{"id":53,"date":"2008-06-03T16:49:32","date_gmt":"2008-06-03T21:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cae.tntech.edu\/mwr\/2008\/06\/03\/some-days-i-just-hate-solaris\/"},"modified":"2024-10-27T14:26:19","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T14:26:19","slug":"some-days-i-just-hate-solaris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/2008\/06\/03\/some-days-i-just-hate-solaris\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Days, I Just Hate Solaris"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in 2000, when some of us in engineering were talking about how best to improve our facilities for high-performance and research computing for our graduate students, we came to a few conclusions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Software was more important than hardware.<\/li>\n<li>Some software ran only under Windows, some had no Windows version at all.<\/li>\n<li>Of the non-Windows software people cared about, there was always a version for Solaris. There was often a version for most other Unixes, but regardless of the company, they always had a Solaris version.<\/li>\n<li>Sun&#8217;s matching grant program for education was awesome.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And to be fair, for some operations, our Sun Blade 1000 workstations blow the doors off of our Dell Precision Workstations with 3x the clock cycles. We&#8217;ve had very little hardware trouble from the Suns, and the aforementioned matching grant program and judicious use of third-party upgrade vendors let us buy two decked out Ultra 80 workstations on a budget that was originally allocated for one decked out workstation and one considerably lower-specced one.<\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;s little to no excuse for the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/group\/comp.unix.solaris\/msg\/fdb9e7d3a0bef32a\">patchadd rewrites every byte of \/var\/sadm\/install\/contents every time you do a file operation<\/a>. During jumpstarts, I manage to put that file in a tmpfs for faster access, but before that, I couldn&#8217;t do a single Solaris-only Jumpstart install in less than half a day.<\/li>\n<li>Solaris 10 includes Samba. Solaris 10&#8217;s Samba includes winbind, which is what I use on my Debian systems to convert Active Directory accounts to Unix ones. But the Solaris 10 winbind doesn&#8217;t include the idmap_rid backend for consistently converting an Active Directory RID into a Unix UID, which confuses NFS mightily. I thought blastwave&#8217;s or sunfreeware&#8217;s Samba packages might be better, but they weren&#8217;t. I found <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.sun.com\/app\/docs\/doc\/819-3063\/ciajejfa?a=view\">these instructions for configuring winbind and idmap_rid for Solaris<\/a>, but they&#8217;re squirreled off in a manual for Sun Cluster Data Services. What reason might they have for not compiling in idmap_rid by default? Am I the only person who uses Active Directory to generate UIDs for a central NFS and Samba server?<\/li>\n<li>Today, during an attempt to install and test Matlab 7.6, I found that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opensolaris.org\/jive\/message.jspa?messageID=242029#242029\">X11 forwarding is broken on recently-patched Solaris systems<\/a> like mine. A similar bug came up in 2005 and sat unfixed for a few months. The usual fix of telling sshd to only listen on IPv4 interfaces in sshd_config isn&#8217;t enough, though. You actually have to add the <code>-4<\/code> argument to the sshd service file.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I hate throwing away tens of thousands of dollars of perfectly functional hardware. I could install Debian&#8217;s sparc port on them, but why? I&#8217;d lose access to Ansys, Matlab, and all the other packages that are the reason I have these systems in the first place. And letting them languish like they did for years before I got into the managed infrastructure business seems a waste. Solaris 10, puppet, and the newer firmware that allows PXE booting is such a vast improvement over earlier versions for what I need to do, but there&#8217;s still some distance to go before it&#8217;s up to Debian standards.<\/p>\n<p>If we went through the same evaluation process in 2002, I&#8217;d probably not have any Solaris sytems at all. Matlab, Maple, Ansys, Abaqus, etc. were all coming out with (or had already come out with) Linux versions. We&#8217;d have spent a lot less on hardware, and some jobs just love the extra clock cycles available on an Intel CPU.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in 2000, when some of us in engineering were talking about how best to improve our facilities for high-performance and research computing for our graduate students, we came to a few conclusions: Software was more important than hardware. Some software ran only under Windows, some had no Windows version at all. Of the non-Windows &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/2008\/06\/03\/some-days-i-just-hate-solaris\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Some Days, I Just Hate Solaris&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infrastructures","category-solaris","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}