On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 04:19:42PM -0500, Yaron (jethro at freakzilla.com) wrote:
>   Hey,
> 
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Amy Tanner wrote:
> 
> > I've got a bunch of sparc boxes (9 Sun Ultra 10s and 1 Sun Enterprise 3500)
> > that I'd like to put linux on.
> 
> Why oh WHY do you want to do that?
> 
> Ok, on Ultra-10s, maybe, but why put Linux on an E3500?
> 
> Now, I have in fact installed Linux on an E-3500. Worked fine, even with
> the weirdo disk array conneected to it. But Solaris on the same machine
> was faster and more stable. Solaris 8 is free, too.

Lots of reasons...but mainly ease of maintenance and because no one here
has experience with Solaris.  My experience with Solaris ended nearly 6
years ago and it wasn't much then.  We are trying to consolidate all the
OSs we manage (linux, solaris, AIX, IRIX, FreeBSD, windows) down to as
few as possible (linux, windows).
 
> I know people think I'm flame-baiting whenever I go on a seemingly
> anti-linux thing, but please understand that occasionally there are
> situations where Linux is not the best choice. Of course, you do have the
> advantage of experience with Linux in this case, but is going from Red Hat
> to debian really all THAT different than going from Red Hat to Solaris? (:

Since I haven't used Solaris recently, I'm not sure.  I would guess that
RedHat & debian are alot more similar than RedHat & Solaris, though.

It would be nice to have similar maintenance procedures using APT,
the ability to automate the updates, and the ability to kickstart boxes.
With 2 administrators to maintain hundreds of boxes, the more that can
be automated, re-used,  and the less time things take, the better.  And,
in this case, that is more important than performance for what the E-3500
is actually doing (print server).  We have pretty strict guidelines on
getting security updates installed as quickly as possible.

So, given that, since you have installed linux on similar hardware, do
you have any tips you can share? :)

-- 
Amy Tanner
amy at real-time.com
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