect that to be prohibitively expensive in the long haul). Sun isn't like Gentoo or FreeBSD (I believe their ports collection is similiar to Gentoo) where you get 'rolling' updates of bundled software whether the updates are security related or not. You get tested, stable versions at the time of shipment. Patches get released to address security issues naturally but new features (or versions) aren't integrated generally until the next full release (there are exceptions). This really isn't much different than the way Debian (or most linux distributions) does things for example. They ship a stable version of their OS that contains bundled software which then only receives security updates throughout it's lifetime. If you want/need to live on the bleeding edge (or really any edge other than what Sun defines as it were), you need to 'roll your own' solution or leverage other's work. Now, if you packaged up your custom built software into Solaris packages, your maintenance for 100+ machines goes down. You have a build machine, that runs whatever version of Solaris that is running on the rest of your machines, you build your software on it, package it up, and then deploy your packages to x number of machines. You've still got work to do (keeping up to date with the software, initial building, packaging work) but it's far more manageable. Plus, your packaging work is essentially a one-off. Plus, if you have packages of software you've built on your own, you could integrate them into jumpstart (thereby easing your installs of new machines). You can play other games (like say exporting something over nfs to all your machines that contains all the software you want to deploy) but that has risks all it's own. Your problem isn't unique. It just requires some management/effort to sort it out. It's certainly not unique to Solaris. You would have the same problem on most (if not all) linux distributions (gentoo being an exception in some cases, but lately I've noticed even they aren't delivering absoulute bleeding edge for everything). It's just a fact that if you can not use the bundled software in an Operating System because it doesn't meet your requirements, you've got to craft your own solution (by and large). Certainly for most linux distributions, probably freebsd (though I think their ports collection is updated pretty frequently but I don't run that OS much to know for sure). I'm sure there are other ways to ease the problem you describe, but the two I mention are what I and other I know who have supported a large installation of Solaris have done. Cheers, -- Glenn Lagasse KISS/Approachability Sun Microsystems, Inc. x21293, 781-442-1293 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
