FreeBSD vs Solaris usefulness

[CurlyTheStooge]

What these distributions ship, and that they want money for nothing (and chicks for free?) when it comes to support. THAT is the problem, and I think we have a right to point that out. Don't you think?

I should re-word it to RHEL support from Linux and I for one, somewhat do agree with that. I've worked with RedHat support guys in the recent past and yeah, a lot of times what we ended up with was frustration and resolved the issue ourselves.
However, I won't call them crap just because they won't support an older/unsupported version of some software that the admin installed and in the process screwed up the server. That's why they have SLA and terms & conditions.

Regards.

 

[_martin]

AIX has /etc/filesystems

Yop, that's why I was teasing @throAU a bit.

@@CurlyTheStooge Not hate at all, just the experience with it. And crap does describe it very good. Especially compared to commercial UNIXes it tries to replace. When you read the posts above you can see it's not about older, unsupported software installed on the system (not at all). It's about the system itself (kernel) and utilities shipped with the sold distribution.

 

[Remington]

There's bit too much hatred for Linux in here. Just saying.

Regards.

I don't think anyone hates Linux. The main problems with Linux are too many distros, binary repositories and they're disfranchised. One application you install may work with Ubuntu but it may not work with Red Hat and it's nightmare to migrate to different Linux distro. Upgrades are also a problem since there are different binary repositories as I experienced broken applications or OS from upgrades/updates. Linux binary repositories are often outdated and unreliable due to different configuration settings during compile time. One repos may have binary application but later they discontinue the support forcing you to seek updates elsewhere which also poses another problem with different configurations, dependencies, installation path, etc.

That's why I like FreeBSD better because FreeBSD's packages and ports are very well maintained with latest updates and organized. This makes upgrades/updates relatively easy and stable too. If something breaks in FreeBSD which is rare and its easy to fix. Linux has too many problems and its a headache for system admins.

You have to remember that Linux is the kernel itself. Linux distros build their own Linux OS with different applications, configurations, file directories, etc.

 

[CurlyTheStooge]

One repos may have binary application but later they discontinue the support forcing you to seek updates elsewhere which also poses another problem with different configurations, dependencies, installation path, etc.

I totally understand that, however when I said Linux, I meant the enterprise Linux distributions with support(as we are talking about the enterprise *nixes in the thread).
Now, while I agree on the support perspective, I somewhat disagree on the repos point. I've been using CentOS since last 3 years to emulate the work environment at home and the only time I messed up the repos was when I didn't read the documentation on configuring/adding extra repos. But again, I'm a Slackware user for a reason.

But I understand that's not applicable to the playground distros like Fedora, Ubuntu etc. But reading the official documentation does help and is encouraged, whether any enterprise Linux or *BSD.

Linux has too many problems and its a headache for system admins.

Again, too generic but I won't say its not entirely false.

I'm newbie enough to talk about FreeBSD administration so I won't.

Regards.

 

[Deleted member 13721]

@CurlyTehStooge, well this is the FreeBSD forum and the Linux users post their hatred for *BSD all over the place, including at Phoronix, on a regular basis. It's usually based on irrational zealotry, whereas here there are good reasons for the "hate".

My point is that people here have the right to discuss how they feel about Linux, within reason.

I also will go further to suggest that it's not hate if it's true.

Not hate at all, just the experience with it. And crap does describe it very good. Especially compared to commercial UNIXes it tries to replace. When you read the posts above you can see it's not about older, unsupported software installed on the system (not at all). It's about the system itself (kernel) and utilities shipped with the sold distribution.

I identify with that.

 

[Daisuke_Aramaki]

I am afraid I am not adding anything to further the discussion. But, I will tell you this. Last week, a recruiter from Google contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in talking to him about a possible engineering role at Google. He had seen my blog recently and thought my writings on *BSD was very relevant and that was the reason he wants to talk to me. *BSD will always have its place and will be of interest to a large number of companies. True, once in a while you would hear news reports about a certain OS phased out of a company and so on, but you never know.

