Oracle Solaris (or any other commercial UNIX) for home use?

[DaBSD]

A couple of questions to those who know. Does it make sense to use Oracle Solaris as a home OS? As I guess, this doesn't contradicts the licence and it's available for free download at Oracle's website. But what about updates, full-scale use of ZFS, installing 3d party software etc, can this be done without buying a licence? And how good is it in general terms compared to Linux and *BSD?

The same question goes about possibly any other commercial UNIX systems in case they allow free distribution.

[LeFrettchen]

You can find a lot of answers on the Oracle website, i.e. with the Solaris 11 FAQ's pdf :

Example :

Can I use Oracle Solaris 11.1 without a support contract?

Oracle Solaris 11 can be downloaded from the Oracle
Technical Network under the terms of the Oracle Technology
Network Developer Licensing Terms for Oracle Solaris which
grants a perpetual license for the purposes of developing,
testing, prototyping and demonstrating applications on Oracle
Solaris 11. Oracle Solaris 11.1 can also be downloaded from
Oracle Software Delivery Cloud under the terms of the Oracle
Software Delivery Cloud Trial License Agreement that permits
a 30-day evaluation use only license for Oracle Solaris. In both
the above cases, neither license permits for production use.
Customers will not receive updates to the operating system
unless they purchase a support agreement from Oracle.

So, could be a solution, if you pay

But any BSD solution can become a good home OS.
I use OpenBSD to work, but it's also a good home OS, and it just works.

Edit : You can try OpenIndiana, derived from OpenSolaris.
It's free, use CDDL, MIT & BSD license, have a ZFS system, etc...

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by DaBSD

A couple of questions to those who know. Does it make sense to use Oracle Solaris as a home OS? As I guess, this doesn't contradicts the licence and it's available for free download at Oracle's website. But what about updates, full-scale use of ZFS, installing 3d party software etc, can this be done without buying a licence? And how good is it in general terms compared to Linux and *BSD?

The same question goes about possibly any other commercial UNIX systems in case they allow free distribution.

Using Oracle Solaris for home use, that can be NAS for example, that can be achieved with ZFS on FreeBSD with a lot better way (a lot more packages and FreeNAS available).

The only way I would use Oracle Solaris at home would be educational way, which means learning Oracle Cluster, Zones, Crossbow ... things that are not available on FreeBSD.

... but You can have them anyway for free on Illumos[*] based distribution

Name chosen after OpenSolaris has been 'kept' by Oracle.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by LeFrettchen

Edit : You can try OpenIndiana, derived from OpenSolaris.
It's free, use CDDL, MIT & BSD license, have a ZFS system, etc...

That was a joke. Right? OpenIndiana is dead for many years as we know. SmartOS, OmniOS and similar Solaris based storage and virtualization solutions use Illumos as a base.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by DaBSD

A couple of questions to those who know. Does it make sense to use Oracle Solaris as a home OS?

For what? How many hundreds of TB do you have? What kind hardware do you run? 64 cores, 256 GB of RAM or something better? You could use something like SmartOS or OmniOS.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by vermaden

Using Oracle Solaris for home use, that can be NAS for example, that can be achieved with ZFS on FreeBSD with a lot better way (a lot more packages and FreeNAS available).

As somebody who runs FreeNAS at work I must observe that you have became rich since your initial involvement with open source based upon your recommendation What kind a person has money to buy proper hardware to run FreeNAS at home? For home data storage use DragonFly because of Hammer beats the pants out of any other OS.

[LeFrettchen]

Originally Posted by Oko

That was a joke. Right? OpenIndiana is dead for many years as we know. SmartOS, OmniOS and similar Solaris based storage and virtualization solutions use Illumos as a base.

I know OpenIndiana, but I don't use it, so, no, I don't know if OpenIndiana is dead or not, and I don't really care, that was just a clue...

Why are you so agressive ? this forum is designed to help people, not to agress then !

[Oko]

Originally Posted by LeFrettchen

Why are you so aggressive ? this forum is designed to help people, not to agrees then !

