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

After literally years of good intentions, I've finally managed to get my home network server flipped from an aging Linux distro to Solaris (Solaris Express, 12/06, to be specific)...whew. It's funny how well-entrenched technology gets, and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule of thumb takes over.

 

On thinking about it, I believe that we've had a home network server for about 12 years now, ever since we had a 10base2 network, Windows for Workgroups, and a honking Windows NT 3.51 server. That server was actually the impetus to getting into Unix in the first place-- we hit one of those nasty BSOD events that totally trashed the file system, and I had to rebuild the server and restore everything from scratch. Again.

I headed out to the computer store and found a copy of Yggdrasil Linux, along with a book to help out, and went home to get to work. It was a heck of an interesting learning process. I had done some sysadmin work on Ultrix and AIX systems in a previous life, and spent a little time with Sun products, including the spiffy SparcStation5, which just smoked everything else I'd seen. I hadn't, however, ever used a *nix system that was all mine. It was fun!

As I recall, it probably took a week or so to get things up and running sufficiently to have a network connection, X running, and Samba sharing files with the Windows boxes. Cool. (Funny how the time to configure doesn't change, although the scope of what you can configure in that time does...it's Moore's Law in reverse, I guess.)

Over the years, we migrated from one Linux distro to another, from Yggdrasil to Slackware to Redhat to SuSE, usually based on either cool new claims or hardware death that provided the opportunity to upgrade. Recently, though, life's just been too busy to upgrade, and the existing server wasn't broken, so just kept on going. (There's clearly a challenge here for Sun as a whole--when the existing systems are good enough and not actively failing, it's hard to get the needed catalyst to actually upgrade.) Fortunately, a fading Dell PIII server provided the impetus to put a used Xeon to work and reduce the server sound level by 30 dB.

With Solaris working beautifully on most x86-class hardware, not to mention that I've been working in the Solaris organization for about 7 years, it was clearly well past time to get the home network on Solaris. Over the next few postings, I'll try to share some of the things I did to get the server up and running, and happily serving the family needs. Stay tuned...