Moving to Solaris 10 has been pretty smooth for us. But every so often there's something that just gets ya in the neck. And its usually something right up there with breathing in terms of taking it for granted…
Solaris does some things very differently from the regular open source world. Usually I have to agree with their choices. An example is the way they do volume management. Its a little quirky having to lay down two or three copies of the metadata database, but it makes sense from a reliability point of view.
But there's other times that I swear there was a little too much NIH powder in the coffee on spec day. Which brings me to today's gripe: use OpenSSH stock folks. I understand SunSSH is just OpenSSH with a functioning Kerberos implementation, but come on. Do you really need to completely reword some of the sshd_config options? I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to figure out that disabling reverse DNS lookups didn't use the UseDNS directive. Instead, some group in the bowels decided
that that directive needed to be renamed LookupClientHostnames no. Linux, FreeBSD, even quirky MacOS X all use the same OpenSSH config directives.
There's a time to be different and a time to follow another's example. At the end of the day, its the things that look the same but behave differently that keep folks from switching platforms. Please don't worry too much about the things that don't even resemble their open source counterparts…at least we know to expect it there.
Lastly…thank you for including BASH! Thank you from the bottom of my cranky little heart. When y'all do things right, you knock 'em out of the park!
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