 

[throAU]

Re:

AIX has /etc/filesystems

/:
        dev             = /dev/hd4
        vfs             = jfs2
        log             = /dev/hd8
        mount           = automatic
        check           = false
        type            = bootfs
        vol             = root
        free            = true

/home:
        dev       = /dev/hd1
        vol       = "/home"
        mount     = true
        check     = true
        free      = false
        vfs       = jfs2
        log       = /dev/hd8

/usr:
        dev             = /dev/hd2
        vfs             = jfs2
        log             = /dev/hd8
        mount           = automatic
        check           = false
        type            = bootfs
        vol             = /usr
        free            = false

Ah, that's it.

It was about six years ago and my only ever time logging into an AIX box. Basically I fixed it at 5am on a weekend because the remote administrator back at HQ screwed up an edit on that file and prevented the machine from booting multi-user somehow.

Anyway... point being: if you've used a few different UNIX variants and something retarded like that happens to a production machine running another UNIX variant, you'll most likely be able to troubleshoot it.

 

[vermaden]

Re: Re:

AIX has /etc/filesystems

Ah, that's it.

And also AIX is the only one that has the -p option for grep(1) (paragraph), useful (not only) for /etc/filesystems:

# grep -p /home /etc/filesystems 
/home:
        dev       = /dev/hd1
        vol       = "/home"
        mount     = true
        check     = true
        free      = false
        vfs       = jfs2
        log       = /dev/hd8

 

[robspop]

To answer OP:

I work for a UK University. I would describe us as a medium size enterprise in computing resource terms. For many years we have run a Solaris system, and it was excellent, very reliable. However, the Solaris system is just about dead and I think will disappear completely in the next couple of years. There are several reasons for this, and I suspect they will apply in lots of other "medium size" companies.

The first is that the actual decisions are taken by what someone higher up this thread called "morons". I think that is rather kind, but I will stick with it. The morons don't understand things, so when companies like Microsoft come along and say "outsource your email to us and it will be better and cheaper because you won't need dedicated technical support" the morons think "great" and do it. The result of that one has been that our email service is now virtually unusable, with many of my colleagues setting up redirects to Gmail accounts. It's difficult to go backwards though because the technical support staff have now gone. We have bought into things like Google Docs and Alfresco Hub, both of which I hate, and both of which seem to be much more Windows (or maybe Linux) oriented than OS agnostic.

The second is that Oracle have really killed Solaris for organisations like ours. We used to get a reasonable discount as an educational institution. Oracle stopped that and also put up all the prices, so the difference for us was huge. The result is that we have dying servers no longer under support contracts, quite a big network of Sunray labs running an absolutely horrible Ubuntu desktop, and again tech support staff not being replaced if they leave.

There are other factors as well (the users don't help!) but they are probably the main ones.

The result of all of this is that we have labs running Windows on PCs that are rubbish in terms of reliability compared to the SPARC-based server systems we used to have. They are much less reliable to use and are on a 3-year rolling replacement cycle and overall probably cost far more than retaining Solaris might have done, but not in a way the morons can understand.

The other thing we have is Linux. There are lots of reasons why, but the two main ones are probably (a) the morons have at least heard of it, and (b) there are people around who feel they are competent to support it (I think many actually are not, but that's another story). None of these people have even heard of FreeBSD as far as I know. I have FreeBSD running on my laptop and, when nobody was looking, I replaced the approved Windows image on my desktop PC with FreeBSD - nobody has noticed and I haven't got into trouble yet. So, there are two FreeBSD systems where I work, out of several thousand machines. If there are any others, I have not encountered them.

As others have said, learning FreeBSD will stand you in good stead for finding your way around any other Unix system, but I think admin jobs specifically requiring any of the *BSDs will be relatively rare.

I'll end with a bit of prejudice: the downside to knowing your way around any other Unix system is that in many ways, Linux is not a Unix system. It's something that, from a user perspective at the command line, looks like Unix. But under the hood, as they say - wow, what a mess.

