== Solaris's sparseness

Coming from years of working primarily on Linux, one of the things that
keeps getting me about working on Solaris 9 is just how sparse and bare
a Solaris install is. I especially feel this with system diagnostic
tools, where about 90% of the things I am used to considering as routine
are either third-party packages or just not available.

(Solaris 10 holds out the promise to be much better, with things like
DTrace, but I'm stuck working with Solaris 9 machines at the moment.)

Some of this is just different names for the same stuff (for which the
[[Rosetta Stone for Unix ../links/UnixRosettaStone]] is very handy),
but for a lot of it you really need to start installing third-party
software. (Even when semi-substitutes are part of Solaris; _fuser_ is
only a pale shadow of _lsof_, for example.)

And sometimes there doesn't seem to be anything at all. For example,
my current desire is for something to dump system level file locking
information, because I am trying to run down a peculiar Samba and NFS
locking problem and I would sorely love to be able to see what processes
have certain files locked, and how. On Linux I would use _lslk_; on
Solaris, well, the core author of _lslk_ dropped it in 2001 or so.

(Yes, I can find the source code. Last updated for Solaris 8. My
quickly hacked attempt yielded no useful results.)

=== Sidebar: an inexplicable omission from Sun's Freeware stuff

Much to my surprise, Sun's Freeware software collection inexplicably
does not include _gdb_, despite having the GNU compilers. Sure,
Solaris has _mdb_, so you can at least do some state analysis of errant
daemons with _gcore_ and it (if the stars are right), but it's not quite
the same.

Knowing about _pstack_ would probably have saved me some time a few
days ago, though. Moral: I should always check the Rosetta Stone
before proceeding to brute force.

(Not that it would have helped; all of the Samba daemons confuse
_pstack_ as much as they confuse _gdb_ and _mdb_. Oh well.)