Solaris, Fedora or other ?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I am going to learn Solaris because i think Sun Servers has more become popular for big companies. Anybody have other ideas ??

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Although they have a few similar areas... the one is Unix and the other Linux.. Fedora is a good distro and Solaris is a good unix distro.. and in the wise words of Freddy you can take years to learn Unix/Linux before being employable.. but doesnt mean you will take that long!

Good luck!

 

If you really love the idea of learning Solaris and you are drawn to that system, go for it. That said, don't pick an area of study or make career decisions just because something is (or at least seems) currently popular. Stuff goes in and out of popularity all the time and today's "must have skills" can be tomorrow's "has been skills" (hence all the Netware gurus taking Novell training courses to migrate their knowledge base to SUSE servers).

 

Can you qoute sources for that?
Sun servers are more popular in big business, they do not however make up the majority of servers in big business
Solaris is a very widely deployed OS in the enterprise though, although Solaris skills on there own wont always get you a job

 

Well you have set yourself a hard road if you go for Sun Solaris straight up.

Note that unless you are trained to the hilt in Solaris and have years of experience you wont even be allowed near a production SUN server. That includes even the seasoned IT professionals here by definition....

I dont want to discourage you - but I am being honest if a bit direct!

The best way to handle getting SUN or Linux skills is to download the free OS's and documentation, make up the Cd's and install on a home lab.

Solaris [needs its own pc - not easy to dual boot]
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp

Linux
http://en.opensuse.org/Download
http://www.mandriva.com/download
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download

Then play with these OS's for a year or three as you also do A+, Network+ or a MCSA/MCSE, plus a computer degree might be useful....

Of course if you get a dream run with a good employer that will train you in high end skills for Solaris then you are one lucky IT person!

HTH

supag33k

 

Lest we forget:

http://www.lpi.org/en/lpi/english/certification

http://www.debian.org/distrib/

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name=Tutorial&pageid=224

 

Hm - when I joined my current company I was allowed root access to our Sun billing server. They did this on the basis that I had been dealing with Unix boxes, and in particular SysV boxes, for years. But it was the first Sun I had had my hands on.

The reason Sun is so weird is that it is a SysV system with a fair amount of BSD thrown in as well just to confuse you. Add in some highly non-standard admin stuff and you can see why Solaris is considered difficult!

Harry.

 

I came across this at NewsForge.com. It's a free OpenSolaris starter kit DVD. Might be worth a go.

http://get.opensolaris.org/

 

I agree with supag33k, Solaris is a hard road, but rewarding. And yes,
once working as a sysAdmin you may not be allowed near the kit
until you've proved yourself as a safe pair of hands - this could take
up to a year!

Many Solaris techies I've worked with seem to have fallen into it by
accident, strangely enough, myself included.

I would recommend several flavours of 'nix. Definitely Redhat, perhaps FC6
or FC7, or maybe RHEL (widely used in industry). Look at Ubuntu, very
user-friendly and very popular, and SuSe linux.

Solaris 10 does port to x86 architecture, download from:
www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp, or go to eBay, buy an old Sun box -
an Ultra 2 or similiar (£30-ish) and get the SPARC version of Solaris
(get it on CDROM not DVD). Solaris 8 is a good OS and widespread.
Solaris 10 is a departure in some ways. Ebay also have Solaris training
materials for sale quite regularly.

Also, join your local lug (linux user group) http://www.linux.org/groups/ -
they're friendly and good for noobs.

An advantage (and danger) with unix is that it is programmable which
makes it very powerful and flexible OS. So learn to use the command line,
and learn shell scripting (SH or KSH) - it's a must-have unix skill. The trick
with unix sysAdmin is to automate everything, and this is done effectively
through shell scripts.

Unix is also highly stable and robust. A good OS to get familiar with if nothing
else, as it's used all over the place.

 

I have a feeling that Sun is going to become much more "linux-like" in the next few years. Ian Murdoch, the last half of "Debian" and the founder of Debian, has been hired by Sun to expedite their move to open source, and, from what I remember, to help make Sun resemble Linux to improve its popularity.

So, will it stay, as has been pointed out very ably here, the domain of the highly experienced system admin? That barrier might come down some, but it will take a while to overcome the historical ways of doing things.

I'm always kind of surprised when I see people making recommendations for OS's to learn for the server market and they don't include Debian. Debian is certified for use by several server manufacturers including HP and their blade servers. You won't see it in "market share" surveys as it is free, but if you really look around it is used quite a bit in the server marketplace. It's second to RedHat in number of deployments. Also, rather than spend the money on buying RHEL for learning purposes, use CentOS. It's RHEL without the name. It's built directly from RHEL source code, and there is a move underfoot among smaller companies that used to use FC to switch to it as it is much more stable than FC. By that I mean it doesn't have FC's very rapid release schedule with its resulting loss of support for older versions. I think FC is actually going to die out in the server area because of its Ubuntu-like release schedule with the new policy of immediately dropping support for the last version. CentOS is the natural for replacing it in that area, and I've talked to several smaller hosting companies that are moving to it just because of that. They had used FC for years, but could no longer justify the expense of rebuilding their servers with every release just to get support.

 

Thnx ffreeloader for mentioning CentOS - good point which I overloooked. Anyone
interested check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centos and http://www.centos.org.

Debian, another good point. True - it's out there, take a look.

As for the outlook for Solaris or, indeed, Sun Microsytems come to that, who knows?
Sun are profitable again after the dot com crash, and have successfully entered the
SAN market, and continue to develop new servers and software etc. Sun's market
share certainly got hammered somewhat by customers opting for increasingly reliable
Open Source software on cheaper x86 boxes, rather paying for notoriously expensive
(but robust) SPARC systems,.

I read with interest that Ian Murdoch has joined Sun. Maybe your speculation will prove
correct, ffreeloader, it's not an unreasonable assumption. Particularly since Sun have
been producing their own x86 arch (Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron etc) boxes for a few years
(V20, V60 et al).