[wplug] wow

Lance Tost ltost at pobox.com
Wed Sep 24 10:43:35 EDT 2003


On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Vanco, Donald wrote:
> 	Not arguing anyone's personal experience/opinion, but at one point
> in time I was getting a 50% failure rate on Sun hardware.  I had so many

I saw a lot of failures on some Sun hardware at a job as well.  However, 
it turns out it was due to a lack of cooling.  Once that was corrected, 
everything ran pretty smoothly.

> 	I think my overall bend is the waffling that Sun has shown over the
> years on a couple fronts - the support for Solaris x86 (which is OT) and
> support for Linux.  Listening to Sun is like watching Sybil

Not disagreeing with this.  No doubt that Sun is in it to make money and 
will use whatever they can to try to get ahead of MS.  No denying that 
they're getting pretty desparate too.

> 	I too have had issues with up2date - in my case annihilating Mozilla
> and destroying all "bluecurse" menu icons.  As far as kernel updates, well,
> that's always had a "caveat emptor" feel to it IMHO.  I have set up2date to

Sure, but my point was that I've personally never experienced a problem 
because of a Solaris kernel patch.  The same can't be said for Linux 
kernel patches.

> 	It's also worth noting that there's a setting in up2date that allows
> you to NOT upgrade packages whose local config files have been changed.
> "up2date --configure" is your friend.

Yep, I no longer automatically update kernels.  Of course, this makes me 
lazy about updating them so I'm often running with an old kernel for a 
long time before I have the time to sit down to see if it'll break 
anything.

> > and a couple more gig of RAM and dynamically configure it into the
> > running OS.  I don't believe Linux can do that (yet).  
> 	RAM and PCI cards - yes, possible today on appropriate hardware.
> CPUs - not yet (but IBM probably has it working in a lab, and for 2 years).

Really?  Gimme a url to some info on this... I'd like to read up on it.

> didn't say Linux was just plain bad - but they are saying it's not a server
> OS.  Funny, there's an @$$load of benchmarks for Enterprise class
> applications (Oracle, Sendmail, Reuters, SAP-R/3, etc) that kind of beg to
> differ.......

I tend to think the opposite.  I think Linux is more of a server OS than a
desktop OS.  *I* use it on the desktop, but I don't think it would go over
well with most of my co-workers... Sun's desktop (or new versions of Gnome
or KDE) could change that... but I doubt it.

BTW, have you ever tried installing SAP on a Linux box?  We're currently 
evaluating this and there are way more gotchas on Linux than Solaris.  For 
instance, SAP *only* supports a specific kernel (2.4.9-e.16enterprise) 
that you need to download from their ftp site and they only support a 
couple of the enterprise editions of Linux (Redhat and SuSE).  Now we're 
going to be stuck with kernel 2.4.9 (and all of the bugs that are found in 
it) until SAP provides a new kernel on their ftp site.  On Solaris, it's 
almost always safe to use the latest revision of the kernl.

-- 
Lance Tost <ltost at pobox.com>




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