Sun the networking company? Well maybe for X but on the web they suck in the shrink wrap version of Solaris. Here I was in Nov 95 trying to build a simple Web server with dialup PPP access for my office and Solaris 2.4's PPP crashed every time I called from a Win95 PC. So I call my ex-coworker (now our sun sales rep) and sure enough it's a bug in Sun's PPP. Well I kind of expected it, PPP was broken in 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 before that.
Then I switched to a free version of DP-4.0 from Purdue.
So ok, my users can dialin, let's do something useful like POP mail. Guess what Solaris has no POP3 mail daemon, so it's off to Qualcomm for a free version of POP3.
Well, now wouldn't an HTTP daemon be nice, ok again nothing in Solaris, I go to NCSA and try theirs, works great. I'm running Apache now, better performance.
So next task, configure for anonymous ftp, well Solaris has this daemon, but it doesn't return the files size to the caller. So it's off to Washington University for WS-FTP.
Whatever happened to "The network is the computer", I keep hearing rumors they will address these short comings. Yet all I see is overpriced products that should be bundled into the standard version of Solaris. I don't mean to compare Solaris to NT, but atleast it has all these server daemons in the base package.
Please don't misunderstand, I like Sun, I have been using them every day for the last 10 years. I just couldn't figure out why they unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and I really don't understand calling yourself the Internet/Network company when the basic daemons to do networking are missing!
Hoping Solaris 2.6 will return some reality to the marketing slogan. I heard/read somewhere that Netscape now has Sun doing the browser work for supporting Sun's by Sun. Also the ATX Ultra's look like a great way to introduce cheap/powerful UltraSparc's in ATX form factors and utilize PCI (read cheap) cards.
PS: Looking to buy a Sparc 5 for home, just lost my Sparc 2. I only need a box with CPU and power supply. Got memory, disks, CDs, monitor, keyboard, mouse and Turbo GX video card already. Any college students out there that can buy from the bookstore cheap?
PPS: Yes I own the stock, and I'm long, just disappointed they don't deliver like MSFT has. |
