Oracle Solaris Goes Downhill
Last year, I decided to upgrade my computer to Solaris 11 Express. Unfortunately, I updated one of my partitions to the newest version of ZFS. This was a mistake.
Solaris 11 Express did not support the Sun Ray. For almost a year now, Ele has had to boot up her computer just to check her e-mail. After an interminable wait, Oracle finally announced an update to Solaris 10, as well as Solaris 11 Early Adopter. So, I tried them. First was Solaris 10; after 10 months, the update to Solaris 10 did not even include the version of ZFS in Solaris 11 Express. That made Solaris 10 a nonstarter.
So, onto Solaris 11 Early Adopter. I really don't know how Oracle could have released this as an operating system. It is so bad that, if I was still working, I would refuse to install it even in our test lab.
First off, I've installed it four times on my server. Each time, the network has behaved a little differently. This aside, the network is the first biggest problem with Solaris 11. NWAM cannot be turned off. This is Solaris' "network auto magic" functionality. It is basically DHCP. The SMF service that is supposed to turn it off, doesn't. The network tools meant to give you a static IP address don't do anything. ipadm and dladm do nothing but spit out error messages. The only thing they did tell me was that Solaris 11 does not know how to assign networks. The pseudo-driver net0 points to the real driver e1000g1 and net1 points to e1000g0. Not that this matters, with the inability of the tools to operate on either the pseudo-driver or the real driver.
Next comes DNS. The XML file for SMF for setting up your system as a DNS server does not exist. Neither does the file for the DNS client. Since you can tell the system to be a DNS client (and it works, at least through sysconfig--the new name for sys-unconfig), this means that Oracle has already broken the SMF model. Based upon a previous discussion online about SMF, involving a question that was never answered, DNS does not appear to be the only thing broken here. SMF appears to keep some of its data in a database somewhere, a database that you cannot back up because nobody is saying where it is. Perhaps I am being a bit harsh here, but the lack of response to that thread, combined with Oracle's silence around everything else, leaves me very disheartened.
I have also been unable to compile software on Solaris 11 Early Adopter. It seems that the C preprocessor is unable to compile executables. This means that I can't build MediiaTomb on the system, which has been the server's main role since last year.
There are also other tools missing. I won't get into listing them all, but combined with the first three they leave a very bad taste in my mouth.
I have spent almost a week backing up my data, with several more days to go. When I am finished, I will install OpenIndiana. This is built on the last version of OpenSolaris, but it uses the Illumos kernel. This attempt to take all of the proprietary pieces in the Solaris kernel and replace them with open-source variants. OpenSolaris supported the Sun Ray software, but I know that OpenIndiana probably won't. I'm willing to live with that. Even being two years old, OpenSolaris was a much better operating system than Solaris 11 will probably ever be. I strongly suspect that Oracle will do the same thing with Solaris that it does with its unbreakable Linux. That is, take the updates provided by the open community, roll them into Solaris, and self the final product. Ellison will prove once again that he has no interest in giving back to the community. Him being a capitalist, this makes sense and is understandable. However, he should at least acknowledge that he's making his billions by riding on the backs of others.
I will keep a sharp eye out for what's happening at Joyent. Some of Sun's top engineers have left Oracle and joined Joyent. Their recent release of SmartOS shows that they will continue developing good product. Much of their work is being funneled into OpenIndiana, since it is all open source. And that's a good thing.
Rainer
Solaris 11 Express did not support the Sun Ray. For almost a year now, Ele has had to boot up her computer just to check her e-mail. After an interminable wait, Oracle finally announced an update to Solaris 10, as well as Solaris 11 Early Adopter. So, I tried them. First was Solaris 10; after 10 months, the update to Solaris 10 did not even include the version of ZFS in Solaris 11 Express. That made Solaris 10 a nonstarter.
So, onto Solaris 11 Early Adopter. I really don't know how Oracle could have released this as an operating system. It is so bad that, if I was still working, I would refuse to install it even in our test lab.
First off, I've installed it four times on my server. Each time, the network has behaved a little differently. This aside, the network is the first biggest problem with Solaris 11. NWAM cannot be turned off. This is Solaris' "network auto magic" functionality. It is basically DHCP. The SMF service that is supposed to turn it off, doesn't. The network tools meant to give you a static IP address don't do anything. ipadm and dladm do nothing but spit out error messages. The only thing they did tell me was that Solaris 11 does not know how to assign networks. The pseudo-driver net0 points to the real driver e1000g1 and net1 points to e1000g0. Not that this matters, with the inability of the tools to operate on either the pseudo-driver or the real driver.
Next comes DNS. The XML file for SMF for setting up your system as a DNS server does not exist. Neither does the file for the DNS client. Since you can tell the system to be a DNS client (and it works, at least through sysconfig--the new name for sys-unconfig), this means that Oracle has already broken the SMF model. Based upon a previous discussion online about SMF, involving a question that was never answered, DNS does not appear to be the only thing broken here. SMF appears to keep some of its data in a database somewhere, a database that you cannot back up because nobody is saying where it is. Perhaps I am being a bit harsh here, but the lack of response to that thread, combined with Oracle's silence around everything else, leaves me very disheartened.
I have also been unable to compile software on Solaris 11 Early Adopter. It seems that the C preprocessor is unable to compile executables. This means that I can't build MediiaTomb on the system, which has been the server's main role since last year.
There are also other tools missing. I won't get into listing them all, but combined with the first three they leave a very bad taste in my mouth.
I have spent almost a week backing up my data, with several more days to go. When I am finished, I will install OpenIndiana. This is built on the last version of OpenSolaris, but it uses the Illumos kernel. This attempt to take all of the proprietary pieces in the Solaris kernel and replace them with open-source variants. OpenSolaris supported the Sun Ray software, but I know that OpenIndiana probably won't. I'm willing to live with that. Even being two years old, OpenSolaris was a much better operating system than Solaris 11 will probably ever be. I strongly suspect that Oracle will do the same thing with Solaris that it does with its unbreakable Linux. That is, take the updates provided by the open community, roll them into Solaris, and self the final product. Ellison will prove once again that he has no interest in giving back to the community. Him being a capitalist, this makes sense and is understandable. However, he should at least acknowledge that he's making his billions by riding on the backs of others.
I will keep a sharp eye out for what's happening at Joyent. Some of Sun's top engineers have left Oracle and joined Joyent. Their recent release of SmartOS shows that they will continue developing good product. Much of their work is being funneled into OpenIndiana, since it is all open source. And that's a good thing.
Rainer
