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Solaris 8: Better Features and Performance for Web Servers April 17, 2000 By Jeff Ballard Unfortunately, stability isn't a word that's often used to describe operating systems and applications. Thankfully, though, you can depend on Sun Microsystems' Solaris to be a stable environment in which to host your Internet-based services. Among the many things you can expect from Solaris 8, the latest release, are free licenses, enhanced performance, scalability and a slew of new features. I tested a beta copy of Solaris 8 at our University of Wisconsin Real-World Labs®. While putting version 8 through its paces, I also compared it to its precursors, Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7. Sun does a solid job of making its operating environments secure--and Solaris 8 appears to fall right into line. Thinking of upgrading? If your Sun or Intel Corp. box is running Solaris and you don't need the new features, chances are you can pass on version 8. Enterprises that would benefit most from this release are organizations running Solaris on Web servers: Sun has placed great emphasis on improving the performance and reliability of both Apache and iPlanet on Solaris 8.
A Free Lunch On the features side of Solaris 8, the single biggest enhancement is support for IP version 6. Sun has integrated IPv6 support into the versions of NFS/RPC (Network File System/Remote Procedure Call) and NIS/NIS+ (Network Information Service) that ship with Solaris 8. If you develop software that connects over the network, you'll appreciate Solaris 8's Socket Scrubber, which checks for IPv4 dependencies within your application code. I also liked Sun's addition of IPsec (IP security) support for IPv4 and IPv6. With IPsec, you can create secure, authenticated connections across the Internet.
Bring in the Applications Solaris 8 also includes the StarOffice 5.1 Productivity Suite and Netscape Navigator 4.7. StarOffice, which offers spreadsheet, word processor, presentation, graphics, database, event planning, e-mail and newsreader applications, is a viable alternative to the standard productivity options on Microsoft Windows NT.
Performance? No Problem
Sun offers another major improvement in the area of file-system management. Many sites that have popular public FTP servers provide anonymous, read-only NFS shares; with other OSes, no statistics are available if you choose to offer this service. Solaris 8's nfslogd, which is started when the service is shared, gave us a log file of who was accessing our share in FTPd-compatible format. One thing I found disappointing is Solaris 8's lack of an included compiler. If you purchase the compiler from Sun, the cost is $3,495 (per machine). Thankfully, precompiled versions of many freeware packages for the Solaris platform are available at www.sunfreeware.com. The site provides a precompiled binary of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 2.95.2, complete with a GUI installer. The installation of GCC was smooth, but it is certainly not a replacement for Sun's compilers. With GCC, I was able to successfully compile and install ssh2 (Secure Shell)--another package I recommend. In Solaris 8, Sun also has improved the install process--complete with a kiosk interface that let me browse documentation files and other data while the installer was running. This is a great way to spend the lengthy time needed for an upgrade from Solaris 2.6 or for a fresh install of 8. The installer worked well and capabilities such as finding our NIS domain were rock solid, whether the product was upgrading or doing a fresh install. All our automounted directories were found and usable without further configuration. Send your comments on this article to Jeff Ballard at jballard@nwc.com.
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Solaris 8 also contains some additional performance enhancements for Internet servers. Typically the UFS (Unix File System) stores the dates and times that your file was created, last modified and last read. Often, however, the time when the file was last accessed is unimportant, so Solaris 8 lets you turn off this metric to improve access time and overall performance. For example, if a Web server is using UFS last-access-time logging, each time index.html is read, the file system updates the file entry to note the time it was accessed. If you disable this logging, the file can be read repeatedly by the Web server with no changes made to the file system.Best of the Web
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