I apologize for the sound of my post. It was not mean to offend you. I was genuinely surprised by your mentioning Open Indiana. There are few people with genuine knowledge of Solaris lurking on this forum. I am not one of them in-spite of the fact that that was my second Unix. The first one was of course Tru64 which we run on Microvax 3100 in 1991 back in Belgrade.

[LeFrettchen]

Originally Posted by Oko

I apologize for the sound of my post. It was not mean to offend you.

No problemo !

Originally Posted by Oko

I was genuinely surprised by your mentioning Open Indiana. There are few people with genuine knowledge of Solaris lurking on this forum. I am not one of them(...)

And I am not one of them either
I tried OpenIndiana in 2011, and not followed its development since (just because Puffy is enough for me).
So, honestly, I thought it was still alive.

[ibara]

Originally Posted by LeFrettchen

So, honestly, I thought it was still alive.

It is, but work has definitely slowed. I wouldn't count it out just yet.

[muflon]

Originally Posted by DaBSD

Does it make sense to use Oracle Solaris as a home OS?

&

Originally Posted by DaBSD

And how good is it in general terms compared to Linux and *BSD?

&

Originally Posted by DaBSD

The same question goes about possibly any other commercial UNIX systems in case they allow free distribution.

Douglas Comer once wrote that:
"An operating system is designed to hide low-level hardware details and to create an abstract machine that provides applications with high-level services."[1]

On these page, You will find basic list of specifications that relate to Oracle Solaris OS.

DaBSD - LeFrettchen Who was also referring to your post;
concluded that I use OpenBSD to work, but it's also a good home OS, and it just works.

Ваше Величество Oko - suggested few options for "Solaris-like" and DragonFly systems including advantages and disadvantages of using them.

Vermaden, noted educational purpose - that cope with Oracle Solaris.

So. DaBSD; If you want to get particular answer to your trouble, you should provide basic information about your computer hardware, along with the information of how You understand the the concept of Home OS?

Salute!
Marcin

-------------
[1]D. Comer, Operating System Design - The Xinu Approach, Linksys Version, CRC Press 2011, p. 2

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by Oko

What kind a person has money to buy proper hardware to run FreeNAS at home?

I use MINI-ITX motherboard with dual core T8100 Intel CPU and 1 GB RAM with two 2TB disks in ZFS mirror, its more then enought for FreeNAS and home use (I use plain FreeBSD instead).

[Oko]

Originally Posted by vermaden

I use MINI-ITX motherboard with dual core T8100 Intel CPU and 1 GB RAM with two 2TB disks in ZFS mirror, its more then enought for FreeNAS and home use (I use plain FreeBSD instead).

You know infinitely more about ZFS than me but since this is a public forum used by many to mine useful information I have to observe that your hardware doesn't meet minimal ZFS requirements. FreeNAS project has a stellar documentation thanks to Dru

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Har...ecommendations

A quick look will show that at least 8GB of RAM is required for any kind a serious data storage more like at least 1 GB for each TB of physical storage plus 1GB per each core. Also you do not even have enough disks to really run ZFS with any kind redundancy and data protection. This is official FreeNAS recommendation:

• Start a RAIDZ1 at at 3, 5, or 9, disks.
• Start a RAIDZ2 at 4, 6, or 10 disks.
• Start a RAIDZ3 at 5, 7, or 11 disks.

The list goes on and on. If you just run ZFS at home for academic purposes that is OK but one should not be fooled that you are running a real ZFS file server.

As I said earlier I am not an expert on ZFS but I do run at work several file servers with effective capacity of over 20TB each running FreeNAS with proper hardware and proper redundancy. Those things start at $6000 and above even with all my discounts. I wasted at least a month of my life reading and learning about ZFS from FreeNAS documentation (NAS4Free not so great documentation but they also have good forum) and of course looking and FreeBSD forum. There is another FreeBSD based project IIRC called ZFS Gury. Have not been able to learn much from them. I have not considered Solaris based solutions due to the lack of familiarity with vanilla Solaris and very high entry bar when it comes to knowledge for each one of specialized storage solutions. Personally I would never run ZFS at home. Now your hardware looks like a perfect hardware for 2TB Hammer storage with mirroring running of DragonFly BSD but you already knew that.