 

[ShelLuser]

When re-reading this thread again (very cool post @robspop) something struck me.

Solaris, SunOS at first (or as some will argue 'underneath'), is a true Unix system. Linux and FreeBSD are not, they're Unix-like operating systems. Now, I know it's all mere politics and semantics because in the end it's a mere licensing issue. From personal experience I'd say it's more so for FreeBSD (or any of the other two main BSD distributions) than it is for Linux (because in the end Linux is but a kernel whereas BSD is a full operating system).

Having that out of the way I can't help wonder if it couldn't be beneficial for the FreeBSD group to obtain a certification. Please note; I didn't even bother to look this up myself yet, I'm merely sharing an idea. Obviously if a certification would cost thousands of dollars then I can easily see that this wouldn't be the best of investments, especially for a non-profit organisation.

But I do think it might help (a bit) to put FreeBSD a little better on the map, or the BSD distributions in whole for that matter.

Because; what true Unix environments still exist today? Better yet: which one are as easily accessible or perhaps well known as Solaris is? Sure, there's AIX which has been mentioned before, but I don't think it'll run on common (x86 based) hardware (not claiming this to be a requirement).

Although I too question the true usefulness I can't help wonder if it wouldn't (or couldn't) give all BSD distributions an edge. When keeping the 'management morons' in mind (a term I don't fully agree with) what would sound better? A Unix-like environment which happens to be well known, or a real Unix environment which you can even manage to install yourself (I think anyone should be able to get FreeBSD running within VirtualBox for example)?

Food for thought?

 

[scottro]

For what it's worth, while job-hunting this past Spring, in the metropolitan NYC area of the US, I probably saw more requests for AIX knowledge than for Solaris or FreeBSD. However, even the FreeBSD shops with whom I spoke needed some Linux knowledge. For better or worse, if seeking a sysadmin position, I think there are probably hundreds more Linux positions than anything else.
As for like or dislike--I've often thought that it's more important to know the various applications that will run on a server than the O/S itself. If a company needs an Apache administrator, and they're running RHEL6, and you know Apache inside and out on FreeBSD, but don't know RHEL6, you're almost certainly going to be a better candidate than the RHEL6 master who has never worked with apache. (Hrrm, should Apache have the file tags in this case? Or, a ports tag with a version in the first mention, in conjunction with FreeBSD? Meh, mods, if you think it should, I apologize, but I couldn't decide, and therefore, left off the tags and gave it an upper case A.)

TL;DR

If you're looking for the O/S that will make you more marketable, RHEL is probably the most widely requested, at least in the NYC area of the US. Neither FreeBSD nor Solaris seem to be that popular in job requirements these days, but if you want to be a sysadmin, deep knowledge of either one will serve you well, in my less than humble opinion.

 

[NewGuy]

I think it is unfortunate so much of this thread on Solaris vs FreeBSD got sidetracked bashing Linux distributions. The original post had an interesting question and I think it deserves some thought.

My own response is that, given the opportunity to learn either Solaris or FreeBSD, I highly recommend trying to use both. This thread is full of people saying they were used to FreeBSD and got confused when trying to use Linux distros. Or people who were accustomed to one Linux-based distro and got completely turned around when moving to another distribution. This is not a problem with Linux distros anymore than getting confused when moving between BSDs is a fault of the BSD-based operating systems. Rather it shows these people got stuck in habits, narrow ways of thinking and were not prepared to move out of their comfort zones.

When I was in school I learned Solaris in the classroom and ran Slackware at home. They were similar enough to feel familiar while having enough differences to keep me on my toes. And I'm glad I had that variety as one of my first jobs mixed Red Hat Linux and FreeBSD. Neither OS I had used in school, hardly even touched Red Hat before, but I was accustomed to slight variations in UNIX systems and so it was pretty easy to adapt to both Red Hat Linux and the FreeBSD systems. These days I tend to switch between FreeBSD, CentOS and Ubuntu, all pretty seamlessly as I do not allow myself to fall into habits, to stagnate using just one platform.

