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  *RANT* Solaris is braindead

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Author Topic:   *RANT* Solaris is braindead
azagthoth
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Posts: 7
From: Boca Raton, FL, USA
Registered: Mar 2002

posted April 11, 2002 12:26     Click Here to See the Profile for azagthoth     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Well, since this section has rants in it's title and I'm feeling the need to vent, here goes.

There's been my budding love/hate relationship with Solaris 8. I need to learn it and it does have some rather interesting features/functionality but it is such a bitch to get things done with. Granted most of the problems I've encountered can be chalked up to lack of familiarity with it but still some things that would make sense are exactly the opposite. I'm learning it but, oh the frustration and annoyance. Like syslogd understanding *.debug but not mail.* in it's conf file. Now come on if your going to have it understand the * wildcard in selector field then why in the FSCKING hell would you not have it understand the same gods damned wildcard in the action field. And yes I now know that solaris logs everything for that action and any actions up the tree from it, but come on would allowing * in the action field have been that fscking difficult, not to mention the fact that it just would have made sense? And of course there's the fact that syslog doesn't like it when the log file you've just told it to log to doesn't exist. Hmmm let's think about this for a minute. I've just told syslog to log mail.info to /var/adm/mail, now wouldn't you think that as that file doesn't currently exist that syslogd would check to see if that file exists and if it doesn't to create it. Well of course syslogd just blindly calls an append to the file specified and if it doesn't exist well it it just ignores logging to that file with *NO* error output at all about it. You don't find out about it until you through syslogd into debug mode. Granted a quick touch of the file will fix this, but it's FSCKING annoying that they couldn't get this right. Let's face it folks your talking about changing most likely one line of code to handle creating the file if it doesn't exist:

from something like this:

rc = open(logfile,O_WRONLY | O_APPEND,0666);

to something like this:

rc = open(logfile,O_WRONLY | O_APPEND | O_CREAT,0666);
[0]

Then, I finally track down how Solaris 8 does it log rotation stuff and it manages to be even more braindead then syslogd.Log rotation under Solaris 8 is done through cron] calling /usr/lib/newsyslog at 03:10 on sundays. Ok this seems sane enough, hmmm what kind of file is /usr/lib/newsyslog? Oh look it's a shell script. Ok this is kind of silly but perhaps I've been spoiled by logrotate under Linux and freeBSD, let's take a look at this script and see how it knows which files to rotate. Mind you that I was assuming that it parsed a conf file that told it which files it should rotate and when to rotate them(perhaps based on time or size or both). I really should have known better. For those of you familiar with solaris 8, you're probably already laughing. This brain dead, bone headed, crufty assed piece of drek that sun calls a logrotate script is only setup to rotate one (1) file and is not setup to handle multiple log files. Sigh. looks like I'll be writing my own logrotate stuff.


I first learned UNIX on linux and I'm really starting to realize just how much easier linux makes things compared to the so called true UNIX's. Granted this makes sense as the people who wrote all the different parts of it already dealt with the boneheadedness of other unix's and tried to make things easier based on there experiences. Don't get me wrong there is boneheadedness in Linux as well but, it seems to be less than other UNIX's like solaris.

Granted I'm also familiar with *BSD and IRIX, and although IRIX has some cruftiness in it's syslog and logrotate stuff it's not as bad as Solaris.

[0] Thanks to my roommate for pointing this out as my C skills are very weak.

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