[pca] Missing sconadm on Solaris 10 1/13

[francis picabia]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Jeremy Loukinas <sunadmin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Solaris 11 is a much better alternative for a number of reasons. I work for
> a large organization that has 1000's of Redhat / Suse linux servers.
> Managing them is a mess, yes they are easier to patch yum update etc.. but
> with Solaris 11 you have pkg update? It couldn't be easier.
>
> Suse and redhat just got finished racking us over the coals for our "free"
> linux to the tune of about $500,000.

We pay less than $200 per Dell for annual hardware maintenance.  Oracle
is $1000 per server for hardware maintenance.  We pay $60/year for
Redhat update access (for University).  Same update access plus
support from Oracle is another $1000/year.  There is no option for only
software updates with Oracle.

It costs us $2000/year per Sun, or roughly $260 per Dell.

For a cash strapped small University, the best choice for our
future is Linux.

> The trick with Linux is you have no rollback capability if your patches go
> to shit like you have with solaris live upgrade.

Not true.  There is such a thing as yum downgrade.

Live upgrade on Solaris is great.  However, why is it needed?

I've rarely seen Linux kernel updates give me a system which
bombs on start up, and it is very easy to select the last kernel
version from grub menu.  Whereas I've had two downtime experiences
with Solaris upgrades in the last 2 years.  Not all of us can
afford the luxury of spare disks and pools for live upgrade - for us,
the system is usually needed with the capacities for which we bought it.

On top of this, Linux doesn't need a live upgrade type of install for
maintenance
releases.  Any and all updates until the next version of the OS can
be done with package manager updates.  Solaris holds back many
updates to be done only via the next U level, so in essence, the
architecture needs live upgrade to save itself from itself.  Live upgrade
is important because in a Solaris update, you never know
what you're going to get.

Finally, sticking with the original theme of this thread, Redhat's
tool to register for software updates is still provided with the OS.

> Linux is junk meant for running startup dot coms in someone's basement.

I guess that would be the opinion to have once you've
committed yourself to having an email of "sunadmin".

As the trends in IT prove, that myth is held by very few today.