I was kind of thinking of buying an oldish Sun SPARC server and running Solaris 11. Why? Two reasons:
1. Security through obscurity. For all intents and purposes, there's no SPARC malware/spyware on the Internet.
2. Shits and giggles.
SPARC aside, what do you Sup Forumsentoomen think of Solaris as an OS (other than that it's proprietary)?
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Really? No thoughts on Solaris at all?
Solaris is dead
Fuck oracle
15 years ago Solaris was king.
Today Windows Server is "good enough" for a lot of things and Linux or BSD is way more than good enough for everything.
Where would you get security updates from?
Oracle basically killed it.
Only people still using it are enterprise and government customers who didn't manage to migrate away to another platform after Oracle acquisition.
>slowlaris
>oldish Sun SPARC server and running Solaris 11
I don't think any of the SPARC equipment you can afford is capable of running Solaris 11...which is no big loss since Oracle fucked it up.
Also you're an idiot if you want to run Sun shit just for """"security""""
>really horrible and expensive linux
Running Windows server in a mixed environment is asking for a headache.
>implying I was talking about Linux
:^)
In all seriousness, those old SPARCs are massive space heaters
Just use centos, git gud and harden it yourself.
Or go to openbsd and also git gud
>Just use centos, git gud and harden it yourself.
Precisely, use the redhat/nsa harderning guide and you're all set
OpenSolaris was 8 years ago probably the most interesting system besides linux. Sun did opensource it and it was buzzed like hell. I've worked with Solaris 8, 9 and 10 before but OpenSolaris was awesome with features like zfs before it was usable on linux. Had it as my main OS for like one year because I could literally do everything with it. I still had of course my gentoo installation but didn't boot it much.
Then came Oracle and fucked everything up. It's hard to imagine how anyone can fuck up such a nice piece of software with tons of developers but somehow they managed. After that I did not even try Solaris 11 because of what happened to OpenSolaris. Fuck Oracle.
Just use FreeBSD\sparc64.
You tried illumos?
Yeah, it's ok but sparc64 support is sparse.
You don't need SPARC hardware to use the many variants of Solaris around. Most Sun hardware is meant to go into a rack and is LOUD. Even if you're used to the BSD ports tree or something like lFS or Arch, you're going to be challenged getting software compiled. Solaris 11 _had_ some great features, but they've "inspired" features in other OS distributions. Zones, the startup process (forgetting the name), and .. maybe ZFS.
Zones are superceded by stuff like Xen. The startup process is like systemd. ZFS is available outside of Solaris, but FreeBSD is doing the most work there.
I'm wary of ZFS because its hard to expand a volume, and when it crashes there's basically no tool to try to recover ZFS.
If you want to take something away from Solaris, read Solaris Internals.
Also, fuck Oracle.
>OpenBSD
enjoy your fbi backdoor ;^)
I'd rather use Free/OpenBSD on SPARC hardware.
>Most Sun hardware
No, not most.
most. They were a server company. The dot in dot com or whatever. Yes, they had workstations, but the last decade or so the workstations weren't competitive.
>windows server
>good enough
laughingwhores.jpg
weeaboo shit
>They were a server company.
No, they were pretty much always a workstation company. They had more workstation lines than they did server lines.
1. There's no Sparc malware/spyware because theirs no Sparc software, Just get OpenBSD
2. Go back to 9gag
Unless you're an experienced programmer that plans on getting into the low level nitty gritty, you won't find any differences to x86. If you really care that much then setup a Qemu Sparc system, I guarentee you won't find a use for that 15 year old door stop.
Can an Sun Ultra 10 emulate NES?
If you have time
fms.komkon.org
Ironic shitposting is still shitposting, user.
/thread
I loved Solaris 9 on Ultra Sparc II/IIi/III. Ultra 80? Mmmm....
But fuck Oracle.
Posting from OpenIndiana right now, but Solaris 10 is my primary server OS. I really like it, but I can't really attest to its advantages over other *nix platforms since it's all I've ever used for that role, supposedly the service management is quite an improvement over Linux and BSD systems.
