Fire on the Sun

Few days ago our company delivered few Sun machines to a national research institute around here. There’s nothing much to disclose, but just to share some things that I consider as “funny”.

1 – Security server running Windows Server2003
While our company deliver the Sun servers and workstations for the client’s HPC need, other companies deliver their solution to the institute as well. While we were there, the institute (or actually a vendor, to be precise) was in the process of setting up the security server in the same room as we were installing our servers.

While seeing the MCSE guys setting up their servers, I just cant stop laughing (silently of course). They launch few programs, clicks here and there, and wait a considerably long time for the progress bar to advance.

As they left, I still keeep my eyes on the server, and the next thing I know, the mouse pointer suddently move. Ah, they’re doing remote login. When logged on, the first thing the mouse ponter went to was to the Start menu, and the Start menu just hangs and 10 minutes later the guys are back scratching their head

I’m not totally against Microsoft Windows. They might be good for my nephew to play games on it, but for a security server, I would argue that..

2 – Sun machines with Sun’s OS
All the Sun machines (Sun Fire V40z Server and Sun Ultra 20 Workstation) already comes with Solaris 10 03/10 pre-installed. I haven’t had much experience with Solaris myself, and I was thinking that it would be a good opportunity for me to learn something there. It was not a good expression however that the pre-installed Solaris couldn’t boot into Sun’s Java Desktop Environment, though I have no ptoblem booting into CDE. It was libbonoboui problem, the same problem I faced when I was a gnome user (dropline Gnome on Slackware). I wonder how do the engineers test the machines before being delivered..

3 – Triple booting
When delivering the Sun Ultra 40 Workstations, we have a request from the client to multi boot the machines. One might argue if a workstation is dual-booted (it’s ok if it’s a personal/development machine to dual-boot), but the client wants it to triple-boot. I have no choice but to scratch my head and proceed with the request.

The OS to be installed were Windows XP Pro, SuSe 9.3 and Solaris 10 03/10. We started with Solaris, and do a full install so that the client wouldn’t bother us with incomplete packages or whatever later. The installer took a long time to load and initialize, and that’s really a minus. As we come to the installation GUI, things are straightforward and we didnt face any problems with that. Our complain goes to the very slow installation process, that took us over 2 hours. Don’t compare it with gentoo though, but it deserve the name Slowaris instead of Solaris. After swapping CD’s and DVD’s for the installation, we manage to get the JDE to work this time. Another minus for Solaris for be Sun’s OS is that it didn’t automaticly detect and configure the built in network card. We need to get a third party drive n get it to work,, though actually later we found out that the driver was provided in a separate CD.

The next OS installed was Windows XP Pro. We were trying to install it on the second hard drive as we later come to a problem where Windows was so hard headed that it only wants to reside on the first harddrive. Our guess was Windows programmer doesn’t want to add some code to make it able to be installed in the second hard drive that it would later add another vulnerability to the system. More codes = m0re bugs.. The rest of the installation went ok, but as usual, the self pro-claimed best OS when it comes to hardware support couldn’t get the graphic card, network card and sound card, among others to work.

Last but not least, we installed SuSe 9.3 on the machine. Everything just works fine, except that it couldn’t get 3d accelaration to work. What we did just to run YOU, and tick on the NVidia driver for installation, and we get the 3d acceleration to work within minutes.

I would say, SuSe wins the round, and Solaris is just a bit under Windows..

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 2:46 am and is filed under Information Insemination. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.