Sorry:) Well I think you hit it right on the head with your list of things that just don't have enough polish or are completely "half-baked" in Solaris today. There are things that have lingered about in Solaris and have died over the years. The end result is bad user, SA, and corporate experience around managing Solaris. Too many shops end up building custom tools for everything from provisioning and patching to monitoring and security. Ultimately, it makes managing Solaris more expensive and complicated when it shouldn't be. Some things are improving, but are still being worked on.
I like the UNIX way of doing things, but if Solaris/OpenSolaris is to really shine in the corporate environment, these items really need to be addressed. I know a great amount of focus has been on the desktop and getting GNU/Linuxish these days. But I can't help wonder if that's really a waste. Look at how things are on MacOS X and the server edition.. nice tools that anyone who can read and think can use to configure a workstation or server. That's not to say we don't need good CLI tools.. which MacOS X lacks in many cases. There should be parity there. I complain a lot about the expense of Veritas products, but I will say that there is good parity between their CLI and GUI tools. We should see more of that in our space. The SMC stuff thats been in Solaris for years unfortunately has made many SA's and desktop users want to puke. I even wonder if there should be a management design guide for Solaris/OpenSolaris to help guide consistency and usability. There should be projects for each of the things you've listed with community and internal support at Sun. ++++++1 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Ben Rockwood <b...@cuddletech.com> To: Octave Orgeron <unixcons...@yahoo.com> Cc: Jason King <ja...@ansipunx.net>; sysadmin-discuss@opensolaris.org; perf-disc...@opensolaris.org Sent: Monday, February 9, 2009 2:42:47 PM Subject: Re: [sysadmin-discuss] [perf-discuss] Project Proposal: Improved Performance MIB for OpenSolaris Octave Orgeron wrote: > What I meant what the such things have been left to 3rd party tools and > products by Sun. That should change. Monitoring and administrative tools are > essential and should be robust out of the box. > I know what you meant, I was trying to be funny. I think we're of the same mind that a variety of Solaris features are lacking polish out of the box. I'd go further to say that Sun has done a poor job of providing that polish via add on products, and it seems like the only way it ever gets high level features at all is through acquisitions, which seem to whither and die after the fact.... Management Center is a good example. I would personally like to see us/Sun put polish on: * LDAP & Kerberos (We need an easy to use, easy to manage, easy to deploy AD alternative) * NFS Security (consequence of better Kerberos) * SNMP (what we're discussing here) * FMA (still not robust enough) * SMF * ZFS Monitoring Hooks * Extended Accounting tools * BSM Auditing work that stalled (namely, an audit server to avoid using local NFS mounted audit trails) * ... Too many users are creating custom tools and not opening them. Just adding GNOME panels or focusing on GUI's isn't really useful, we need easy to use CLI tools that make users successful very quickly and easily. benr. _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list sysadmin-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss
