[wplug] wow

Lance Tost ltost at pobox.com
Tue Sep 23 21:35:07 EDT 2003


On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Keir Josephson wrote:
> I realize that I may be preaching to the choir, here, but, having used 
> both Red Hat ES 2.1 & Solaris in a production environment, I just have 
> to ask what's in the Sun Kool-Aid?!? Sun is one of those systems that 
> works fine as long as you don't touch it, patch it, or do anything with 
> the hardware config. On the other hand, RH has proven to be quite 
> flexible, especially with regards to performance running anything 
> Oracle.

I'm a huge fan of Linux.  I've been a user and admin for over 10 years.  
But I have to disagree with the statement about Sun.  I've been a Solaris 
admin for the past 5+ years and my experience has been quite the opposite.  
Our Solaris boxes run great and rarely have problems.  I apply 
"Recommended Patch Clusters" from Sun without thinking twice about it.  
I've never had a patch cluster break anything.  On the other hand, 
RedHat's up2date has bitten me a couple of times by overwriting apache 
configs, and occasionally updating my kernel to one that won't boot 
correctly.  BTW, higher end Sun boxes allow you to shutdown individual CPU 
and/or memory boards, remove them, and replace them all while the OS (and 
any apps) continue to run.  I believe if we decided tomorrow that our 4 
CPUs weren't enough for our SAP system, we could throw in a third board 
with 2 more CPUs and a couple more gig of RAM and dynamically configure it 
into the running OS.  I don't believe Linux can do that (yet).  FWIW, I 
don't feel that "Linux doesn't belong on the server" but I do feel that 
Solaris is still a better choice in some situations.

-- 
Lance Tost <ltost at pobox.com>




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