Solaris Archive

Sun's announcement this week that it plans to make Solaris an "open-source" operating system has been met with mixed reactions from users and scepticism from open-source advocates. "I'm totally nonplussed by the announcement," said Dale Pickford, chief infrastructure officer at Ocwen Technology. Ocwen last year consolidated around 140 servers into several high-end Sun servers running Solaris - one with more than 100 processors. For smaller servers with four or fewer CPUs, Linux on Intel is suitable, Pickford said. But for systems larger than that, "the Sparc and Solaris environment really comes into its own," he said. "And once you start playing at that level anyway, you don't want to be messing with the OS." LinuxWorld has an article as well on the open sourcing of Java and Solaris.

Learn how to engage the MPSS feature of the Solaris 9 Operating System and how to analyze the performance effect. Elsewhere, this first of a two-part series about planning and implementing Sun Fire 15K/12K server Dynamic Reconfiguration provides an introduction to Sun Fire 15K/12K server DR and details the planning phase.

Sun Microsystems Inc. this week is planning to give users of its Solaris operating system a sneak peek at the next version and its new file system. Among the many new features of Solaris 10, due by year's end, is the DFS (Dynamic File System)—a 128-bit system that will automate many common tasks for system administrators.

Linux & Open-Source Center Editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols wishes Sun would either embrace Linux or stop using Solaris on Intel as a pawn against it.

Sun Microsystems may be selling servers running Linux, but that doesn't mean it is cutting back on the evolution of Solaris. Among its plans, the company is considering offering a free, open source version of its flagship operating system, said Jonathan Schwartz, the company's recently appointed president and chief operating officer. "Maybe we'll GPL it," Schwartz said of Solaris, referring to the GNU General Public License under which the Linux operating system is distributed. "We're still looking at that."

Sun Microsystems launched a handful of initiatives Monday designed to promote its talent to run Solaris on x86 systems. The company is trying to build on its install base of Solaris deployments, which are popular in the telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and government sectors, but have experienced increased competition from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and enterprise Linux offerings from Red Hat or SUSE.

This paper provides detailed discussion regarding the algorithm, implementation, kernel tunables, and messages you are likely to see on a system running the appropriate kernel updates.

Now available for download, Solaris 9-4/04 has left the nest, SunHelp.org reports.

The Solaris Operating System includes many file systems, and more are available as add-ons. Deciding which file system to apply to a particular application can be puzzling without insight into the design criteria and engineering tradeoffs that go into each product.

Janice Winsor details the two new installation configurations of the Solaris 9 release.

Solaris Express 02/04 is now available with exciting new features: partitioning a single Solaris instance into isolated application environments called "zones." It's a project similar to Linux Virtual Server (LVS).

Sun Microsystems Inc. will continue to offer the Trusted Solaris version of its operating system as a separate product, a company official said Tuesday, trying to clear up any confusion that Sun may have caused in the marketplace. Sun executives have said several times recently that security features from Trusted Solaris, a hardened version of Sun's OS used by the military, governments and some enterprises, will be added to its standard Solaris distribution. But the two product lines will continue to exist separately, said Ravi Iyer, Sun's group manager of systems security marketing.

Sun is rolling out a sweeping set of security enhancements to Solaris, punctuated by a kernel rewrite and a partnership with VeriSign. InfoWorld has an article too.

This article presents a fictional case study that illustrates the methodology, tools, and best practices used to migrate a Tru64 environment to a Solaris environment.