Solaris and GRASS

[Craig Anderson]

We are running GRASS 4.0 under Sun OS 4.1.X and OpenWindows 3.  Some of our
Systems people are asking when we are upgrading our OS to Solaris 2.X.
I would appreciate if anyone who has upgraded to Solaris 2.x would let me 
know how this affects the use of GRASS.  I am interested in both the pros and 
cons of such an upgrade.

Thanks,
Allan Axon

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Welllll,
	
	One word describes Solaris 2.2  "NIGHTMARE"!!!!  We were running OS 4.13
on our Sun 690 servers and had the uncontrollable urge to upgrade OS to
Solaris 2.2 (aka 5.1).  For the next 4 WEEKS, 50 people of our group sat around
and tweiddled our thumbs!  Requests to Sun went like this "hello, Sun user 
support, Oh let us get back to you when we have found a machine running 2.2
so we can try and repeat the process you just described, bye." Definately not
a good indicator.  In the end, we changed CPU's (4) each, motherboards and still
are only using 1 of the 4 cpu's.  Various other hardware was incompatible with
this upgrade.  We applied in excess of 50 system software patches and one of
the patches had 37 versions!  When they sent the patches out, they came on 
a seperate CD. 
 
	When we finally got things running, required two changes which seem
to be solaris specific.  Recompilation:
	1.  XEXTRALIBS   -lsocket -lnsl
	2.  USE_TERMIO   -DUSE_TERMIO
which are different from the defaults for a Sun.  
	
	We have been testing Solaris 2.3 on a Sun Clasic which we use as an 
OS boot server.  Thus far we have the 5th Hard Drive in it and the 3rd CPU/
Motherboard combination and 2nd Monitor.  It finally seems to be working,
so what are we doing on Friday?  Replacing the 690 Servers with SparcCenter
2000's with 8 CPU's each!  Supposedly to be usable by Monday, Yea Sure....
	
	When Sun first received our order for the 2000's, the said "let
us know when you are going to upgrade so we can be sure that all of our
engineers are in here at work to handle your calls."

	As was previously mentioned, system admin has significantly changed
and there are still many bugs in 2.2 but 2.3 should be better.  A letter from
Sun summarized it well "there are 3500 known bugs in 2.2" Hmmmmm, probably 
just as many that haven't been found and reported still exist.

	As usual, driving conditions can not be determined by this agency and
your mileage may vary.

Craig