Solaris Network Appliances

OpenSolaris Network Appliance

Introduction

 For people who are interested in making small to medium sized network appliances using OpenSolaris, it is possible that what they can obtain in the form of OpenSolaris today isn't quite complete in terms of the feature set.

 This web page is intended to provide a central repository for bringing together information related to work that we believe would benefit those working in this space, if they were to choose OpenSolaris as the base operating system upon which to build a product.

 This web page is not meant to be a comprehensive list of what's required to make a functional OpenSolaris network appliance (such as a firewall or DSL router) as the requirements in this space will be ever changing, depending on the specific needs at a moment in time.

 If you have any questions regarding the contents of this web page, or about building a network appliance using OpenSolaris, please contact the appliances community (if you aren't already a part of it) at appliances-discuss@opensolaris.org

appliances-discuss@opensolaris.org

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Why Solaris?

 If you're already reading this web page then you hopefully don't need any further convincing that Solaris is a good choice for your appliance.

If you're just browsing around and still thinking about which direction you will go, here are some compelling reasons to choose OpenSolaris:

• Friendly source code license. If you develop new code that either works with ours or includes ours as part of your application, you own all the IP and rights to your work
• Open source. If there's a need to customise a particular part of Solaris' behaviour, you can download the source and make those changes in accordance with the CDDL.

Examples of OpenSolaris network appliances

• Firewall on a device like a Soekris motherboard. Some of the challenges here are:
  • building an OpenSolaris image to boot from a CF card (the smaller the better)
  • getting OpenSolaris to run with a filesystem space that is mostly read-only
  • Support for cryptographic hardware devices
• Network storage device. Some of the challenges here are:
  • handling plug and play storage devices in a safe way. This would allow them to be unplugged, at random, without corrupting data

What is listed here

 The projects listed below are those that could be regarded as adding to or improving the OpenSolaris operating system, typically through OpenSolaris projects hosted on this web site.

What is not listed here

 We haven't listed other work such as the following:

• creating a web server interface to manage the decive
• building firewall/NAT rule sets

Other resources for appliance building

 We're always interested in hearing about what others do to build network appliances using OpenSolaris. If you'd like to share the recipe or other documentation, scripts, etc, used to make that happen, please let us know and we'll be happy to include some links on this web page to your work.

Current Projects related to building a network appliance

 The table below represents a list of technologies where it is recognised that we, the OpenSolaris community, have some work to do in order to make OpenSolaris a truely worthwhile choice for use in appliances and embedded systems.

The table below has been prepared using XML/XSL - you will need a modern browser in order to view it. 

Existing functionality

 If you're interested in what Solaris currently has to offer for building an appliance, the table below offers some insight in to what is currently available with Solaris as provided on DVD media.