Date: Sat, 10 Feb 96 09:42:56 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #5 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 10 Feb 96 Volume 9 : Issue 5 Today's Topics: 2.4 on SS2 (2 msgs) Commercial Communication packages for SS2/4.1.3 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > @net-kitchen.com | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / | | WWW Archive access: http://www.net-kitchen.com/~sah | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 12:11:04 -0800 From: Jim Murff Subject: 2.4 on SS2 To: Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com >Date: Wed, 31 Jan 96 20:09:03 -0500 (EST) >From: woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) >Subject: Commercial Communication packages for SS2/4.1.3 >To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com > >> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 14:49:00 -0500 >> From: "fadi (f.) mehanna" >> To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com >> >>> I am also thinking to upgrade my SS2 running 4.1.3_U1 sun4c, to >>> Solaris 2.3/4/5 ?? >>> What do you think of that?? good move, bad move, ??? >> >>"bad move" ;-) >> >>You might be more interested in running NetBSD/sparc-1.1. I've ran one >>such IPC with -current for a while about May of last year, and we're >>building another (with 1.1) for a customer now. >> >>It feels slightly faster than SunOS-4.1.4 did, even just as an "X >>terminal", and of course as operating systems goes NetBSD is quite a bit >>more modern, secure, and supported than S(t)unOS. Of it is essentially >>SunOS binary compatible too, so long as you load it up with a copy of >>the SunOS shared libraries. >> >>-- >> Greg A. Woods I disagree. I *really* like 2.4 except for the crappy printing. I run it and find it runs very well on SS2 w/48Mb at home. I do a lot of development and have gotten all my favorite tools running with minimal problems. I have recently gotten 2.5 and plan to upgrade to improve some of the above mentioned 'drawbacks'. It is fast once booted and has many improvements. The cdrom booting into OW is a life when you trash your root partition (who me?) :) anyway I do like BSD but there isn't any need to not to us2 2.4 unless the spirit moves you. As far as 2.5 I have attached a summary off the sun managers list that some of you might find useful. -jim ---------- To: sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu Subject: Summary: How stable is solaris2.5 Hi All, I had a asked a set of 6 questions regarding solaris2.5 stability, problems, ease of installation etc. I got back 16 responses. Many people have asked for the summary. So, I am sending this without waiting for any more responses. Each one of my questions will be followed by a summary of answers that I got. 1) How stable has solaris2.5 been, particularly are there any known NIS+/NFS/ automounter problems. A) Most of them replied that it has been very stable. They have been using it between 2 and 3 months some with large number of clients. One reply was that they dont use automounter but they use amd. One interesting reply: It has worked well for us. However, its performance still isnt quite as good as 4.1.4. It beats the heck out of 2.4. Another sys admin responded that they have less automounter problems since 2.5. Overall it seems better and requires less number of additional patches as compared to 2.4 2) How easy was the upgrade. Do we have to install from scratch or is the upgrade working? What about other software installed on the system? A) one reply was: Hmmm. I did a backup of my /etc/-configs (passwd/shadow, inetd.conf, goups, services and so on) then I did a scratch-install. This I was able to do, because in a clean installation, I got all add-on software installed under /opt. (I preserved that one.) This means, ALL software we do install, does NO nodifications to usr-tree ! (Only one link left: /usr/local -> /opt (SYMLINK)). That was it. (I do have SPARC-Compilers bundled, and I did updatethen to the recent version, when I did update the OS, so I did not need to take care of their change to /var/sadm...) another reply was . Don't forget to read the relaese note about performing an upgrade. There are some special hints of things you should take care. One other important answer was / and /usr needs to be bigger for the upgrade. All the others replied that it is easier to do an install from scratch and that they do it. I myself think that one should save the existing OS disk as it is for use in a backout plan in case things dont go well and then do an install from scratch. (This is mainly for the servers). 