Sun Community Support

As I’ve been exploring the Solaris 10 betas (via Solaris Express) I’ve naturally been running into a few issues (particularly with zones and x86 hardware support) and just wanted to summarize a few of the free online support mechanisms I’ve found useful.

• forum.sun.com - has a developer focus, but fairly generic help
• supportforum.sun.com - lots of general, useful info
• Yahoo! Groups: Solaris x86 - probably the best place for help with x86 hardware compatibility issues (and you will hit them, trust me..)
• Sun Managers mailing list - been around for a long time, bit of an enterprise-ish focus. Still worth checking out.
• comp.unix.solaris - the original, and still likely gets the most traffic. Enough traffic that if you actually want to follow it you’ll almost certainly need a dedicated USENET reader.
• BigAdmin Portal and docs.sun.com - I generally start at BigAdmin or the Solaris docs themselves *first*, and expand my searches outward from there if I can’t find the answer I’m looking for.

Also note that Eric Boutilier has an OPML file to let you import these resources into your RSS reader. Handy, although I personally find RSS readers a little cumbersome for high traffic sites like comp.unix.solaris, and maybe even Yahoo’s Solaris x86 group..

I think it’s certainly fair to say that compared to 4 years ago when I last worked with Solaris a lot, the community resources have gotten substantially better.