As a desktop platform, Solaris is alright, I prefer its CDE implementation by far over competing SysVs mostly due to little enhancements like GWM and sdtperfmeter, but it's obviously lacking in turnkey binaries for desktop software since the community focuses more on the server side of things than aging workstations for pretty obvious reasons. Nonetheless, StarOffice and OpenOffice are reasonably good for most jobs, Firefox 31 is fine, plenty of IDEs and other development-related packages, the Sun Studio compiler set beats the shit out of GCC on SPARC as well.
I don't really like 11 as much, unless you plan on going for certs or other resume-padding stuff that would benefit from being aware of newer features, 10 is lighter weight, more exciting and a little more compatible especially when it comes to workstation usage.
OpenCSW will keep pretty much all of your outgoing services up to date. I think the only major things I've seen from skimming CVEs are all NFS-related.
>I don't think any of the SPARC equipment you can afford is capable of running Solaris 11
You can get 16-core/32GB RAM UltraSPARC T2 boxes for pennies right now, T1 systems are even cheaper. Been thinking of picking up a T1000 for $50 off of Ebay lately.
test[/test]
[test]kek[/test]
Christ using CDE On an ultrawide.
That's just 3 1280x1024 monitors
>In all seriousness, those old SPARCs are massive space heaters
I keep one in my desk that barely eats more power than a light bulb at maximum load and puts out about the same level of heat, you don't have to go with a quad-socket monster if you don't want to, SPARC boxes are actually probably some of the better non-x86/Unix boxes when it comes to power and heat since Sun was probably the only big-name vendor that really cared for the low end in that category.
>They were a server company.
Towards the end after they finally shitcanned the Ultra 25/45s, but that was for barely a few years, for most of its life Sun was practically the face of traditional RISC and Unix on the desktop, even post-dotcom bubble.
Not to say servers weren't a significant piece of them none the less, Slowlaris was the way to go for web hosting for a long time.
I want to pick up one of those 8c/64t UltraSPARC machines for OpenBSD, any specific models I should look for?
>SPARC aside, what do you Sup Forumsentoomen think of Solaris as an OS (other than that it's proprietary)?
Man, fuck Oracle.
I'm still fucking livid whenever I think about what Oracle has done to everything Sun was.
there's no reason to bother these days with Solaris
but if you just want a SPARC box to fuck around with, go right ahead, could be fun
As what? That is a blanket statement that doesn't make sense.
Illumos Foundation should GPL the kernel if they want to rescue Solaris.
Just saying.
Why? I can't really see how GPLing it would really contribute anything meaningful to its development.
Solaris admin here (well, Solaris 10 and earlier).
Depending on what you WANT to accomplish, Solaris is an excellent OS.
Running JVMs? Solaris kicks ass.
Running as an NFS share for a ZFS pool? Solaris kicks ass.
Running an enterprise eCommerce stack? Solaris kicks ass.
Running Oracle DBs? Solaris kicks ass.
Day to day screwing around on a Unix (or Unix like) system? No reason not to go BSD, Linux, or whatever else.
There are a few things I personally really like about Solaris:
- ZFS, the greatest of all filesystems
- Service Admin (svcadm) and related tools are EXCELLENT when your services are registered. Nice and verbose with easy to read output (downside, XML configs instead of easy to read scripts)
- Easy to use but super tweakable network configurations. Aggregating multiple NICs and creating complex routes is easier on Solaris than on RHEL (at least for me)
- Live upgrades
All that being said, being a Solaris admin is seen as a dead end in a lot of places. Oracle burned a lot of bridges with their handling of Solaris and a good many companies went to Linux (and x86) after Oracle acquired Sun. When I started (6-7 years ago) we were 95% Solaris and 5% Linux (RHEL and Suse). We are now 85% Linux and 15% Solaris (mostly just boxes running our DBs and some legacy apps). We plan to swap out that remainder and transition all but about 5 (not percent, five physical systems) SPARC hosts.
