I care a lot about about OpenSolaris and I want it to be a massive success in the future and beat RHEL and IBM AIX, but in order for it to eventually become successful, I think that the following point cannot be emphasized enough:
CUSTOMERS DO NOT WANT TO BE PROHIBITED FROM DEPLOYING NEW IPKG ZONES JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE HAVING PROBLEMS CONNECTING TO THE OPENSOLARIS IPS REPOSITORY!!! Could you imagine me working for a major telecom, bank / financial institution, or government / military organization and having to tell my boss: I'm sorry , I couldn't deploy any new OpenSolaris ipkg zones today because we were having trouble connecting to pkg.opensolaris.org ? I would be fired in a heartbeat for being an OpenSolaris evangelist and all my kit would be replaced the next day with a massive pile of IBM gear running RHEL or AIX. The basic stop-gap solution to the problem is simple: we need a single "pkg" command that we can run with root privileges at the command line to have the global zone download and clone all of pkg.opensolaris.org and then act as the preferred IPS repository for the non-global zones using an internal network based on project Crossbow. Doing this would give us the following advantages: (1) Latency issues with IPS are now solved!!! All of the people who use zones on my test servers always complain about how slow IPS is compared to yum on Red Hat / CentOS or apt on Debian / Ubuntu / Nexenta. Crossbow uses an internally virtualized network, so the latency from installing a package from the global zone to the non-global zone should be almost non-existent. (2) Cheaper bandwidth bill for Sun (the IPS packages are downloaded once and then used over and over again, no more downloading something over and over again that you already downloaded once just because you're deploying a new ipkg zone). (3) Cheaper bandwidth bill for Sun's customers: if I ever went into full production with OpenSolaris and say I had 40,000 ipkg zones in my data center. That's a lot of wasted bandwidth downloading the same packages over and over again, and it's really going to cost me when I pay my bandwidth bill at the end of the month. I will guarantee you that IBM's and Red Hat's marketing droids will catch on to this wastefulness and rub it in our faces in their next anti-OpenSolaris marketing campaign. Here's how I'm hoping it will get fixed (I can always hope, right?). In January of the year 2010 (my Utopian OpenSolaris future), Joe Unix-Administrator downloads the OpenSolaris "Server Core" version of the OpenSolaris Indiana operating system from genunix.org, and installs it. The installer asks him to put in a static IP address (something the current OpenSolaris installer never does unfortunately), installs a minimal server OS with no GNOME or X-Windows in the global zone, and then comes up after the reboot with a BASH or KSH command line with virtual terminals working, SSH on port 22, and nothing else running. Then Joe Unix-Administrator SSH's into the global zone and types in a command to tell the global zone to clone the opensolaris.org IPS repository, but because this is a server operating system, it will only clone all of the server and developer related packages (i.e. Apache, postfix, Bind / named, gcc, gmake, MySQL, Erlang... basically anything at pkg.opensolaris.org that's not an X-windows dependant application). The command the sysadmin types in to clone the IPS repository could be something like this: # pkg clone-repository pkg.opensolaris.org/server crossbow Now, the global zone starts downloading all the server packages from pkg.opernsolaris.org and several hours later we have a fully functioning local IPS repository running on an internal crossbow network inside the global zone. Now we have to make this local IPS repository the default repository for the entire system (including the non-global zones which haven't been deployed yet). To do this, Joe could type in something like this # pkg set-authority -P global crossbow and voila! Everything is done. The server could even be disconnected from the internet and ipkg zones would still install because they use crossbow to download their packages from the repository in the global zone. Any latency issues with installing IPS packages are now also resolved. We in the OpenSolaris community just need to consistently lobby all the developers to implement something like this and I think it would be a huge win for everyone. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
