BSD Cafe Billboard

NIS+ got removed from Solaris back at the end of 2009. So it got removed from OpenSolaris and thus illumos, as that was before the fork.

This was announced long before. As a heavy NIS+ user at the time, we were somewhat dismayed to read the announcement. Sun said it would be no problem, LDAP was a superior replacement. We actually tried LDAP, and to call it an unmitigated disaster would be far too generous. Apart from the excessive hardware requirements, endless bugs, woeful performance, and lack of basic functionality, there was an almost total lack of administrative tooling.

My understanding is that NIS itself is also slated for the chop in Solaris 11 at some point.

In theory, you could reinstate NIS+ in illumos - we have the whole commit history so reverting 6874309 wouldn't be so bad. Whether you could get it to work properly is another matter.

One thing about Tribblix on SPARC is that it tracks x86 pretty closely, but actual releases come at different times. What this means right now is that while Tribblix on x86 is effectively in freeze while I work through a bunch of breaking changes, many of those changes are now available on SPARC. While this may seem a bit odd, the reality is that not all the breaking changes apply to SPARC at all (I'm not planning to update perl or gcc there, even though I want to, because the updates won't even build properly), and even those that do are less appropriate (such as desktop updates like bumping the Xfce version). The one visible change that people might see is the python switch from 3.12 to 3.13.

And on another tack, a new ISO for Tribblix on SPARC:

https://www.tribblix.org/download.html#sparc

Of course, I post this, and almost immediately realize that the latest Jenkins LTS release 2.555.1 has gone and bumped the minimum Java version to 21.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that talking about SPARC ought to live in the Retrocomputing section.

But I still work on SPARC, have a small number of servers (a T4-1 and a couple of T5140s) that support the work. I don't expect this to be of major interest to most, but possibly the most visible part of the SPARC work I do is the OpenJDK port, which supports SPARC and x86 on Solaris and illumos. While the x86 port is current (so supports 17, 21, 25 LTS and everything in between and up to the current development of 27), SPARC goes up to JDK18 at the moment. Fortunately it's good enough to run Jenkins, which has bought people a little bit of time, although the minimum version will get bumped at some point.

@naltun Bumbling along it is!

@batcat17 Good to know my attempts to keep things simple and reliable have had some success. Although partly it's because I'm a lazy user, I really can't be fussed to deal with systems that make my life difficult.

Officially, Tribblix follows the "when I feel like it" release model. I make a release (as in a new version that requires a full upgrade) when I feel it's about time for one, rather than calendar-based or feature-based.

This tends to mean that releases come every few months - with the range being 2-6 months.

Should releases be on a more consistent timetable?

Should releases be more frequent?

Or should I just bumble along with the current model?

Can't post the numbers because I no longer have access, but I strongly suspect the OmniOS systems I built at a prior employer haven't been proactively rebooted since I left. Which would give them about 4-5 years of uptime. Even when I was there we wouldn't reboot production systems unnecessarily - and most application updates, which were the most frequent, don't really warrant a reboot.

@ef@mastodon.bsd.cafe Laptops are ...interesting. I've never had much access to laptop hardware, which doesn't help.

We've always had NFSv4 (as in 4.0), the latest release ought to handle NFSv4.1 too. And I ought to add encryption to the installer (the problem, as always with encryption, is handling key management).

Welcome to anyone running or interested in running Tribblix!

Yes, it's a hobby project, but it's built to my standards which I hope are good enough to make it useful.

It would be nice to know what sorts of things people might be using Tribblix for, and what other people consider its strengths and weaknesses. (After all, it's perfect for me, by definition.)