3) I read that Solaris2.5 has 30% more performance improvement. Has this been true in your case? If so, how did you measure it? A) first answer was good: It at least takes much shorter time to reconfigure /dev and /devices. Also, look at the difference in kernel size: Solaris 2.5 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 631396 Oct 30 18:07 unix Solaris 2.4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 1073692 Sep 21 15:33 unix second answer: While I have no benchmarks to give official numbers, we have found Solaris 2.5 to be much faster than our SunOS machines. So much so that we moved a copy of our source code to our first Solaris 2.5 system so we could run major shell scripts on the Solaris system totally for performance reasons. third answer: Yes: Do a loop: 10000 * times execute a shellscript: #!/bin/sh date uname -a on a idle system and run time over it. (All run from /tmp in a ramdisk (tmpfs) on a SS10-40: The 2.5 ist 27% faster than the 2.4. (It was the SAME machine.) NFS seems to be faster too, but I cannot say details yet. All other answers were saying the same. Users and sysadmins could feel the speed but did not measure it. 4) I also read that Solaris2.5 has a better admintool? Have you tried this? A) anwer one. Yes, much better, but a license key will have to be obtained from Sun, a two day wait. admintool has hung the X display server of my workstation many times when being redisplayed remotely. another answer was: The new admintool under 2.5 is written in motif and has not so much features like in 2.4. You could not change or add users in NIS or NIS+, for example. If you want to do this, you have to install Solstice Adminsuite, which is included in the server Edition of 2.5 another he admintool changed and is one together with swmtool. But you need also AdminSuite2.1 for the configuration of OS Server etc., what was=20 the job of admintool in the 2.4 release Most of the other answers were pretty much the same. They are saying that you need to use solstice adminsuite which is slick and that it comes with the server edition of sol2.5. 5) Any other experiences with Sol2.5 good or bad? Most answers were good and more stable. a different one was. Some bugs are still left. Cronlog is never cycled, kernel starts all rc.*/* script with a umask of 000 another one You need a little bit of your time to see the new concepts in the admin policy. After this time of "brain adjustment" I prefer the new way. (for expample: You don't need to decide if the system will be an OS = Server or not at the installation time cause you could convert a standalone machine at any time to a OS Server with the AdminSuite) yet another, Its great that S2.5, (especially for server) come with meny addon software packages (ODBC drivers, Networker, Disksuite, Wabi, IPX stack ...) cron has a memory leak that has not been patched yet. 6) Has anyone set up an installserver from which all machines can be upgraded over the network? if so, please share your experiences. A) Few said that they were able to do it without any problems. Most of them did not try it. One good answer was This relies on the adminstuite being installed, so I have not been able to set up the jump start server yet. Couple of sys admins went as far as setting up diskless nodes, but did not install from the server on the network and are planning to do so. Thanks a lot to all those responded. The next time someone who has these questions will just have to look at the summary. Please pass on this info. Thanks to. anchi@starbase.neosoft.com gibian@typhoon.hascom.af.mil rk@theo-physik.uni-kiel.d400.de Florian.Meyer@munich.netsurf.de boenning@igd.fhg.de simong@aifs.org.au rgrimsha@mailbox.syr.edu maris@dogs.sun.swh.lv scott@spy.org dhzavatson@ucdavis.edu gregheim@mindspring.com melvil2c@ditco.disa.mil mikey@lanl.gov parks@xdiv.lanl.gov lzerbi@tlvsno.vim.tlt.alcatel -Ramesh. Ramesh Radhakrishnan UNIX Systems Administrator NETRIX Corp Herndon, VA. email: rr@netrix.com - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 5 Feb 96 16:09:18 -0500 (EST) From: woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) Subject: 2.4 on SS2 To: Jim Murff [ On Mon, February 5, 1996 at 12:11:04 (-0800), Jim Murff wrote: ] > Subject: Re: 2.4 on SS2 > > I disagree. I *really* like 2.4 except for the crappy printing. I run > it and find it runs very well on SS2 w/48Mb at home. I do a lot of development > and have gotten all my favorite tools running with minimal problems. > I have recently gotten 2.5 and plan to upgrade to improve some of the > above mentioned 'drawbacks'. It is fast once booted and has many > improvements. The cdrom booting into OW is a life > when you trash your root partition (who me?) :) anyway I do like BSD but > there isn't any need to not to us2 2.4 unless the spirit moves you. I know nothing of the specifics of the Solaris-2.4 print spooler, but I do know I far prefer the capabilities of SysVr4 print spoolers in general, even though they are a bit more difficult to configure, esp. in a network. You certainly can't beat the nifty toys modern commercail OS's have to facilitate installation, but unless you develop or test such tools (or have the