Unix or Linux?

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: jhu

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Holy shit, n0c lives...

no one ever mentions me when i leave and come back after a few years. in fact, what happened to all the old timers?

Sorry, I didn't really know you :^(

n0c was pretty active when I first joined, and he's one of more educated posters, so he stood out to me.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: lxskllr
Sorry, I didn't really know you :^(

n0c was pretty active when I first joined, and he's one of more educated posters, so he stood out to me.

Less educated, more vocal.

Hi jhu!

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: lxskllr
Sorry, I didn't really know you :^(

n0c was pretty active when I first joined, and he's one of more educated posters, so he stood out to me.

Less educated, more vocal.

Hi jhu!

drag needs to come back IMO

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Holy shit, n0c lives...

Depends on your definition of lives.

Oh man I was laughing so hard while watching this!

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: lxskllr

n0c was pretty active when I first joined, and he's one of more educated posters, so he stood out to me.

education == post count, right?

 

[BW86]

Linux

I thought Ubuntu was an easy way to get into Linux

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Brazen

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Holy shit, n0c lives...

Depends on your definition of lives.

Oh man I was laughing so hard while watching this!

You should catch it live.

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: fyleow
FWIW having worked with OS X, Linux, and some flavors with UNIX I feel that it's a bit of a mixed bag whether the skills transfer or not. I know at work we had a bunch of scripts that worked fine in Linux but when moved to our Solaris box it would not work correctly. Some of the common commands like date and sed have different parameters and options between the systems. OS X is also a bit different from the rest. For example I don't think cron is used anymore and fstab isn't either.

For a lot of those commands you can blame the GNU extensions. Scripting for portability isn't easy, but it's generally worth it.

 

[degibson]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
For a lot of those commands you can blame the GNU extensions. Scripting for portability isn't easy, but it's generally worth it.

Every time I work on Solaris I curse GNU and my reliance upon it. Curses to their convenience flags!

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: jhu

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Holy shit, n0c lives...

no one ever mentions me when i leave and come back after a few years. in fact, what happened to all the old timers?

Hi!

 

[jersiq]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
I thought Unix was basically dead at this point. Is that something people actually go out and buy to install on a new server?

Quite a bit of telelcommunications equipment still runs on Sun Servers and Solaris.
And when I say a lot, I mean I can look out into my switch room and count at least 50+ Sun boxes running Solaris.

Sure you pay for it, but it's worth it when dealing with some High Availability equipment. The biggest reason we still do this is that Sun supports the hardware mostly. Nothing beats having a faulty component in a server and having a techinician come out and replace it within 2 hours. Of course, the servers I use are very specialized in application.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Originally posted by: jhu

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Holy shit, n0c lives...

no one ever mentions me when i leave and come back after a few years. in fact, what happened to all the old timers?

I'm still around

 

[Fallen Kell]

Originally posted by: jersiq

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
I thought Unix was basically dead at this point. Is that something people actually go out and buy to install on a new server?

Quite a bit of telelcommunications equipment still runs on Sun Servers and Solaris.
And when I say a lot, I mean I can look out into my switch room and count at least 50+ Sun boxes running Solaris.

Sure you pay for it, but it's worth it when dealing with some High Availability equipment. The biggest reason we still do this is that Sun supports the hardware mostly. Nothing beats having a faulty component in a server and having a techinician come out and replace it within 2 hours. Of course, the servers I use are very specialized in application.

I can look into my server room and count 700 systems that run Solaris... It is a nice OS. A lot of people think it is slow, but those were mainly people who only used it on a single core box or something like a sunblade100-150 workstation. In highly multi-core boxes, there is little comparison. Heck we have a system with 128 cores and it is a monster of a file server.

Most OOS linux software will compile. There might be some hassle getting all the library files that are needed, but once you get gcc, libiconv, libexpat, zlib, gdk2, gtk+, truetype, and fontconfig installed, you are pretty much set to be able to compile just about anything on Solaris (there might be some options that you have to manually set in the config, but almost all of them work eventually).

And did someone mention that Solaris is stable? I really mean that. We have had systems last 4+ years without the need for a reboot.

 

[Brazen]

Oh yeah, well I can look out into my server room and count 5000 systems that run Solaris.

