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Dear Henry Thoreau,

We use RAC on RH linux and it is horrible, horrible. Is there any FS worst than OCFS/OCFS2? (voting disks cannot run on ASM, we now spent more $’s for GFS) For some reason there are tons of “smart” Oracle RAC people that say: “Why don’t you use ASM?” So I feel obligated to add this comment.

Another thing RAC can only bind to a physical interface why not a virtual interface??????? So that you have the option yo use 2 switches.

1. Linux is terrible compared to Solaris.

2. Running Oracle on RedHat is a nightmare, not all the kernel levels are “certified” and once they are, there are 75 newer kernel revisions out already with no option to update to a supported one. As soon as a new one is released the older one disappears from the up2date site. (so much for easy patching!!)

3. We opened a support call for a certified LINUX engineer to perform an update (after Oracle support left the builing)... oops no more powerpath. That resolved they found out the HP proliant support pack was no longer functional and that it had to be reinstalled since it compiles during the install, well the kenrel is now different and the modules had to be recompiled. Who wants this much work? Track 10 different software packages to see if you can perform an update.

4. Then they updated to AS 4 U3 all is good, but only once they needed to do a test system refresh they found out that the relink of Oracle executables no longer worked, unable to refresh an instance, so off they go again, 7 hours later the test system is reinstalled with AS 4 GA release and all works fine.

5. Oracle applications just stopped. Turns out that even if you use ext3 you still run into the 2GB file cap if your software is not compiled with the latest lib info (this is up to Oracle) a log file grew to 2GB.... Lame! (was not the listener.log in this case)

This also bit our Cisco MARS devices:

****

Problem Description

The CS-MARS uses the listener.log file for logging purposes. Once this file reaches the operating system

limit of 2 GB, the listener stops working.

****

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6241/products_field_notice09186a008070fcaf.shtml

As Cisco puts it "operating system limit"

we have now spent more money to switch to RH, we even increased in staff also made use of Oracle Ondemand, they got kicked out. Now the RH systems are running ok, but most of them are still on GA release of AS 4 and the support team found that they have two options, 1 update tons of 3rd party drivers and modules after a kenrel update or 2, just don’t update.

Oracle ondemand recommended, when we started with the RH migration, RH ES3, then they made the crazy call to add more memory, guess what the kernel for ES3 do not support more than 8 GB of memory. So before this migration officially even started we had migrate again to AS 4. (this was just one of the systems so I will let it slide.) (Solaris = one kernel)

Meanwhile it is business as usual on the Solaris nodes.

I guess it is cool to say, hey we use LINIX…. Lalalala….

Linux (no virtualization options… well in RHEL 5, but not certified for Oracle and no live upgrade. The resource scheduling and resource management is terrible compared to solaris, role based access sucks compared Sol.

We migrated to Linux… (we are so cool!) I wonder where we can find the "Powered by the penguin" stickers for our servers

2x the nodes, 4x the admin tasks, 2x backup licenses and currently 4 x the downtime. (not sure why they opted to turn all our DB servers into RAC, not like it helped single nodes running Solaris still require less downtime.

I guess if Linux is your passion and you like spending many hours with it every week, then it’s for you. Someone like me that only wants to work 40 hours a week, Solaris is the way to go. I have no desire to install any system at home and play around with the latest kernel etc.

One vendor for hardware, OS and driver support proved ease of administration. Thank you SUN for ensuing that my admin years are spent on the functional side of applications and not on reading support pages from 3 to 5 different vendors to ensure a supported configuration is met before conducting a kernel update.

Linux by kids for kids.

Cheers

Article from Dreamland

I would like to say that the opinions of the people in that article really don't mean much. And the basis of the article, that Sun and Linux are competing in any way, is a joke.

Linux has already won. Oracle Enterprise Linux(RAC). That is the beast that all others aspire to be. And it's done. Solaris is gone. Their proprietary hardware at 30K a pop is gone. There is nothing to think about.

Sun is consolidating all of their hardware in Nevada. Not saying where exactly, because I don't like kicking a horse when it's dead. They are also laying off people right and left. They took a 1.6 Billion dollar death kiss from Microsoft. They are no friend of open source anything- don't BS yourself.

Linux people know and remember this. And linux people run your IT shops. Because linux people know WTF is going on in IT. Solaris is/was a closed who the hell knows OS and architecture. Their new found balls are found too late. Sun bit the hand that fed it. And the memory of Linux is eternal because unlike it's proprietary cousin, it's history can't be bought off and erased from the internet.

Companies that are successful run Linux. Companies that are running applications that cannot adapt because the programmers are too stupid understand C/C++ run Solaris. And they just don't have a choice then, so there's no discussion. They either keep paying out the ass or that app dies. Superior or not doesn't matter when the playing field isn't even. When the playing field is even, linux wins every time.

Linux is as stable as Solaris if you know WTF you are doing. If you have some guy off the street that calls himself a sysadmin while he's in College, no- it doesn't work that way. Linux has weaknesses, and so does Solaris. But Linux has many many MANY more strengths than Solaris.

And in the end, it's what Bill Gates figured out. It doesn't matter if that one trick pony POS can run one app for 1 million years. What matters is if can run whatever you want, on whatever you want, and if it can be gotten now.

And one more point. Don't confuse Sun custom compiled for Solaris Java with stability. They fk'd everyone else, as IBM learned. That's why it's stable on Solaris. You turkeys just don't get it. Sun cut their own head off. Why you aren't seeing it rolling is because you either A) Don't do anything with Sun B) Are a developer that reads press releases C) Are not involved enough in IT to know.

I'm glad the Carrion removed their Sun ad from the front page. Guess some opinions die harder than kickbacks.

Linux does all I need

The reason I'm using Linux and have not - as yet - switched to Solaris is that I haven't heard of anything in Solaris that Linux doesn't provide. I'm pretty sure that there are many differences, and many ways in which Solaris is better than Linux, just as there are ways in which Linux is better than Solaris. However I haven't seen anything that made me say "Wow, that is something I absolutely must have". Why should I take the trouble to change from a Gnome-based Unix-like operating system (Linux) to a Gnome-based Unix-like operating system (Solaris)? Different backdrop?