[indiana-discuss] Introduction

[Ben Creitz]

I just joined the list.  My name is Ben.  I am a sysadmin for a large
department in a large county in the Washington DC area.  My main
responsibility is to take care of Solaris 9 servers which host a big
web application on Oracle DB and App. Server.  When I took the job two
months ago, I had no Solaris experience, only Linux, so my impressions
of Solaris are still pretty fresh, if anybody wants to pick my brain.
One of my longer term projects is to plan the migration of the web
application from [Sun hardware + Solaris] to [Dell + Red Hat].  This
was decided before I was hired.  I look upon the next year or so that
I'll be supporting Solaris as a good opportunity to get my hands dirty
with it, so I'm trying to study it as much as I can.

I would like to raise one point about OpenSolaris's direction as it
relates to distributions like Belenix.  I personally like the GNU
utilities, and I personally think that Solaris would benefit from a
packaging infrastructure managed by yum or apt, I think /usr/bin/less
should be the default pager, I like the way Ubuntu's bash completes
command arguments, etc. etc.  But I avoid the offshoots of OpenSolaris
because it seems like the best way to spend my time tinkering would be
with something that I am pretty sure has a chance of becoming the next
Solaris.  That way I would be investing in my own job marketability
while tinkering.  I must be getting old!

Ben