Geek Style

While I run Windows XP on my laptop, my friends know that I am a big big fan and advocate of FreeBSD, Sun Solaris and Apple Mac OS X. Keep these facts.

Beside my faith and believe in Sun, now I am afraid they are going the wrong way. In fact, Sun without Bill Joy is like Apple without Steve Jobs. People in sun are officially starting to act weird:

As you know, we recently unveiled Solaris 10, the world’s highest volume and most secure UNIX, running on all volume platforms - SPARC and both AMD and Intel x64. We’ve seen a huge rush of downloads (topping 1.5 million licenses) - and as you continue exploring the x64 platform as an alternative for your users, the opportunity to join forces on an operating system seems readily at hand.

So I’d like to personally invite you to adopt Solaris 10 as the underpinning of the next generation Mac. We both respect Unix, both respect innovation, and both clearly see volume opportunities in extending choice to developers. We’d love to work together.

from Jonathan Schwartz blog

I am afraid he’s not sure what he is talking about. Solaris is not mature enough for serious jobs on x86. And what would motivate apple to discard its own BSD-like licensed platform (which because of derivation from FreeBSD project, is already mature and stable on x86 platform) and switch to Solaris?

Maybe it was a free try to promote Solaris. But instead of chattering and issuing free advise to people, I’d suggest them to work on better products and realize the promises they’ve made about ZFS and their other unfinished projects.

The reason that you see so many Sun related posts in this weblog recently is that I am doing some SUN related jobs these days. And I’ve gained a lot of invaluable experiences with SunOS and stuff that I would like to share with you.

I have visited docs.sun.com several times but I haven’t dig into it accurately. There are plenty of useful documentation on Solaris is available here in both online and downloadable format.

The second good thing Stokley’s Unix SysAdm Resources, especially the SUN section.

And finally the SUN BigAdmin portal has many good Solaris related articles for SysAdmins.

Apart from my SUN related works, I am also reading “Postfix: The Definitive Guide” by Kyle D. Dent from O’reilly and Associates that is an excellent book and I really recommend it for Postfix lovers.

And another news for postfix lovers is that Wietse has released and updated set of documentation for upcomfing Postfix 2.1 software.

Hello to earth people, from SUN:

farrokhi@javelin:~> uptime
2:18pm  up 38 day(s), 58 min(s),  2 users,
load average: 0.05, 0.04, 0.04
farrokhi@javelin:~> uname -a
SunOS javelin 5.9 Generic_112233-10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-250
farrokhi@javelin:~>

Experiencing patch management and playing with packages from SUNFreeware.

It’s a lot of fun.

It’s a bit old, but a worth reading:

Jonathan Schwartz, former VP of Software Group and current Chief Operation Officer at SUN Microsystems clears their linux strategy:

let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don’t have one. We don’t at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price.

Full interview on eWeek