Over Two Years!

Last updated: Sun, 06 May 2007 09:18:00 GMT

Yes, that's how long Solaris 10 has been out.

There are some interesting discussions going on over at Blastwave central, exciting changes (potentially) afoot. As an extremely junior maintainer, I'm keeping my trap shut, but I have at least been persuaded that I should be doing what little I do within the framework of their automated build system, rather than just rolling my own and leaving it at that.

Unsurprisingly, there are contributors from Sun, and from OpenSolaris, and one guy in particular said something (twice, no less!) that made me laugh. On the off-chance that he reads this (he won't) I have to say that I agree with much of what he's said to date, but I'm not about to assult him with personal email about such a minor point, nor post off-topic in public.

Solaris 8 has at least one foot in the grave, Solaris 9 long in the tooth. Fair enough, they've been out a fair while now. But they're still widely used. This particular chap keeps stating that "Solaris 10 is over two years old now!".

His emphasis.

Well, technically he's right, but what of it? Sun did what they always do — shunt the final year's beta testing onto the customer. We've had so many kernel patches that we're onto our second stream of kernel updates. We've changed bootloader. I can still panic a Solaris 10 box just by switching on IPQoS. I've burned hours of development time dancing around moronic mistakes and obvious omissions in new features. I've shortened my life three times by subjecting myself to "two hour" patching sessions that turned into 12 hour bowel-surgery marathons or, worse, reinstallations all because they can't quite get their patch manager to play nice with their other features, or their operating system to identify devices correctly. I'm too old to be greeting the dawn chorus with a hunched back and a belly full of coffee, staring blindly at some wad of console output.

So, yes, it might have been out for two years, but it sure as eggs hasn't been a laid-back, fun-filled two years.

Should we really strike camp and turn our backs on Solaris 8? Probably, yes. Has Solaris 10 been ready for use for over two years? No, but it's probably ready now.

I sound angry, but I really was chuckling. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe I should thank my lucky stars that I'm a Solaris sysadmin, not a Windows 2K3 admin. Actually, I do, every damned day.

Maybe, though, that was his point — it's been out for two years, it's all ship-shape, so now's the time to jump on board and settle in for four or five years of plain sailing.

So, you want to buy a zone? Going cheep!