The 5-week [tag]Solaris[/tag] 10 7/07 beta program was launched yesterday. It will start in May 2007 and will end in June. Within this beta program, there are several new features and enhancements to existing ones that will be tested by the beta evaluators. From the punch list, some of the notable ones of interest to me are:
- resource management in solaris containers
- containers for linux apps
- improvements to [tag]zfs[/tag], [tag]dtrace[/tag] and [tag]nscd[/tag]
Having done these before and knowing that they take a chunk of your time out (to do it properly and to actually be useful), I am not sure if I will be signing up for this one right now. Increasingly, I am becoming a more of a pessimist when it comes to Solaris in a user-facing, compute intensive environment.
The OS has made great advances in launching innovations like DTrace, [tag]Predictive Self-Healing[/tag], Containers (loosely qualified – [tag]BSD[/tag] [tag]Jails[/tag] - anyone ?). However, the operating systems is woefully under managed and under-maintained when it comes to simple, get-with-the-times sort of functionalities.
Take usernames, for e.g. This is year 2007. Solaris is probably the only operating system that restricts the username length to 8 characters maximum. From what I hear, the list of customers banging at their door for this “feature” is a mile long. How customer-insensitive can a company get ? Watch and learn.
If you can’t login to the machine cause you have moved on and have longer usernames, then how is one supposed to find the treasures that lie deep within ?
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