# mount -r -F hsfs /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 /cdrom

did that just this afternoon.

Don't blame Solaris for operator ignorance. If you were a Solaris admin switching to Linux or BSD, you would find it equally confusing. Keep a notebook as you are learning. Get some reference books that point out the differences. Check out the following thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ris+references, as well as the this one: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...olaris-589080/.

Sun SPARC systems can be pretty amazing. I'm just finally decommissioning E250's that are approaching 10 years old this summer. They have performed remarkably well over that span of time. We finally got money to get new servers, and I'm putting in a couple of Sun T5220's. The cpu's are 8 core, with 8 threads per core, an FPU per core, an encryption accelerator per core, and 2 on cpu 10Gb/s ethernet circuits as well as 4 GigE ports on the back. The machines are only 2u, use less power than the E250's, are probably 100 times faster or more, and I can sling them under my arm and carry them the length of the building. There is a kernel module ssl proxy in Solaris 10 that accesses the on chip encryption accelerators so that you can offload the cpu load from user applications that need encryption. The thing looks like 64 cpu's to the OS. And this is what they call an entry level server. Gotta love it.

Thanks for the links. There's some helpful stuff in there. You do have a point about not blaming Solaris for my ignorance. However, I don't think that it would be as difficult going from Solaris to Linux, if no other reason than pretty much everything you need is in your path. I'm sure there's a reason for the way Solaris is laid out but because I don't understand why I find it very confusing.

I still don't quite understand how the "special" device files in Solaris work. For instance, how does /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 refer to the cdrom if the last number means slice 2? I thought a slice in Solaris was tantamount to a partition?

I'm not going to explain the rationale behind this but anyway you are not alone. These rants are typical of a GNU/Linux only user discovering a non Linux still Unix OS.
A distribution has been created to match these requirements and started its life recently. You should have a look at OpenSolaris 2008.05 ( www.opensolaris.com )

There is just one file you need to edit that allows you to set the default path for all users on a machine.
Not to break compatibility.
Nobody.
Nobody should use it anyway as logging in as root is a poor practice.
The shell to be used is a user's choice, not the system choice.
I personnaly prefer and use ksh93.
Well, think about it as a tradition so deeply rooted it's hard to change it.
For example the US is using an unconvenient and anachronic measurement system that piss people off much more than the legacy /bin/sh ...

The default shell is "sh" and not "bash". That is because in case of system error, and you boot in rescue mode, there can be problem loading a large shell as bash. bash is dynamically linked, all parts are not in one directory. If you can not even load bash then you are in big trouble. However, sh is loadable in one piece. This is from long ago. Is it still like this? Or is this problem solved?


And yes, I tend to agree with you about Solaris. It feels antique. I installed it and didnt like it really. Sure, it is rock solid, but it was hard to use. I installed OpenSolaris instead, which is very similar to a modern Linux, just like SuSE, RedHat or Ubuntu. Everything got detected automatically, nvidia card, my monitor, sound, network, etc. Samba was automatically setup. etc etc. Just like a normal Linux. So I quickly ditched S10. It is a bit hard, and not for the faint of heart. OpenSolaris is very easy.

And you can download vim from www.blastwave.org. There are FAQs that show how to download and manage their package system. Very easy. Recommended.

That was a point used until Solaris 10 was out. Now Solaris 10 mandates all binaries to be dynamically linked. Anyway, it would have been possible to build a statically linked ksh.

The real reason for maintaining the old original Bourne shell as default shell is not to risk breaking shell scripts as no modern shell is strictly compatible with /bin/sh. Neither ksh, ksh93, bash or other are guaranteed properly execute existing scripts.

Here's one to add to my list of reasons I hate Solaris:

4> netstat can't show PID of socket.
I mean come on. I use this feature all the time in Linux and Windows. In fact I need it right now on Solaris 8.

How can I find the pid of a socket?

Thanks

You can find the PID in several ways.
You could try 'lsof'. However, lsof don't come standard with your installation; so you 've got to download it from sunfreeware.

But then there is always dtrace.
With dtrace you can roll your own.
See http://unixconsult.org/sock_top.d and run it.

That is a 7 years old "bug" (RFE actually) ...
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=4616466

I suppose the motivation to correct it isn't sufficient due to the workarounds available.

For example that one, slightly modified from the bug report:
As coolster mentioned, lsof is also good for that task (but is quite lost with ZFS ... )

I just read that the solution to provide this feature would be trickier to implement as an open socket can belong to 0, 1 or more processes ...