Deficiency

In the course of administration in a mixed environment from time to time you've got to make an application or service available to another system. Usually this is a pretty straight forward process of configuring access for the other system using a protocol and application which both systems support.

My issue was a Sun v245, which is an end of life sparc system that happens to be running Solaris 10. I needed to simply mount a Windows share as a local file system so that an application can intact with files on the Windows share. I began looking for a solution to this problem and to my surprise Solaris 10 does not support smbfs. Interestingly enough, OpenSolaris supports smbfs in-kernel.

Even more disappointing is that the v245 is not on the OpenSolaris hardware compatibility list. One of Sun's own systems, not supported by Open Solaris. As such, it was an easy decision to migrate the application to Linux, sure I could have installed Windows Services for UNIX, but why should I have to?

More importantly, what am I going to do with a server that has limited usefulness. Less and less support for sparc systems by linux distributions means limited alternative operating system choices. I suppose I can just stick with Solaris until they acknowledge Windows exists.

Financial overlay comparing Sun and Redhat.