Solaris Networking bloggers

Sunay was in Watford earlier this week and we discussed the fact that there are very few Solaris Networking engineers blogging. Compared with the number of Solaris Kernel people sticking their head up, talking about their work and pushing through we look poor.

Some of the reason for this is personality related - Brian is a vocal member of Solaris Kernel Marketing and that encourages other members of the group to step up. At the moment we don’t seem to have a rabble rouser of the same calibre for networking.

Our Solaris 10 projects are also lower visibility, though this is clearly something of a vicious circle - the less we talk about them the less visible they are. Don’t let that give the impression that nothing is happening - it’s far from the truth. Off the top of my head:

• the FireEngine project is important for current and future networking performance in Solaris - read Sunay (and others) answer to questions at the link above,
• SCTP support,
• a SIP proxy (SER),
• OpenSSL libraries,
• networking aspects of the service management facility described by Stephen Hahn,
• various other improvements to IPsec, GLD, networking utilities, etc.,
• higher resolution latency reporting from ping !
• and lots more…

It’s difficult to talk in detail about performance improvements, especially because the first question is always “how much faster?” With many things, and networking in particular, this depends a lot on your application, environment and hardware. Features are much easier to discuss, but we can talk about performance if people insist :-)

If there is something in Solaris networking that you think is important, please ask (especially if it relates to Solaris 10) and we’ll try to get someone on to it.