[TUHS] Research UNIX on the AT&T 3B2?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 8/28/2018 2:42 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> But I can testify from experience at my last job that AIX, HP/UX and
> Solaris are all still in heavy use at major companies, mainly hosting
> big database systems, but still there and not going away too soon.

If you haven't tried Solaris 11, at least 11.2 or later, check it out. A 
lot of GNU stuff is available, and you can "pkg install" apache, tomcat, 
PHP, MYSQL, and a slew of other things that are actually being kept up 
to date. The recent PHP 7.1.17 exploit fix was put out in the regular 
Solaris 11 SRU a few weeks after it was publicly released. And that was 
supposedly after the "mass layoff" of Solaris engineers. I've also 
noticed quite a few bug fixes for Solaris internals and device drivers 
since then so Oracle is still maintaining Solaris. I think their most 
recent support time line puts Solaris support out to 2030 or so.

I've installed and maintain a few Solaris 11.1 (since upgraded to 11.3) 
clusters for Oracle databases on Intel (Dell) blades with fiber channel, 
and with ZFS they've been rock-solid.

Side note, and I probably already said this a long time ago here, but 
back in the early days of Linux kernel 2.6, I complained on one of the 
mailing lists about the removal of a way to control the size of the disk 
cache, along with the tendency for the kernel to page out applications 
in favor of more disk cache. The snobby answer I got back from a 
developer was that (paraphrased) "We know better than you about memory 
allocation" or some such garbage. I've always turned my nose up at Linux 
since then. I figure if that level of arrogance had infested it to that 
degree, and an open-source project at that, I wanted no part of it. 
Since then, of course, they have made some changes that make it less 
likely to do that, but I have a recent Oracle Linux (Redhat) system here 
running Oracle eBusiness that is currently 2GB into swap, and has 10G of 
disk cache. Swappiness is set to 0, and other tunables were altered that 
should have stopped that. That's just plain dumb.