But, if getting used to Solaris and screwing with it is something you wanna do: go for it. I'd look at getting a T2000 or T5120. Last I looked you could score a T2000 for ~$100 on eBay. But that was a while ago.
I personally keep a T3 in my home office to do some light tooling around on. I'm not much for gaming, but Solaris kicks ass as a Minecraft server if that's your thing (the reality is that any performance difference you might notice on a SPARC box running Solaris vs an x86 box running Debian as a MC server is likely negligible)
tl;dr - mostly dead, still fun
Original developers couldn't neither and there you have.
In this day and age you either make your software freedom friendly or is forgotten.
>Running JVMs? Solaris kicks ass.
Care to explain? I was always curious of Solaris really was a better Java platform.
It sucks how Oracle has killed it like that though, their new SPARC hardware seems pretty alright, too.
What is this familiar script?
The story of Solaris is what you are remembering my friend. Solaris developers in particular.
>Original developers couldn't neither and there you have.
But how would a license swap fix that? There's nothing stopping you from contributing to the project right now.
>In this day and age you either make your software freedom friendly or is forgotten.
Huh? The platform was doing just fine under its current license before the Oracle buyout, the problem with Illumos is that it's just plain irrelevant, the distributions feel amateurish and in general they're just a pain to work with. I wouldn't touch OpenIndiana with a ten foot pole if I could get a hold of Solaris 10 drivers for my NIC.
Visionary compsci teachers might told you that in college.
License compatibility goes beyond the subject of software engineering. Just think on it like a mix of propaganda to bring developers, but is more complicated.
>The platform was doing just fine under its current license before the Oracle buyout
And yet the project is dying. Call it development politics, but with a license like the GPL you have a more stable scenario for bringing developers.
I administer about an inventory of 500-600 servers using Solaris 10-11.
I like Solaris 11.
>Just think on it like a mix of propaganda to bring developers, but is more complicated.
I can see it from that angle, but I don't know. I think most of the types who use GPL software for the freedom aspect are more than fine with GNU/Linux and I can't see them wanting to touch SysV, unless there's something you're getting at that I'm totally missing.
Wasn't the specific idea of the CDDL to fuck over Oracle and company in the first place anyway to keep it free and open to anyone who wanted to audit or modify it? Would Sun even have been legally allowed to GPL OpenSolaris and by extension, Illumos? Most SysVs are so laden with foreign IP that it basically makes it impossible to totally open up the whole thing in such a way.
>And yet the project is dying.
Well, yeah, as I tried to imply, the Oracle buyout really put a dent in it, and right now it's a mess.
What parts do you like about it more than 10? My Sun boxes are all UltraSPARC II gear that can't run it, so I've never really done more than loading it into VMWare and using it for web surfing/basic office work where it was obviously nothing exciting.
>1. Security through obscurity.
does not exist. it's a false sense of security.
>2. Shits and giggles.
If you want to shit your pants, be my guest, just don't drag Solaris, the Java Enterprise Server operating system into it.
Oracle is known to dispute licenses, and so is FSF. But while Oracle wants to stop all foreign development or whatever, the GPL is the exact opposite.
Maybe is a long shot and Linux got all the attention, but Solaris still has a userbase that can tell devs what they are missing.
Of course, wait another five years and you no longer have that opportunity and all the possibility of propaganda is gone, along with the last remains of the current userbase except for harcore lovers.
We patch all this servers monthly (we are 3 people). Patching the 10's is a mess with Ops Center because it doesn't work as it should always.
Solaris ABE's never work with the ABE you select with luactivate, specially if it is an LDOM with directly assigned disks from HBA's.
So just doing the patching before maintenance windows and rebooting after with Solaris 11 is quite pleasant.
I hate the fact of installing IDR's every month, having some DB servers always outdated because poor Oracle support. Which might have to be with that we are the only morons updating this amount of servers monthly to keep it always up-to-date.
Aaaand, T3-2 servers are fucking lemons. Always crashing. I think that if we just installed Sol11 on them they would work better.
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