FYI: Solaris 2.6 feature

From: James Harmon (jharmon@telecnnct.com)
Date: Sat Feb 14 1998 - 11:27:46 CST


Hi everyone,

About 6 months ago I posted a pre-summary of my experience upgrading
from Solaris 2.5.1 Wkstn on a SPARC 5, first to 2.6 Wkstn, then to 2.6
Server, minimal config, then to 2.6 Server MAX config.

Since then I've been using 2.6 server for numerous Intranet support
duties that I wasn't doing under 2.5.1 locally.

Anyway, some of the things I've noticed (I used 2.5.1 for about 1.5
years) that are actually very good features are listed here.

(Perhaps this will be the incentive some of you need to make the plung
to 2.6... :)

    o It's tremendously more stable than 2.5.1 was, off the bat.

    o (If you pay attention to increasing the recommended new
         partition sizes when upgrading) 2.6's installer will actually
         recreate your partitions interactively, saving your existing
         data to whatever network or local backup device you have
         available. (It just takes several additional hours, but less
         than running ufsdump and ufsrestore manually!)

    o The Screen Saver utility ACTUALLY locks the login automatically
        (Under 2.5.1 you have to push the "lock" button to lock the CDE
         desktop)

    o Fault Tolerance is far superior. Under 2.5.1 it would
        spuriously reboot about once every 2-3 months. 2.6 has run
        on my desktop continuously with only 5 reboots (for implementing
        changes and checking hardware options) since I installed it.

    o And the most AMAZING revelation:

        Auto-correction of mistyped directory/file names.

This last one deserves special mention, as over the last few days I've
had a bad cold and have lost a little coordination, but I'm installing
some programs to evaluate, and have to switch dirs often, and move files
all over the place.

I'm frequently typing things like "cd /ect" when I Want "/etc", and what
I see is:

        $> cd /ect<cr>
        /etc
        $> (and I'm in /etc)

I hate retyping dirs, and in 2.5.1 I was constantly getting "file not
found) or (not a directory) messages.

:)

Hope this is helpful!

-- 
   Jim Harmon                           The Telephone Connection
jim@telecnnct.com                          Rockville, Maryland



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:31 CDT