So long, Open Solaris!
April 25, 2008 8:54 amI’ve been running OpenSolaris Nevada on my file server for a while now. While ZFS makes administration of filesystems beautiful, I’ve been disappointed with the zpool functionality.
In addition, administering the rest of Solaris is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Things like Perl’s CPAN, which is supposed to have a high level of “JustWorks”, fails hard in Solaris (which includes both 5.6 and 5.8). Things like libtorrent/rtorrent and FLAC with Ogg support, which compile just fine on Mac, Linux, Cygwin, and OpenBSD, fail it hard under Solaris. I’ve been frustrated with all the little quirks of the system that just don’t seem to appear under other platforms. I’m underwhelmed by the SunPRO compiler set, and the system just feels *slow* to use, as compared to Linux on the same hardware.
So, using my handy-dandy external backup drive, I backed everything up, and installed the brand-new Ubuntu 8.04 on it, and while it’s back to mdraid and lvm, the rest of the sanity more than makes up for it.
Categories: Geeky Peawee
One Response to “So long, Open Solaris!”
I gave FreeBSD a spin to try out ZFS…after OpenSolaris wouldn’t install and Nexenta wouldn’t boot the livecd.
This was all with a view to making a home fileserver.
But after about a week I reverted to good ol’ Linux, LVM and dmraid.
ZFS was really nice to work with but it lacked a few features that are MUST have, the most prominent of these is the ability to grow a RAIDZ pool. Can’t be done! Not looking like being implemented any time soon (if at all!)
This is a ZFS killer feature, in the ‘death’ sence rather than the ‘cool’ sense.
McPop.
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