I am currently a Biomedical Technician who performs as a local administrator for our patient monitoring equipment( which runs on Solaris 9) as well, for about 6 years. My tasks are somewhat basic, ie maintain DHCP services, addhost, rm host, edit host files with vi editor, etc. I am considering obtaining certification for Solaris 9, and attempting to crossover and get an administrators position. I just purchased Bill Calkins Solaris Administration book, and reading that. I have a Ultra 60 box which I tinker around with while I’m home, which can be interesting. Do you have any suggestions for good resources for forums, other books?

As for the rest I can’t really relate. I guess your core reason for someone to switch from LINUX to Solaris is:

[Linux is full of hacks] resulting in “Linux being fast to administer and fast to get to do what you want, but as stability and universal configurations come in to play when a system grows, the need for serious structure in process execution and user management becomes clear.”

I’ve no doubt that Solaris/OpenSolaris scales better for very large installations and for a variety of other heavy lifting workloads.

But I don’t see that this is the normal case for a Linux user. Most people use Linux for desktop/workstation; small business server; web hosting or application hosting. Where the ability to run well on a wide variety of hardware and be easily managed are more important than scalabilty. It’s just a case of “add another cheap box”.

I think OpenSolaris has some interesting apps such as process monitoring: and I’ve seen how useful their contributions have been to projects like GNOME that I’m interested in. But I don’t currently see the compelling reason to drop Ubuntu

1. This was not always a free option. Until recently, you had to pay big $ to get your hands on a spark machine and a Solaris SO.
2. Now, even it is free and runs not too bad on a home PC (not a bad one), in order to get the updates and patches (that are needed a lot check only the keyboard problem under GNOME), the minimum amount you need to pay is $ 120 USD / year! (over a 2 TWO years period you have paid already a WinXP Professional and Linux is still 100% FREE)
3. Nobody stops Linux users to configure their systems as they want and can however, for someone who is just learning, Solaris is not too friendly. The learning curve for Linux can be as you want.
4. Documentation is excellent for Solaris and is 100% free but you have to buy big bucks books from OReilly hmm, let me tell you that you can buy also big bucks books for Solaris, not only on OReilly but allover. Good documentation for Linux is also 100% free and the fact that you have the how-to and wiki is only a plus.

And I am using Solaris 9 and 10 at work and Linux on my three workstations and one server at home.

Reagards

In reading this article that compares Solaris to Linux, something caught my eye about the product documentation.