[gpatrick]

There are few people with genuine knowledge of Solaris lurking on this forum.

I am one of those few with knowledge of Solaris and have used Solaris 8/9/10 in my work for Fortune 200 companies and the DoD.

OpenIndiana isn't dead, there are just a few developers who work on it, so any progress is slow (think of a turtle in a marathon). If you want to use the open source OpenSolaris kernel, then you can use OmniOS which is for a server, or SmartOS which is a hypervisor. Solaris 11 from Oracle won't allow you to get any updates, but you could run it if you choose to.

I run a few websites and have them running on SmartOS with each domain in its own zone. I run a mail server for each domain too, and that is using OpenSMTPD on OpenBSD in KVM on SmartOS.

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by Oko

A quick look will show that at least 8GB of RAM is required for any kind a serious data storage more like at least 1 GB for each TB of physical storage plus 1GB per each core.

That depends what are your requirements ... if You want to serve 40 TB of data simultanousely to 100 users, then You need more RAM, more CPUs, probably ZFS mirror on SSDs for ZIL device and one or more SSDs for L2ARC ZFS read cache ... but if You have ~1.5 TB of data and You use it as NAS in home environment for 3-4 devices at most, then 1 GB of RAM is OK.

Originally Posted by Oko

Also you do not even have enough disks to really run ZFS with any kind redundancy and data protection.

This is official FreeNAS recommendation:

• Start a RAIDZ1 at at 3, 5, or 9, disks.
• Start a RAIDZ2 at 4, 6, or 10 disks.
• Start a RAIDZ3 at 5, 7, or 11 disks.

I use ZFS MIRROR for redundancy (2 disks), which is like RAID1, so I have redundancy, if one disk fails, then the data is accessible from the other one.

ZFS also has an optimalization where in mirror data are read simultanousely from both drives, so its more like RAID1 for writes and RAID0 for reads.

RAIDZ1 is like RAID5 (but without write hole problem) with 1 disk for parity, RAIDZ2 for RAID6 with 2 disks for parity and so on.

Originally Posted by Oko

Personally I would never run ZFS at home.

Why?

Originally Posted by Oko

Now your hardware looks like a perfect hardware for 2TB Hammer storage with mirroring running of DragonFly BSD but you already knew that.

From what I remember HAMMER does not keep sha checksums of all blocks, so it does not make sure that data is not corrupted.

ZFS does have sha checksums for all blocks and if any checksum does not match, then it will be fixed from the other disk.

If I would build ZFS for serious work on the datacenter with tens of terabytes I would probably would use something like Storage Pod with several SSDs for ZIL and L2ARC.

[DaBSD]

Thank you everyone for your replies! Sorry for my belated reaction.

Yes, I do know about all those gratis OSes, no need to suggest the likes of OpenBSD as I was strictly interested in commercial UNIXes. In fact, my first UNIX systems were HP and SunOS in my university network, I used to connect to them through a terminal program from within Windows. But that was ages ago, in the very beginning of this millennium. As I haven't dealt with them since those days, I just started wondering how they are doing today.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by DaBSD

Thank you everyone for your replies! Sorry for my belated reaction.

Yes, I do know about all those gratis OSes, no need to suggest the likes of OpenBSD as I was strictly interested in commercial UNIXes. In fact, my first UNIX systems were HP and SunOS in my university network, I used to connect to them through a terminal program from within Windows. But that was ages ago, in the very beginning of this millennium. As I haven't dealt with them since those days, I just started wondering how they are doing today.

They are not doing very well. They are all but dead. You will have to point a gun into Oracle sales people to give you any information about Solaris. They are recommending their own version of RedHat. IBM has some sales of AIX on its PPC architecture but they also have Linux and bunch of other proprietary OSs. Last time I saw HP Unix was in some hospital. Irix is of course dead like SGI but XFS continues to leave on as a default file system of RedHat 7.0.

[gpatrick]

They are not doing very well. They are all but dead.

