SUMMARY: Solaris 2.2 ok?

From: Steve_Kilbane (steve@gec-epl.co.uk)
Date: Fri Jul 23 1993 - 16:12:04 CDT


the responses appeared to have stopped trickling in. there were surprisingly
few, considering the number of 2.2-related questions i've seen over the last
week. anyway, here's the results:

1. 2.2 seems "more stable" than 2.[01] when used as a client workstation, i.e.
   NIS/DNS/mail services supplied by a 4.1.x machine (or possibly HP, etc).
   NO-ONE mentioned having set up 2.2 as an NIS+ server.

2. One reply was extremely negative: frequent freezes with OW 3.2, buggy
   admintool, and problems getting the automounter to work with the home
   map/file. another mentioned that the man pages are still wrong, and that
   it "breaks just about everything", but then, i expected that (it's svr4...)

3. Interestingly enough, no-one mentioned sun's recent change of licencing
   in 2.2. maybe i should have mentioned it in the message?

i have to admit, it looks like the jury's still out on this one, so i think
i'll just have to suck it and see...

Thanks to the following. My post and the full responses come after the credits.

Steve.

eckhard@ts.go.dlr.de
T.D.Lee@durham.ac.uk
as@uebemc.siemens.de
darrenr@vitruvius.arbld.unimelb.EDU.AU
cal@soac.bellcore.com

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From: Steve_Kilbane@vampire
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 93 08:47:44 BST

[ not an urgent question, so skip if you're busy ]

there've been quite a few questions in the last six months or so which have
as their summary "this is broken in 2.[01] - wait until 2.2." 2.2's now out,
and some of you have been playing with it (much like you play with any
venomous, life-threatening creature you find lurking on your desk of a
Monday morning...). so the big one is: is it worth it yet, or do we wait for
2.3 in October? i'd actually like to give a little more detail in the
summary to this than just "yes" or "no". key points are, i suppose, NIS and
NIS+ support, DNS, mail, general OS bugs, OW tools bugs, the bundled software,
and so on.

steve

--
Steve Kilbane, MDD, CEGELEC PROJECTS Ltd, Boughton Road, Rugby, CV21 1BU,
England. Tel: +44 788 563493.            email:Steve_Kilbane@gec-epl.co.uk
Disclaimer: I don't speak for my employers. I don't speak for me. I mutter.
"I can easily imagine a demon bus driver out there who has the names of all
the sysadmins for sites, and just cruises the streets, hoping he'll get lucky."

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>From eckhard%ts.go.dlr.de@gec-epl.co.uk Tue Jul 20 07:16 BST 1993 Date: Tue, 20 Jul 93 08:12:24 +0200

I never had problems with 2.[01] concerning NIS(+) as our Solaris 2.X machines are NIS clients only. This always worked. Similar to DNS and mail, as the mailhost and Name Server is an 4.1.3 machine (only the 2.1 Localized version was ugly concerning mail). 2.2 seems to be fairly stable to me, its the first of the Solaris2.Xes I'm not angry to run on my machine (I'm the tester here). I think of it as Solaris2, whereas Solaris2.0 was Solaris2.alpha and Solaris2.1 was Solaris2.beta.

Eckhard R"uggeberg eckhard@ts.go.dlr.de

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From: David Lee <T.D.Lee%durham.ac.uk@gec-epl.co.uk> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 09:50:04 +0100 (BST)

We have been a SunOS 4.x shop for a few years. We have done a little dabbling with Solaris 2.[012]. This has in large part been driven by the arrival of new machines which only run this.

We would definitely avoid Solaris 2.[01]. Solaris 2.2 seems more stable, although we don't really have that much experience, nor have we really pushed it that hard.

For the coming academic year, we will be staying with SunOS 4.x on existing equipment, and running Solaris 2.2 (or higher) only where we have to. But having said that, any new equipment will probably run Solaris 2.x and so far it seems stable enough for us to keep in "experimental service". (If your machine is heavily used, it may be worth applying some patches, but what's new there?!)

We already run well-established NIS, DNS and mail services, which we will keep on SunOS 4.x machines. We have set up the Solaris 2.x machines as clients in these respects. We are not running NIS+, nor have we any immediate plans to do so, because we have a lot of HP equipment and some SGI and others as part of our UNIX service.

Hope that helps.

--

: David Lee Computing Service : : Computer Centre : : Phone: +44 91 374 2882 (ddi) University of Durham : : Fax: +44 91 374 3741 South Road : : Internet: T.D.Lee@durham.ac.uk Durham : : JANET: T.D.Lee@uk.ac.durham U.K. :

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From: as%uebemc.siemens.de@gec-epl.co.uk (Andreas Schroeder) Date: Tue, 20 Jul 93 08:26:57 +0200

Hi Steve,

We got 5 Solaris 2.1 Suns here running in a 4.1.3 environment (~180 Suns). They worked pretty fine so far as normal workstations (NIS, automounter ...).

I installed Solaris 2.2 two weeks ago on my LX. But nothing worked like before! OpenWindows 3.2 freezes every 3-4 hours, the automounter doesn't run with the auto(_|.)home file/NIS-map and the admintool was also buggy. I have to mention that I do no evaluation of Solaris 2.2, I only tried to do my work!!!!!

I'm pretty unhappy about such a disaster, because I thought things get even better than worse. Now i am waiting for the response from our local sun supplier about my complainings.

So far I can only say: DON'T TOUCH SOLARIS 2.2 !!!!

andy

+---------------------------+------------------------------------+ | Andreas Schroeder | Internet: as@uebemc.siemens.de | | Siemens AG, UEB ES A 14 | InterEUnet: as@uebemc.siemens.de | | Hofmannstrasse 51 | UUCP: as@uebemc.UUCP | | 81359 Muenchen | Phone: +49 89 722 23985 | +---------------------------+------------------------------------+

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From: Darren Reed <darrenr%vitruvius.arbld.unimelb.EDU.AU@gec-epl.co.uk> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 15:37:38 +1000

Well, cc is unbundled, man pages are *still* wrong, it breaks just about everything anyone ever had working on SunOS4. In general, I find Solaris 2.x to be a real pain when it comes to programming.

Boycott Solaris2!

Darren

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From: Christian Lawrence <cal%soac.bellcore.com@gec-epl.co.uk>

I have been working with SunOS since 3.5. As with all Sun releases there are bugs and/or missing functionality....can't please them all all of the time ! Actually, I'd say 99 % of software falls into this category....... Anyway, although I had limited experience with SunOS 5.1, things seem to work much better in 5.2....and there are patches to fix some problems (e.g. printing).

My current list of patches is listed below. I have installed them on every SunOS 5.2 system as part of the JumpStart sequence .... although I don't know whether I really needed them all everywhere.

1014-02.tar.Z 1055-01.tar.Z 1016-01.tar.Z 1086-01.tar.Z 1018-01.tar.Z 1115-01.tar.Z 1025-02.tar.Z 982-02.tar.Z 1027-03.tar.Z 983-02.tar.Z 1028-01.tar.Z 991-01.tar.Z 1031-01.tar.Z 992-01.tar.Z 1050-01.tar.Z

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