I had a Fedore Core system that ran for 3 years without a reboot, on a recycled desktop that was like 6 years old at the time of recycling, until the power supply died. That story is actually true. That was like a year ago. I replaced the power supply, booted it back up and haven't touched it since then.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Holy shit, n0c lives...

Apparently I haven't visited here in so long I didn't know n0c was away. Sorry, n0c.

/hangs head in shame

Now that I think about it I miss drag's incredibly detailed posts too...

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: Brazen
Oh yeah, well I can look out into my server room and count 5000 systems that run Solaris.

I had a Fedore Core system that ran for 3 years without a reboot, on a recycled desktop that was like 6 years old at the time of recycling, until the power supply died. That story is actually true. That was like a year ago. I replaced the power supply, booted it back up and haven't touched it since then.

Lucky you!
My first home fileserver had a similar pedigree but the power supply failure was not quite as nice. It let the smoke out of every drive and PCI card and the motherboard!

 

[cliffordsfleas]

I thought Unix was basically dead at this point. Is that something people actually go out and buy to install on a new server?

Sure, why not. SCO Unix is dead though. They tried to sue just about everyone in the computer world for infringing on copyrights (money grab anyone?) and then suddenly after numerous failed lawsuits they declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But that's just one commercial brand/flavor of unix. BSD (another flavor of Unix) has a tremendous technical following and rightfully so. OpenBSD is regarded as perhaps being the worlds most secure operating system. NetBSD is regarded as potentially being the worlds most portable operating system - it'll even run on a Sega Dreamcast among other things. FreeBSD is the more mainstream BSD for desktop users and many servers. There are a number of commercial unix versions still out there as well that remain in use. Linux is closely related to Unix in many ways.

Absolutely -- lots of midrange+ new machines run Unix of some kind. There's not a lot of point in running anything non-Linux on current x86 machines. That might change for the ~8+ core products coming down the pipe.

I know of a school district (several towns) that runs Linux for all their desktops and BSD for all their server's. BSD is just a tad industrious for most home hobbyists and desktop users. It's certainly fun to play with and it's a great system but you will find more applications available for linux and a larger user support base/common knowledge base.
Having played with BSD a fair bit I'd say there's plenty of point running it on x86 machines - that said, it is a bit simpler (in terms of software availability, support, and hardware compatibility) to stick to Linux. If that's what you mean by saying there's not a lot of point in running anything non-Linux on current x86 machines.

Unfortunately when it comes to web design, or image, film or audio editing... windows is still winning. If Adobe and a few other manufacturers began supporting Linux that would change very quickly.

 

[ultimatebob]

About 80% of what you'll learn in Linux will transfer easily over to commercial UNIX versions like Solaris and AIX. Some of the hardware management (like file systems) and GUI options are different in commercial UNIX, but almost all of the command line knowledge will transfer over nicely.

But, hey... if you can get an old SPARCStation or RS/6000 off of eBay... give them a try as well.

 

[ultimatebob]

Originally posted by: Brazen
Oh yeah, well I can look out into my server room and count 5000 systems that run Solaris.

I had a Fedore Core system that ran for 3 years without a reboot, on a recycled desktop that was like 6 years old at the time of recycling, until the power supply died. That story is actually true. That was like a year ago. I replaced the power supply, booted it back up and haven't touched it since then.

Yeah... I could have walked into the server room at my old job and counted about 300 servers that were still running either AIX or HP/UX. Big businesses still love the stability and 24/7 support of the big iron commercial servers.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
About 80% of what you'll learn in Linux will transfer easily over to commercial UNIX versions like Solaris and AIX. Some of the hardware management (like file systems) and GUI options are different in commercial UNIX, but almost all of the command line knowledge will transfer over nicely.

But, hey... if you can get an old SPARCStation or RS/6000 off of eBay... give them a try as well.

Avoid the SPARC{stations,servers}. Too loud, power hungry, and slow to be worth it. UltraSPARCs will be a bit better and should be VERY cheap.

Proud owner of ss10, ss20.

 

[degibson]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Proud owner of ss10, ss20.

My ss20 broke .

