
Get Smart with SmartOS - based2
http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/SmartOS-Cool-Cloud-Platform-Rises-from-the-Ashes-of-Solaris
======
SamWhited
I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public
cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely
fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate
those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web
UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if
you don't, but I use Terraform and Packer so I mostly don't have to look at
the UI). The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document
anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they
advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it
as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead).

When it comes down to it though I prefer Triton to the other big cloud
providers just because the firewall product is fantastic, bare-metal machines
running SmartOS are fantastic, and best of all it's not Amazon (which is all I
really want, if I'm honest).

~~~
bcantrill
Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that
it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation:
it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on
documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our
projects.

As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running
into issues, we can figure out what's going on. Generally, we don't have too
much software that isn't maintained at all, but we also do reimplement
components from time to time, and you might have run into an issue on a
component that is being replaced -- but my apologies if or where we weren't
upfront about that...

~~~
SamWhited
Thanks for the reply; the problem I've had is mostly with things on your
GitHub and images you maintain. For example, I asked about the Postgres image
and whether it was maintained ages ago and was told that you're not sure if
you'll maintain it or not. This is fair, and I don't expect updates the next
day, but it's still on Postgres 9.6 and doesn't mention if you plan on ever
updating it again. If not, that's fine, but please mark it as such so we know
if we should rely on that image or not (we're building our own right now,
which is fine, but we'd rather know).

Also, lots of little things on GitHub like the examples of using Prometheus
and others have PRs (some of them by me) which have never had any comments, no
acknowledgement that they've been seen, but also no indication that the
project isn't maintained or is just an example and that we shouldn't submit
PRs.

All that being said, in general thanks for a great product.

~~~
bahamat
Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This
is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just
the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also
happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for
docker images produced by upstream maintainers.

In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever
package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing.

The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable,
it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull
requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at
something I can take a look at it.

------
breul99
I wanted to like SmartOS, but the documentation for Arch really had me
spoiled. The Joyent/SmartOS docs are a mess of information for different
versions that really aren't conducive to a confident first time user. That and
it had problems with a pretty vanilla supermicro build. It did pick up my
linux ZFS pool without a problem though, which was a nice surprise.

~~~
solarengineer
One of the goals of the openzfs community is to ensure feature compatibility
when moving a zpool (a collection of disks that run a storage pool) across
FreeBSD, Linux and Illumos (on which SmartOS is based). This was reaffirmed on
the openzfs call that happend just 5 hours ago.

See:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HB...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HBVsjAYoLIFZAnWHhV-
BM/edit)

------
2trill2spill
I wish SmartOS was more widely used, and had better hardware support. I tried
SmartOS in a VM and loved it, but when I tried to install it on a Supermicro
box it didn't support the hardware.

~~~
bahamat
You may want to try it again. We (Joyent) are using some of the latest
Supermicro hardware in our cloud.

------
jsiepkes
We've been running our private cloud on Triton / SmartOS with Packer and
Terraform for a while now and for us its really working well. I do think
however that Triton / SmartOS works best when used in a true cloud native
fashion (meaning stateless containers). One could probably use it in a
"classic" way but you might not reap all the benefits of the solution.

I also like that Triton has clear upgrade paths when new versions are
released. Something that was usually the biggest issue with OpenStack.

I try to run everything as much as possible in native (ie. Illumos) zones
since I like SMF better then systemd. But if I can't get it to work I use an
LX zone (container with Linux ABI compatibly) with CentOS. Which gets me all
the benefits of true containers (Zones) with ZFS and dtrace.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I really wish I could use SmartOS, but I couldn't even install some common
Python packages without getting a compilation error. Looking such problems up
on issue trackers revealed old requests for compatibility with SmartOS, and no
follow-up from the developers.

I'm not sure what the recourse is, I just don't know enough about C to fix
this myself. I assumed this would be a common enough problem that the solution
would be well documented somewhere but there seems to be nothing out there
even mentioning the issue.

I'm happy to do all my work in LX-branded zones, and that's certainly better
than the alternatives (for my purposes), but having two operating systems
still kinda irks me.

~~~
nbsd4life
I recommend using the package manager than building yourself. If something
needs to be modified about the source, it will first be patched in the widely
used package manager. convincing upstream to take in a patch & then waiting
for a new version to be released with that patch takes time.

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
The problem is, I _am_ using the package manager (pip in this case). I guess
because the wheels aren't built for SmartOS it has to compile them.

~~~
detaro
I'd guess they mean "use the _system_ package manager", given that they talk
about patches not in upstream?

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
Ah, I see, thanks. Still, that's a non-starter. Many of the packages I use are
not available through any system package manager, and it would preclude using
virtualenvs.

OTOH, I desperately want to move away from Python.

