You might think that Linux shines in that area. Obviously you've never dealt with platform provisioning and engineering in any structured matter to know what's all involved. Had you ever designed and built a JumpStart infrastructure that automatically installs and configures thousands of systems in parallel, you would be painfully aware of how sorely Linux is lacking in this area.
Redhat's answer to jumpstart is called kickstart, it generally works, the problems is that if you want to install redhat using kickstart you need the either the redhat cds or some custom created media to boot from, even if it's only to make the kickstart file available. A few days ago i had to use it with a floppy, the redhat media and the actual packages in an nfs server in the network, i had redhat installed in under 6 minutes. I've only read about jumpstart so i cannot comment on it's speed http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/sysadmin-guide/ch-kickstart2.html
And patches? Why, Linux software subsystems only support "patches" as a quasi-notion afterthought. If you want to "patch" something in Linux, be prepared to have entire software stacks replaced while RPM goes and "patches" the system in one fell swoop. THEN you'll rightly know what a mess looks like, and what it's like when 11,000 PCs bust and break.
I wont argue there, i hate rpms and had a lot of problems with them in my early linux days, eventually i stopped using them when i switched to slackware. I dont know if they have improved though, i do know that if you want a linux with more or less serious support you're stuck with either redhat or suse and both use rpms
Like I said, you'd have to be invloved with actually engineering large systems and networks to really appreciate Solaris and to know just how shoddy Linux is in this respect. It's a desktop toy with pretty icons.
i've seen it used in things that are a bit bigger then "a desktop with pretty icons" and underestimating linux is one big mistake, aparently sun has learnt it's lesson. nacho _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
