[indiana-discuss] Simple Question #1

[Jeff Abbott]

Ben Creitz wrote:

> ... to be answered in a couple of words.  This one is for those of you
> who either wanted to play with OpenSolaris, or who started to play
> with it, only to quickly drop it.
> 
> What stopped you?

I played with it briefly, and dropped it.  What stopped me is that I 
can't seem to wrap my head around the best way to manage and maintain an 
OpenSolaris system in production.  I know Joyent is doing it, and I 
don't think they're alone, but I don't know how they keep up with 
patching and maintenance.  They have a whole lot more Solaris experience 
than I do, of course -- my "Unix" background is all Linux -- but it 
still seemed to be a very difficult conceptual mountain to climb.

For what it's worth, I also found the same problem with Solaris 10 in my 
evaluations.  I'm accustomed to my Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and 
Ubuntu machines, where I let up2date, yum, and apt do all the work.  I 
either trust the upstream vendors' repositories, or I point the update 
tools to my own repos which I only let vetted and tested updates into. 
That appears to be exceedingly complicated on Solaris 10 without a 
service plan, and near impossible on OpenSolaris.

I want the power of OpenSolaris -- ZFS, DTrace, rock-solid kernel and 
memory management, and an open development model and community -- with 
the ease-of-maintenance of the Linux distributions to which I am 
accustomed.  Maybe that's outside the scope of Indiana, but it's what I 
was looking for when I joined the list.  Nexenta comes very, very close 
to what I'm after, but I have reservations about considering it for 
production use.

Thanks,
Jeff