Justification for keeping Desktop Solaris workstation
martha....@sanantonio.gov
I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
I currently have a Windows laptop that I use with a docking station at
work and carry with me for on-call activities. I also have a SunBlade
1000 on my desk which I use for day-to-day activities and to run
overnight and long jobs that I can't run on the laptop because I take
it home at night.
Unless I can come up with some good justifictions, my company is
wanting to take away my Solaris desktop and have me only use my
laptop. I'd rather just keep my Sun Blade and turn in my laptop.
My company runs Citrix, so accessing the company Windows environment
on my SunBlade is easy. I'm not missing a thing without the laptop.
Any input from other Sysadmins for justification for keeping my
SunBlade?
Thomas Maier-Komor
could you argue that you can do some kinds of testing on your desktop
sun that you don't have any dedicated test machines for? E.g. evaluating
new features of the upcoming Solaris 11 which are already present in
Open Solaris? So you could possibly argue that you are using it as some
kind of pre-testing environment.
Additionally, I'd point out your use case of running overnight batches
and other long running tasks.
Good luck,
Thomas
Cydrome Leader
make up some crap about how a sunblade is made to manage sun machines, and
anything else is a hack.
Or just have them buy you Reflection X for the laptop. That's several
hundred bucks right there.
Malcolm
Exceed/Exceed on Demand to keep the X11 traffic down ;-)
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Rich Teer
> Additionally, I'd point out your use case of running overnight batches
> and other long running tasks.
And the extra security provided by the SB 1000 by not running
Windoze.
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Rich Teer, SCSA, SCNA, SCSECA, OGB member
CEO,
My Online Home Inventory
URLs: http://www.rite-group.com/rich
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nap...@gmail.com
It depends on your role. My company claim there is no need for me to
have a Unix workstation, and they're quite correct. It's just personal
preference really. Your Sun workstation is loud and power hungry, not
to mention slower than the average Dell machine. Your company will
most likely want to 'standadize' on what desktop systems people use,
and they can then be managed with Windows AD.
The arguments for keeping your Solaris workstation would only be valid
if you needed to do Unix testing, and did not have a development / pre-
production environment to test applications/patches before you rolled
them out. Although I pitty any sys admin who tests out patches on his
desktop to deem them worthy of installing on a server!
Depending on your environment, you may be better off just running a
Solaris server with X in your machine room, and connecting to it from
your windows desktop by way of xdmcp query (Hummingbird Exceed), or
Secure Shell.
As a SysAdmin, I have a single Dell workstation running XP pro to
manage all of my unix estate, and it works fine ;)
..that is, until Microsoft patch Tuesday! ;)
Gerry Sinkiewicz
<martha....@sanantonio.gov> wrote in message
news:1187011553.5...@l22g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
I just replaced my Ultra 60 with a Blade2000 at work.
I would not want to lack a platform to test drive say Solaris 11 before it
goes production.
I am actually a DBA and some stuff just wont install via Exceed Xwindows on
a PC. I don't know why, but all
I need to do is use the Sun box on my desk directly and certain installs
work fine.
The other suggestions about patches etc. are true too.
For example can you try the telnet exploit (now patched) on a server
directly? A bit of a risk that I would not want
to take if I was a management type, maybe not for that exploit, but others
could be destructive.
It is recommended to try new things on a box that does not matter, rather
then trying to explain why a patch could not
be tested before deployed.
Frank Cusack
> I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
> of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
Windows is a security-riddled piece of shit?
> Unless I can come up with some good justifictions, my company is
> wanting to take away my Solaris desktop and have me only use my
> laptop. I'd rather just keep my Sun Blade and turn in my laptop.
>
> My company runs Citrix, so accessing the company Windows environment
> on my SunBlade is easy. I'm not missing a thing without the laptop.
Strange that your company even cares about the client platform, since
you use citrix, but OTOH as a [former] large site sysadmin I understand
it from a system management perspective. The company does not want the
cost of keeping knowledgeable people on staff to maintain every platform
under the sun (no pun intended). Letting folks manage their own desktop
is a security problem.
But, why not just install Solaris on your laptop?
-frank
wbe
> I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
> of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
If you don't have any production SPARC servers that would justify your
keeping a non-production/testbed one on your desk, perhaps you could at
least run Solaris 10 on the PC?
-WBE
Ian Collins
Solaris on the laptop, or on the PC they give you.
--
Ian Collins.
Alexander Skwar
> I'm surprised no one else mentioned the obvious solution - install
> Solaris on the laptop, or on the PC they give you.
cf. <news:1187011553.5...@l22g2000prc.googlegroups.com> &
<news:m2odhbx...@sucksless.local> :)
SCNR,
Alexander Skwar
Chris Cox
Well... I'd say the main reason would be for morale. I mean, sure,
I can do my job from most anywhere... any skilled Sys Admin can...
but if the higher ups keep grinding my forehead with sandpaper
all the time... eventually, I'll seek employment elsewhere.
You're the one that has to decide how big of a factor having
the Sunblade is.... and then let them know about it.
KarlD
>
> My company runs Citrix, so accessing the company Windows environment
> on my SunBlade is easy. I'm not missing a thing without the laptop.
>
> Any input from other Sysadmins for justification for keeping my
> SunBlade?
Installing Solaris x86 on the PC could work fine but if you run
a lot of Framemaker and Acroread like me there is truly no
other choice than a Sparc Workstation. A dual Solaris-Linux X86
machine wont run Framemaker. If you use nfs file servers you
cannot run windows either. Also, you could always argue
from the security and system stability view that you need Solaris
to be able to do your work efficiently.
Windows is a crappy OS for fun and games only. You wouldn't
want to do any serious work on a windows machine with all its
risks.
Reginald Beardsley
It's been my observation that the Sun X server is more robust in the
face of all the vageries (aka bugs) of X11. You *can* make Exceed and
similar work, but it's pretty time consuming. Does management want you
to maintain the servers or debug your desktop?
Good luck,
rhb
s. keeling
> Morning,
> I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
> of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
Suggest they try it the other way first and see how well they do
supporting Windows servers from a Sol box, with only Sol tools. Yeah,
it probably can be done. Would it be anything like doing it from
another Windows box? Hardly.
Windows tools which attempt to emulate *nix functionality (eg. PuTTY,
Exceed, Reflection) are pathetic imitations of the real thing. Ask
them if they really want the organization to settle on a single point
of failure, such as when all the WGA servers were knocked off-line
recently (grep comp.risks archives for the details).
I'm sick and tired of this ridiculous attitude. No matter what fools
like this think, Windows certainly can't do everything real Unix can
do, and it probably never will be able to. It's not considered a
feature in that realm. Clippy's considered a feature in that realm.
--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
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