~~~
solarengineer
Could you let us know which packages you're trying to install via PIP that
cause you issues?

------
jskaggz
Love SmartOS! IMHO zones set the bar on containers back in the 2000's, and
SmartOS is the evolved logical progression of this. It's truly a ferrari.
However, it needs a paint job to accrete community. If you want a cohesive
system, and want to become a paas provider, triton-sdc. But I think at the
medium and low-end, smartos needs something like proxmox to compete where
project fifo appears to be having a hard time. Any takers?

~~~
jskaggz
Let me clarify, proxmox (or the vsphere web ui for example), would be a
fantastic management ui on top of the smartos engine that would bring some
gravity to accrete userbase. Some organizations are just more comfortable with
UI tools. Sure, your hairy-knuckled sa's and programmers will favor
maintaining version controlled manifests for zones, and keeping things highly
automated, using terraform, etc, but there's a huge base out there that will
download smartos, stare at the console prompt, and lose interest unless they
can treat it like a vsphere or proxmox machine, like they're used to, and are
trained on. Project fifo...frankly, needs some good natured competition to
breed better product in this space.

~~~
wkearney99
'accrete userbase'? Yeesh, where did that bit of geek-speak crawl out from
under? Put it back.

~~~
jskaggz
Do you hear that whooshing sound? It's the point I was making that flew right
by you.

------
xte
While I was using OpenSolaris (and Solaris before, till 9 6/06) as a personal
desktop from SXDE->SXCE->OpenIndiana, I have tried many fork (Belenix, Damm
small solaris, Nexenta, OI) I have to say that IllumOS is essentially dead as
Irix was before and no one have enough manpower and FOSS culture to bring it
back to life.

OpenSolaris nicest features like zfs (with IPS/BE, zones, branz on top),
crossbow, SMF, FMA etc may remain or recreated for some time but the whole OS
unfortunately is dead.

Irix legacy leave us with OpenGL, even if today nearly nobody know their
origin, xfs even if is now EOL fs, STL, even if C++ now is well... Harmful.
Many other good things including probably the best CDE out there but it does
not exists anymore and it's hw with it. OpenSolaris will probably do the same.

I think people coming from traditional unix companies do not understand the
hard lesson they get from Microsoft and GNU/Linux: today's student's, young
aspiring users are tomorrow technicians. It doesn't matter how good your
software is, if it's not good on their desktop will be marginal, the same for
good big iron architectures. OpenSolaris itself start to be known thanks to
Ian Murdock (Debian founder, hired by SUN, dead in unclear situation few years
ago), not before OpenIndiana, simply because of the lacking of FOSS culture
SUN has, even if OpenIndiana does not introduce, at least at start, any
particular feature.

I still miss osol, I still hope for a real alternative to GNU/Linux, only to
Linux to be more precise, I still hope to see a good architecture at a price
and assembly that can be used as alternative to x86 on the desktop (I hope for
OpenPower now) but nothing came to the horizon...

After SUN death I've tried to came back to FreeBSD: essentially a pain to use
on modern desktop hw, even if I pry for many FreeBSD features from jails to
geli passing through securelevel, freebsd-update, a base system consistent
with the kernel, a damn simple init (despite raw compared to modern init's),
good fw/network performance, rock solid stability, ... but still does not work
well on commodity hw. I dream DragonflyBSD hammer storage but I can't really
run Dragonfly as my desktop...

In the end I hope we as FOSS users, can came to a modern OS on free hardware
and I fear our next desktop will be a kind of mobile-crap with lock-in builtin
to the point of actual mobile crap. We need such free solution not only for IT
but even for democracy.

------
0xcde4c3db
SmartOS looks interesting, but I've never had a good chance to try it on a
real project. I do actually have an extra box at work that I suppose I could
spin up in my copious spare time, but I'm not sure what I'd _do_ with it. Are
LX-branded zones complete enough to run something like a build environment
based around a vendor-dropped toolchain?

> The Unix-like operating system [...]

I know I'm late to this party, being a bit too young to have direct experience
of the Unix Wars and "UN*X" snark and so on, but this really does grate. It
feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring misrepresentation
rather than preventing it.

~~~
mikestew
_It feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring
misrepresentation rather than preventing it._

There are technical differences, as well. Most of the time one will never tell
the difference (hence "Unix-LIKE": you'll likely never know). But BSD is not
Linux, and vice-versa. For a really poor analogy, kind of like the electric
version of an ICE automobile. Looks a lot like the ICE version (well, the
grill is kind of funny), operates mostly the same, but under the hood it's
different.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I don't have a problem with people calling _Linux_ "Unix-like", I have a
problem with people feeling like they have to call actual Unix descendants
(like forks of BSD and SVR4) "Unix-like" while IBM gets to use "Unix" for
z/OS.

