[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI friendly to new users

[Reginald Beardsley]

 In this case I put / & /export in rpool. So spool is just for working files for various projects. 

I can honestly say I've never lost to the computer, but the initial 202x OI install took about 60 hours IIRC. The list has a long thread of me bitching about it. 60 hrs to get the configuration I *wanted* was enough to make me lose enthusiasm for fighting bad software. Especially with no financial incentive such as a contract. But trying Linux and *BSD drove me back to Solaris for serious work very quickly. For some reason, lots of people think installers are trivial, but for a sophisticated admin they can be a real headache. I want to do A, but it will only do B, C & D. Never did an install for serious work that didn't require some battle with the installer. SunOS 4.1.1 had a very good installer.

I did not want to use flash for rpool. Besides, what I did was bog standard admin decisions. Allocating disk space to multiple filesystems on a single drive. It should have been trivial. I was very unhappy that things had come to the point I had that much trouble. I'm now 72 and have loads of experience at installing and tuning systems.

When I was doing the VMS admin stuff I configured the MicroVAX II to run 2 batch queues to run at 100% CPU utilization and seem like an idle system to an interactive user when they logged in.

I've never run across more than 1 person who understood how I did it or the value. But if your world is dominated by "how long will the computer take?" and the metric is days, it really matters. 

My best friend in grad school was running batch jobs that took a week. So despite being the admin, I couldn't use the system until I sorted the VMS memory allocation parameters. Or simply halted the queues while I worked. Understanding VMS was far more interesting than simply stopping the queues.

Yes, I will under endure ridiculous efforts to do an install. But I have not been persistent enough to create my own distro ;-)

But 24 cores, 92 GB of ECC DRAM, 500 MB SSD cache and 16 TB of raw disk is worth a bit of attention to the implications for the system configuration.

Have Fun!
Reg


On Sunday, August 17, 2025 at 05:44:02 PM CDT, Rolf M. Dietze <rmd at orbit.in-berlin.de> wrote:


ok, doubel parity might be a reason, but on the rpool? I only have
the OS installation on rpool, on systems with bigger rpools, there
might be /opt in the rpool as well. It is only a few thing written
to rpool, e.g. logs etc. User-date belongs in a diffrent place e.g.
nfs or local whatever redundant level of storage. But terrabytes
or rpool do sound a bit surprising for me. For instance, on file-
servers a 16GB compact flash or sd-card is plenty of storage and
fine, but that varies with what one wants to have in the rpool

And yes, I do need a bit more than the proposed 5 minutes, my mostly
USB2 USB-sticks aren't that fast and network speed is limited some-
where in between as well:)

regs, Rolf