How to disable finger service in Solaris 8

Executive summary: Use OpenCSW.

A longer answer: There used to be two major providers of Open Source packages, of which one has forked, so the current number is three.

• OpenCSW - a fork of Blastwave, run by one of its founders, Phil Brown. OpenCSW has the most advanced build system (mGAR), most of the manpower after the fork, and the newest packages. Its SourceForge projects are named gar (packages) and opencsw (tools).
• Sunfreeware - I don't know of any code repository of theirs.
• Blastwave - project started in 2002 by Dennis Clarke and Phil Brown, now being run by Clarke, uses a less advanced version of the build system (compared to OpenCSW), has does not have a publicly available code repository.

There are two package management tools, pkg-get and pkgutil. Both work with OpenCSW and Blastwave. pkg-get is written in Korn shell, pkgutil is written in Perl and has a bit more features than pkg-get does. Both pkg-get and pkgutil automatically resolve and download dependencies.

As far as Firefox is concerned, version 3 is not available from OpenCSW yet. There is a package bundle you can download from elsewhere.

If you use a non-standard keyboard layout, the thing you might miss is the setxkbmap command. A dodgy binary on a random blog was the best I could find.

Another thing you'll miss is the GNU userland. OpenCSW can provide you with all the GNU core utils, with names prefixed with a 'g'; sed is gsed, grep is ggrep, and so forth. For interactive sessions, you can create aliases along the lines of:

alias sed=/opt/csw/bin/gsed

If you happen to need to compile a piece of software, there is a free Sun compiler, coming with a bundle with Sun Studio. You should be able to find it on Sun's website.

Building new packages is a bit of a PITA, unless you have some sort of a framework. The packages format is relatively simple, but Sun doesn't provide convenient package creation tools. I personally use OpenCSW's build system which automates all that away.

Sound card support is poor. If you want to listen to music, have your mp3 player ready.

Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86 was released only recently, and the version released is 4.0 (sic!).

There is Flashplayer, but after you install Firefox 3, you'll need to make the symlinks manually to have Firefox pick up the plugin.

Generally, it would be an overstatement to say that Solaris can be a convenient desktop even for a sysadmin. Expect rough edges. Of course, there are benefits of running the same platform as your desktop and server.

cfgadm -al only showed the controllers, not any of the disks.

The answer, straight from a Sun employee on the zfs-discuss mailing list, is that cfgadm doesn't understand SAS multipathing yet -- and worse, it doesn't understand multipathing in the sense that you can't edit your device configuration! That means that you can't remove a disk and insert a new one (because they have different GUIDs) while the system's running without breaking at very least mpathadm. What good is multipathing if replacing a hot-swappable disk requires a reboot?

So basically, while you can multipath I/O via SAS to an external array, god forbid you need to remove a disk!

This isn't true for fishworks, aka the Sun Unified Storage devices. They've got tools that can handle it, but those tools haven't made it outside of those products yet. The cfgadm and mpathadm problems have also been fixed in Nevada / 126.