Managing on the Bleeding Edge Eric J. Ray's Weblog

 As I look back at getting the home network server moved over to Solaris, one of the things that's  most remarkable is the fact that I didn't have to build anything from source. I'm pretty sure that's never happened to me before, even on some of the more popular Linux distributions.

Thanks, Dennis Clarke and Blastwave (http://www.blastwave.org/). Virtually everything I needed or wanted was either included in the Solaris distribution I choose, or was at the end of pkg-get. As a result, all of the time and effort in the process was in tweaking things like my Samba configuration and the like, to account for the fact that the kids are now users of the system, so it needs to be a bit more bulletproof than I've bothered with in the past. That's really cool, particularly given the time that I've spent in the past crawling through various Catch-22 permutations (on lots of different systems) to get a server in the state that I want it.

The one exception in terms of software availability was Unison, which is a file synchronization utility that I like for cross-platform file syncing. I considered setting up one of the Rsync clones on the kid's computers, but didn't feel like messing with the ssh agent complexity needed for that to work appropriately. Even getting Unison running under SMF wasn't a big deal, though--that's just cool.