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
About 80% of what you'll learn in Linux will transfer easily over to commercial UNIX versions like Solaris and AIX. Some of the hardware management (like file systems) and GUI options are different in commercial UNIX, but almost all of the command line knowledge will transfer over nicely.

But, hey... if you can get an old SPARCStation or RS/6000 off of eBay... give them a try as well.

Avoid the SPARC{stations,servers}. Too loud, power hungry, and slow to be worth it. UltraSPARCs will be a bit better and should be VERY cheap.

Proud owner of ss10, ss20.

Got an ss20 at home but didn't have the time to do anything with it before i hade to leave again.

Got it for as cheap as you can get anything.

So what should i run on it?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: JohnOfSheffield

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
About 80% of what you'll learn in Linux will transfer easily over to commercial UNIX versions like Solaris and AIX. Some of the hardware management (like file systems) and GUI options are different in commercial UNIX, but almost all of the command line knowledge will transfer over nicely.

But, hey... if you can get an old SPARCStation or RS/6000 off of eBay... give them a try as well.

Avoid the SPARC{stations,servers}. Too loud, power hungry, and slow to be worth it. UltraSPARCs will be a bit better and should be VERY cheap.

Proud owner of ss10, ss20.

Got an ss20 at home but didn't have the time to do anything with it before i hade to leave again.

Got it for as cheap as you can get anything.

So what should i run on it?

I think Solaris 9 or 10 dropped support for that processor. Linux or the BSDs (Net & Open) should work fine.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
About 80% of what you'll learn in Linux will transfer easily over to commercial UNIX versions like Solaris and AIX. Some of the hardware management (like file systems) and GUI options are different in commercial UNIX, but almost all of the command line knowledge will transfer over nicely.

But, hey... if you can get an old SPARCStation or RS/6000 off of eBay... give them a try as well.

Avoid the SPARC{stations,servers}. Too loud, power hungry, and slow to be worth it. UltraSPARCs will be a bit better and should be VERY cheap.

Proud owner of ss10, ss20.

I picked up my Ultra60 (2GB RAM, 2x450MHz UltraSparc II processors, 2x18GB 15k RPM SCSI hard drives, CD-ROM) for $20. It "didn't power on when power button pressed", in the desc, too bad the idiots didn't realize there was a second power button on the keyboard, which was the second button I pushed, and sure enough, it powered right up. I can fix the power button with a $10 replacement part from Sun, but I havn't bothered since I can use the keyboard. I run my Apache server on the Ultra60. I also added a USB/Firewire PCI card to it and attached a couple 300GB external hard drives.

You can find some really good deals on ebay especially if you don't mind working a bit on the hardware and buy the "non-working" systems and then do some troubleshooting and pick up parts. I will say this, the most expensive thing will probably be hard drives, especially if you get something like a Sunblade1000 or anything that uses fibre-channel(FC) drives. The Ultra30/60/80 E250/E450/220R boxes are all pretty darn cheap and still capabile systems if you put 2GB RAM or more (only 80 and E450 will take more) and at least 2 450MHz CPUs. The CPUs are pretty cheap even if you don't find a system with them in it already, as they go for about $15-20 (at least that is how much I spent to upgrade my E250).

Also, Sun has craploads of their technical docs available this class of system. And I mean everything from exactly how to open the side cover step-by-step replace a motherboard.

STAY AWAY from the Sunblade100 and 150 as well as Ultra5/10 and any SPARCstation. They are crap now. The Ultra 60 and 80 have aged much nicer and with adding a supported USB/Firewire PCI card and some cheap external disks, make really nice home fileservers (FTP, samba, and NFS).

Proud owner of a Ultra30, Ultra60, E250 and Sunblade2500.

Originally posted by: JohnOfSheffield

Got an ss20 at home but didn't have the time to do anything with it before i hade to leave again.

Got it for as cheap as you can get anything.

So what should i run on it?

As for JohnOfSheffield, you are kinda stuck. Solaris10 dropped support of the sun4m architecture and only supports sun4u architecture. Solaris 9 I believe supports sun4m. I also believe that it only takes s-bus cards, so you will have a difficult time trying to add anything to it like USB functionality (in fact I don't think there are any USB cards for that box), which means you are stuck with SCSI drives for everything, which means either very low capacity (9GB), or extremely expensive.