Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.
I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.
I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.
Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???
I am a huge fan of Sun Microsystems. I love Solaris 10. I love ZFS. I love RBAC. I love zones. I really love T2/T2+ processors. I especially love the T5140 and X4450 servers.
One thing I cannot figure out though, is why Sun lets obviously delirious cocaine addicts package their software. Maybe I'm exaggerating but I think that many will agree that Sun's packages leave much to be desired in general. On top of that, Sun seems to have a constant need to move software around and invent new paths- to boldy go where no sysadmin has gone before????
The Solaris Flash installation feature enables you to use a single reference installation of the Solaris OS on a system, which is called the master system. Then, you can replicate that installation on a number of systems, which are called clone systems. You can replicate clone systems with a Solaris Flash initial installation that overwrites all files on the system or with a Solaris Flash update that only includes the differences between two system images. A differential update changes only the files that are specified and is restricted to systems that contain software consistent with the old master image.
I ran into several issues trying to create such a DVD when following the standard Google results so I thought I'd summarize my experiences. This is a work in progress- I might hit a brick wall at some point, but I hope not.
Today I realized I was missing the showrev command on a Solaris 10 machine I installed. I found it in the SUNWadmc package but received the following error: