Originally posted here by spurious_inode
SuSE is a fantastic distro, and Sun is steadily falling behind the curve compared to Linux. For large installations I really prefer Sun hardware over PC's because of OpenBoot and LightsOut and the flexibility it gives you for remote administration. Having said that, Debian running on a couple of racks of SunFire v100's has worked out great for us so far (each box has been up for about 300 days now).

TrustedSolaris is just Solaris 8 with the wealth of Sun security stuff turned on, unsecure services removed and a very *very* hefty price tag. I am pretty confident that I can get Solaris 9 going for my customers with SunScreen and the other security toolkit stuff that Sun provides at no extra cost with the media and have a machine that is at least as secure as TrustedSolaris.

Solaris 10 for those who have even a marginal interest is well worth the look. The ability to compartmentalize processes into groups and assign each group maximum and minimum system resources has proved itself on a test box running a very unfriendly Oracle test server on a Sun v1280 over the past couple of months.

The downside to Sun of course is that it is largely proprietary, and to make any Sun workstation or development box very worthwhile you really need to install a bunch of the GNU software. Proof positive that Open Source wins in the UNIX world.

-- spurious

P.S. Don't waste your time on any of the Sun Blade server stuff (e.g. Sun Blade B1600). They are a neat idea, but what a piece of sh*t. We have replaced every blade in the three units we have at least once; thank god we didn't eat the cost.
Oh man Sun Screen looked AWESME when I was reading up on it. It has more than I need of course, being it was emant as a REAL firewall for a high end environment, but I still liked it.

You're post is post 138 That's awesome !! http://www.onethirtyeight.net



The blades looked pretty good but after reading your post, heh wow. Then again a lot of things look great on paper heh.

I would love a Sun box. I need the experience working with them for when I move. I've got an ad here for a Sun V250 Server which was a little more affordable for me at 3 Grand. So Maybe I'll try that out.