My advice is to maintain a variety in your operating systems. This thread is full of examples why forming habits and focusing on one OS is a bad idea.

 

[vermaden]

Re:

@gpatrick,

Raw truth you say.

We also have 'pleasure' of using Red Hat support with cluster problems (NFS related and SCSI fencing related). There are two things that Red Hat support is good in. First are gathering the 'sos' reports and the second one is passing your bug/case to other time zone admin.

They did not solved anything, we solved the problem and then as we said to close these requests because we solved them they asked as what we did, because this may be helpful for them.

... and yes, we also stay away as far as possible from GFS/GFS2 shit.

 

[throAU]

I think it is unfortunate so much of this thread on Solaris vs FreeBSD got sidetracked bashing Linux distributions. The original post had an interesting question and I think it deserves some thought.

Bashing? Hmm. No. Based on experience since 1995, I dislike the GNU toolchain primarily, the Linux kernel is actually decent.

This thread is full of people saying they were used to FreeBSD and got confused when trying to use Linux distros. Or people who were accustomed to one Linux-based distro and got completely turned around when moving to another distribution. This is not a problem with Linux distros anymore than getting confused when moving between BSDs is a fault of the BSD-based operating systems. Rather it shows these people got stuck in habits, narrow ways of thinking and were not prepared to move out of their comfort zones.

Again, not so much. The thing is that Linux in general tends to go out of its way to break compatibility with the rest of the Unix world. FreeBSD and Solaris, OS X, AIX, etc. are all a lot more familiar to one another than GNU/Linux (its the GNU bit which causes this) as far as command line parameters go, man pages (info? get out), go, etc.

My advice is to maintain a variety in your operating systems. This thread is full of examples why forming habits and focusing on one OS is a bad idea.

Sound advice. Just realise that a lot of the dislike for Linux on here isn't just having a whinge, it is based on real world experience, and dealing with Linux being different for the sake of being different. Different to fix things that are broken is one thing - reinventing the wheel and being different for the sake of it is entirely another.

With regards to your experience with slackware - slackware is in fact the least annoying of all Linux distributions because Patrick seems to "get" the Unix way, and doesn't stray too far from it. The GNU tools still suck in various (incompatibility mostly) ways though.

Also, to make my stance clear: I started out on Linux and later got exposed to Solaris, then FreeBSD... so my dis-taste for Linux isn't just because it's different and I don't want to learn. It was the first *NIX I started out with.

 

[ShelLuser]

This thread is full of people saying they were used to FreeBSD and got confused when trying to use Linux distros. Or people who were accustomed to one Linux-based distro and got completely turned around when moving to another distribution. This is not a problem with Linux distros anymore than getting confused when moving between BSDs is a fault of the BSD-based operating systems.

But it is a problem with the distribution. @throAU already summed up most of it but I'd like to pick that up and present a specific but simple example; configuring software which is also available on several platforms (think Solaris, *BSD, Linux, etc.) and which is well documented by itself.

On a lot of Linux distributions the official documentation will most likely not fully apply because the distribution has chosen to do things differently. Either by differentiating on specific (but sometimes minor) details like breaking up a configuration file in dozen snippets while also making sure that those snippets don't follow the already present separation in the original configuration file, right down to actually changing the default behaviour of said software for the sole purpose of making it "fit in" with the distribution itself. Ergo: if you're not fully familiar with the distribution you won't easily grasp the underlying philosophy thus you'll have a hard time configuring that particular software.

Even though you may be fluent with it on other environments.

Now, I know I'm presenting extreme examples here, but think about SuSE versus CentOS (or RHEL for that matter). The first will often overrule any changes you make to the configuration files itself because you'll have to use its own setup tools, the latter is a good example of changing things for the sake of making it "blend in" (like cutting up a configuration file).

Those are issues which can be fully traced back to the distribution, not so much the software we're dealing with.

So yeah, I don't hate Linux either (I started with Solaris then used Linux (RedHat 'Picasso') to keep my Unix experiences fresh), but I'm also not too impressed with the differences between all the distributions out there.