FUD FUD and more FUD

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02..._2012_numbers/

Unix is a tough business, but it is not a bad one or a dead one by any means.

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh030314-story06.html

If you drill down into the numbers for 2013, the Unix market based on either RISC or Itanium processors comprised a total of 110,929 shipments in the quarter, down 23 percent year-on-year; revenues from these machines fell by 26.5 percent to $5.8 billion. That is still a lot of dough, mind you.

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...r-sales-126242

However, x86 servers didn’t p[ick up any benefit from the Unix decline.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic..._perfect_storm

Despite the latest numbers, it is important to note that Unix still accounts for a major share of server revenue, and remains an important part of the hardware mix.

Jean Bozman, an analyst at IDC who follows this market, cited a combination of factors in the sharp drop in Unix server sales in the first quarter.

First, she said, the recession delayed sales of Unix servers, which are typically replaced every five to seven years -- longer than most x86 systems. Unix server buyers may also be holding back as Oracle Corp. moves to fully absorb Sun Microsystems Inc. after its deal to buy the key Unix server vendor closed in January.

[raindog308]

Originally Posted by gpatrick

FUD FUD and more FUD

I hate when that acronym is misused. Oko was not attempting to sow "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". He was simply voicing an opinion. On whose behalf are you suggesting he is acting as an agent provocateur? What part of what he posted is an attempt to scare people? Or are you just using "FUD" imprecisely to mean someone whose opinion you disagree with?

Commercial Unix has distilled to a few players...and this list is a fraction of those that used to exist:

• IBM AIX - because people buy their big pSeries stuff. This is for ${GIANT_FORTUNE_500_COMPANY} buyers.
• Oracle Solaris - though Oracle's Exadata stuff runs Linux (Oracle's flavor of RHEL) so this is just on SPARC, which is a life support platform. I mean, yes, they are still making them and dutifully release new versions every year but I'd wager 99% of the people who buy SPARC this year are repeat buyers as opposed to new buyers. Oracle has a big of cognitive dissonance - it's entertaining to talk to your Oracle salesperson (who pitches Exadata) about how you heard at OpenWorld that the new SPARC boxes from Fujitsu are really great for running Oracle databases...
• HP still sells HP-UX on Itanium. You can imagine how exciting that is.

Any I missed?

All of these players sell Linux boxen as well.

I'd note that the big Internet companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) are not buying commercial Unix. It's the Fortune 500 crowd who's been running their apps on Solaris since 2.5.1 or the government unit that has a pSeries.

Of the ones I listed, HP-UX is the sick man. What is the future of HP-UX I wonder...since RHEL (and nearly everything else) has stopped developing for Itanium, I guess that'll continue to be its market. It's another life support OS. Oracle will keep maintaining Solaris as long as it's profitable to sell big iron to Wall Street companies who don't want to switch platforms. AIX will probably be around for a long time because IBM tends to sell big solutions to big organizations.

Meanwhile, everything exciting happens in Linux & *BSD.

[raindog308]

Originally Posted by DaBSD

Does it make sense to use Oracle Solaris as a home OS?

To answer the original question...in my opinion, no.

License question aside, the vast majority of people running commercial Unix are doing so on enteprise-grade hardware, which you are unlikely to have at home. When they run into problems, they call the vendor and use their support question. When they ask questions in forums, it's "my M5000 has this weird error in the log file" not "my Asus mobo I bought form NewEgg has a weird beep at POST".

If you're running *BSD at home, it's easy to find other people running *BSD on the same or similar hardware, doing the same or similar things, with the same or similar problems.

Also, if your main interest is in file serving, a big bunch of disk at home no longer means a complex array. Quality drives are sold in 6TB or even 8TB sizes now, and CPUs are fast enough that even a modest CPU will easily handle common RAID levels. I mention this because the idea of a homemade NAS server with 6TB or 12TB of space has become common and any *BSD or Linux distro can handle a couple disks mirrored (or whatever).

So while you could do it - and of course, sometimes it's fun just because you can - I wouldn't run my main "home stuff" on Solaris (or AIX, etc.) But that old crash box in the basement...party on!