misfortune of having to do many such installs), it's not that hard to do such things the old fashioned way, esp. when you're working on your hobby system. > As far as 2.5 I have attached a summary off the sun managers list that some of > you might find useful. I think those notes basically confirm what I said: its still quite big and perhaps not as fast as it could be; and you're tied to Sun's licensing and support. If NetBSD is faster than 4.1.4, and 4.1.4's faster than 2.5.... So, unless you have to run Solaris-2 at home to keep compatible with what you do at work, or you simply have deep pockets and like to see what's new from SunSoft, or you don't have the expertise to install NetBSD (why are you running a Sun at home? ;-) I wouldn't recommend running Solaris-2 on a home machine/LAN. Of course if you got deep enough pockets to have a sun4m or sun4u at home, you've no choice but to run SunOS for the next wee while! ;-) Personally I'd rather have a free OS for which I can get quick and free on-line support when the next major internet security scare happens. I'm not particularly paranoid, but I don't like feeling like a sitting duck without support either, esp. when such support isn't really available for SunOS-4, or costs an arm and a leg for SunOS-5. I also want to run NetBSD because it means I can run the same "modern" OS on both my aging Sun-3 hardware, as well as more modern SPARCs; *and* on non-Sun hardware too, such as my i486 PC. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP robohack!woods Planix, Inc. ; Secrets of the Weird - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Feb 1996 02:32:24 -0500 From: earl@baugh.org (Earl Baugh) Subject: Commercial Communication packages for SS2/4.1.3 To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com >From: "fadi (f.) mehanna" Writes: >I have a SUN SPARC 2 (sunos 4.1.3), configured as a standalone >wstation at home. I have Xserver installed locally. >.... >I am also thinking to upgrade my SS2 running 4.1.3_U1 sun4c, to >Solaris 2.3/4/5 ?? >What do you think of that?? good move, bad move, ??? I've got a SS2 here at the house and I had to consider exactly that same situation a while ago. (It's a SS2 with 32MB and about 2GB of disk now...) I decided to go to Solaris 2.X ( The actual path was a SS1 w/4.1.3->SS1 w/Solaris 2.3-> SS2->Solaris2.3 [here's where I was deciding on Solaris vs 4.1.3_U1 or 4.1.4...it was tough] now it's up to SS2->Solaris2.4 (soon 2.5) ) Solaris vs Sun OS vs NetBSD etc. If you've got access which will allow you to continue moving forward on whatever path you choose (i.e. continuing support to newer releases and patches) then whatever you choose you'll probably do no wrong. However, I have to admit, Solaris isn't as horrible now as it was with the first 2 or 3 releases of version 2.X. 2.4 is stable, and has served me rather well. I find that where I want to upgrade software packages for the SS2, that the newest versions always support Solaris and sometimes aren't even available for Sun OS (even some compilable software... though that's the exception instead of the rule for stuff you get in source form...) You'll find you'll not really have much problem with it unless you've got a fairly deep BSD background (I do) but even then it just takes a while to feel as "comfortable" with it as you do with BSD. It's taken me over a year to feel "comfortable" again...I still will continue to use BSD versions of ps and other things instead of the SVR4 versions...can't break all the habits...8-) Probably the most annoying feature is the omission of a C compiler. However, it's easy enough to find a compiled version of gcc on the net for it. (another thing that was a pain is the movement of make, ar, etc into the /usr/ccs/bin directory...that was "intutitive"..NOT!) There are some nice features that I wish I had in 4.1.3 (some mods to VI, the "package" functionality is nice [pkgadd, etc..allowing for more "consistant" installations AND removals of SW], a X11R5 based version of OpenWindows, the ability to easily use DNS without YP, etc) But it'll all depend on what you consider "good" features, and which thing you don't care about... Whether we like it or not, Sun is moving to Solaris and dragging folks behind them...(I seem to recall a similar but not quite as painful transition when Sun moved from Sun OS 3.5 to 4.0...and then 4.0.1 and then 4.0.2 and then 4.0.3...8-) ) So, if keeping up with stuff to some degree is important to you, I'd consider it. It doesn't run hugely different when you get it all configured if it's a "single user" machine for the most part. Though, I'll tell you that without something close to 32MB of memory you'll find it sluggy for any large applications... 'later Earl the Squirrel Internet : home - earl@baugh.org work - baugh@isx.com Thank you for playing stump the clown. - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************