Day 59 of 60: Final thoughts
This system will be going back to Sun soon, while I wait to find out whether or not they’ve decided to grant me the system. In the meantime, here are some final thoughts on the last 59 days.
Day 20 of 60: Running Sendmail in the zones (pt 2)
I’ve now got Sendmail built and installed, and adjusted the SMF so that it uses my local version of Sendmail (with DTrace probes) in favour of the system version.
Day 4 of 60: The learning zone
One of the new features that Solaris 10 has that I’m interested in is zones. A zone is lightweight virtualisation environment. Unlike VMWare, or Xen, the whole environment is not virtualised. You still have one running OS kernel which arbitrates access to the hardware, for example. A zone is more like a separate instance of the userland, with its own IP address, users, running processes, and so on.
In this respect Solaris Zones are very similar to FreeBSD Jails, and if I was going to sum it up I might call it “chroot on steroids, with a much better management interface.”
I’m quite familiar with FreeBSD’s Jail system, much less so with Zones. I’ve offered up a Zone to some of the pkgsrc developers so they can experiment with pkgsrc on Solaris 10, and I’m planning on using Zones for testing the changes that I’ll be making to Sendmail, so I need to learn how to create and manage them.
Day 2 of 60: Blastwave
Day 1 of 60: Fun and games with pkgsrc
In the years that I’ve been using Solaris it’s support for third party packages has, to my mind, always let it down. The open source community writes and releases software at a phenomenal rate, and systems like FreeBSD and Linux have developed a number of interesting ways to make it as easy as possible to get this software, install it, and (much more importantly) manage it once it’s been installed.