SUMMARY: Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.6 on an new production Enterprise 3000?

From: Phil Banham - Serco (pbanham@spd.estec.esa.nl)
Date: Mon Sep 08 1997 - 03:51:31 CDT


Dear All,

Thank you for the huge response. I received replies from the
following people:

Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.COM>
"Luc I. Suryo" <luc@Patriots.NET>
Steve Cole <coles@kos.net>
"Hsu, Dale" <hsud@VKM.COM>
Hans Schaechl <hans@mpim-bonn.mpg.de>
"Plesha, Thomas A. (NSLC Pacific)" <tplesha@nslcpacific.navy.mil>
 Mark_Conroy@em.fcnbd.com
Daniel Baker <dbaker@wrangler.cuckoo.com>
"Mike Nguyen" <miken@mwh.com>
Russ Button <button@best.com>
foster@bial1.ucsd.edu
gibian@stars1.hanscom.af.mil (Marc S. Gibian)
kathire@aol.com (Kathir E)
Vitaly Beliaev <vit@mmk.ru>

My orignal question was:

>Dear All,
>
>I am about to migrate a production system to a new Enterprise 3000. However I am not sure
>which operating system to install on it, either Solaris 2.5.1 or Solaris 2.6. I am about abit
>concerned about installing such a new operating system on a production system without
>first hand knowledge. Therefore I would welcome any comments on Solaris 2.6, especially
>for use with an Oracle 7 Database.

The general response was that Solaris 2.6 has alot of features that will improve
the perfomance of a distributed database system, and that it contains all the patches
required by Solaris 2.5.1. However there was some concern about which Oracle products
has been certified. It turns out that only the very latest versions are offically
certified. You can find the Oracle/Solaris product compatibility matrix on the
folowing URL:

http://www.oracle.com/platforms/sun/html/solaris.html#solaris

However it was not all good news, a small minority were not too impressed with Solaris 2.6.
These people pointed out that it did have some new bugs, and even that it was a memory hog.
Daniel Baker identified one bug in paticular (see below):

============================================================================

>Well, to be plain and simple about 2.6 -- there are bugs.

>For example

>/usr/include/sys/model.h

>They modified the copyright to say 1996 or something and to end it, they had

>/* instead of */ :)

>A mungled C comment is a bitch.

>Stick with 2.5.1 and patches for now

>Daniel

=============================================================================

However there were no horror stories. So I will try and set up a test system
running Solaris 2.6 and Oracle V.7.3.3, and if that seems stable, I will go
down that route.

Once again thanks for all the suggestions.

Regards,

Phil Banham,
System Administrator/DBA,
European Space Agency/ESTEC,
Noordwijk,
Netherlands.



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