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Sun Microsystems

The Return Of Solaris 9 For x86 257

Posted by timothy from the which-end-of-the-bandwagon-suits-you dept.
The Pi-Guy writes: "Hoping that I won't screw up again about Solaris 9 on x86 again, this time I'm sure I got it right... eWeek is covering that indeed, Sun will be shipping Solaris 9 for x86 after all!!! Also in that article, they note that Sun is shipping a x86 based server, which will ship the 26th. It will be running a Sun Linux distro... Many surprises from Sun today!!"
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The Return Of Solaris 9 For x86 More

The Return Of Solaris 9 For x86

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  • how much? will it cost regular home users cost of shipping only like past versions?

  • Woo! Great (Score:3, Funny)

    by krog ( 25663 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @04:43PM (#4056672) Homepage
    all seven Solaris x86 users are jumping for joy. ;)
    • "all seven Solaris x86 users are jumping for joy. ;)"

      There are at least 8. My buddy runs a solaris 8 on an x86 box under his bed in his dorm just for fun. I bet you didn't count him ;-)

    • Re:Woo! Great (Score:4, Funny)

      by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @04:47PM (#4056701)
      Oh great. My Solaris 8 install just finished last week.

  • From the article (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sources close to industry insiders at slashdot say that Sun will be releasing Solaris 9 for x86.

    Is it bad when an article uses a source that is using the original article as its source.
    • Looking into my crystal ball:

      Soon we will see a new article in a magazine:

      "According to Slashdot insiders, the rumors about Solaris 9 for x86 seem to be true."

      At which time a new Slashdot article will be posted saying:

      "Now we can be sure it will come: A new article again said so."

      At which time maybe two magazines take up that news, which then raises a slashback "Solaris 9/x86 will indeed be released, as two new articles confirm."

      This will encourage a few other magazines to jump onto the train and announce the new Solaris 9/x86. At which time, other magazines start to copy from those magazines, until every magazine tells that story.

      Finally, someone at Sun reads it in a magazine, and tells the management about it, which instantly releases a press release that the rumors about Sun releasing Solaris 9/x86 soon are nonsense.

      Unfortunately this statement gets misinterpreted as "We have trouble with it, therefore we won't release it soon, but it will take some time." This makes Sun stock go down.

      Sun management sees no other way to get out than creating and releasing Solaris 9/x86. So this is done.

      Now the stories on slashdot and in magazines are proven to have been correct.

      However, I should note that my crystal ball came without any warranty, without even the warranty that anything it shows is or will become true.

  • Sun LX50 Servers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jaaron ( 551839 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @04:50PM (#4056725) Homepage
    Not only will Solaris 9 run on x86, but Sun's new LX50 server [sun.com] is x86 based. And the really cool thing is you can get it with either Solaris or Sun's new Linux distro [sun.com]. This marks an interesting turn for Sun, throwing support to both x86 processors *and* linux.
    • I agree that Sun offering a Linux server is genuinely big news. I imagine that the engineering costs of maintaining Solaris are pretty enormous, and Sun would like to reduce them. It makes sense for Sun to leverage the excellent work of the Open Source community by building on top of Linux instead of maintaining their own parallel development team working on a very similar set of core UNIX-esque services.

      Which leads to an interesting question. What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes? I know Solaris has a good reputation for clustering and high server-side throughput. Are there other Solaris features that could be migrated into a server distribution of Linux?

      I don't want to start an OS flame war - I am genuinely interested in the facts.
      • I'm not much of a Solaris expert -- I've worked on Solaris systems for development, but never been a SysAdmin for a Solaris setup.

        That said, I think the biggest current advantage of Solaris over Linux is scalability. For smaller shops and servers, this isn't too big an issue, but when you're producing some of the top of the line servers like Sun, scalability is key. Last I check, the linux kernal has issues running on more than 8 processors (this could be old news and out dated though). If someone has more insight on this issue, I'd love to hear it.

      • Re:Sun LX50 Servers (Score:5, Informative)

        by pmz ( 462998 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:56PM (#4057245) Homepage
        What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes?

        Solaris has:

        - extreme CPU, disk, and peripheral scalability
        - mature 64-bit support
        - multiple scheduling and VM algorithms
        - fine-grained patch management
        - Dynamic Reconfiguration (allows partially-broken servers to continue running)
        - easy hot-swapping
        - Dynamic System Domains (multiple OS images)
        - multipathing for networks and disks
        - bundled management software (SMC, Disksuite, etc.)
        - fairly easy installation (similar to Red Hat's install but much more robust)
        - JumpStart automatic installation
        - sccs (minor detail, but I like it)
        - really good bundled documentation (enough to get a sysadmin cert. using it)

        And I'm sure there are many more. One thing that is frustrating sometimes is that the Solaris vs. Linux vs. Windows arguments lose many of these details. Most people mindlessly regurgitate benchmarks or marketing-speak trying to justify their basically-religious feelings when an objective analysis would pose a much different argument.

        • Re:Sun LX50 Servers (Score:2, Interesting)

          by BigFootApe ( 264256 )
          But aren't items 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 really features of Sun Fire servers, not the OS.

          Hey, if I'm wrong, that's great. I'd like dynamic reconfiguration and "easy hot swapping" on my k6/2 machine just by switching to Solaris.
          • Its not sun-fire only - the enterprise four-digit servers are where you start getting those features.. USII.

            And it has to be the sparc arch.. sorry :)
          • But aren't items 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 really features of Sun Fire servers, not the OS.

            Only in part. The OS is providing an interface to extra features in the hardware, and real smarts behind these features are built into the Solaris kernel. For example, the kernel needs to know how to manage the device drivers properly when a failure occurs or the sysadmin takes something off-line.

            Also, some of these features are available on commodity parts. You can get elements of hot-swapping if you have an ordinary SCSI bus using Disksuite and the cfgadm command. With some of the Sun Fire servers, there are just more hot-swappable components, such as CPUs and RAM.
      • Which leads to an interesting question. What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes? I know Solaris has a good reputation for clustering and high server-side throughput. Are there other Solaris features that could be migrated into a server distribution of Linux?

        While some of the solaris bits and bobs could find their way onto Linux, the things such as scalability that Solaris does well tend to not to migrate well, as they involve too many fundamental design decisions. Solaris is not going to be going anywhere real soon. You'll notice that IBM isn't really running Linux on the big iron either - they're running they're OS which is running who knows how many instances of Linux.
    • The server looks fairly nice on paper, er, specifications... my question is will Sun be making any workstations that will have an x86 processor (be it Intel or AMD) that can run Solaris x86 or the new Sun Linux distribution? The Sun Blade 100 is fairly inexpensive as it is, but it's technical specs aren't exactly something to write home about.
      • my question is will Sun be making any workstations that will have an x86 processor

        If they did, they would need to find really good ways to differentiate themselves from Dell or HPaq, for example. Firmware would be an excellent way to do this. As would unique things like a UPA bus (XVR-1000 in a PC? Why not?). Solaris is yet another good way.

        On the other hand, I always cringed when I saw a PC with the SGI brand on it. Once SGI started selling PCs with Windows, they plunged themselves to where Dell and Gateway reside. Let's hope Sun is smarter than SGI in this regard.

        The difficult stigma that Sun has to deal with is that PCs are crap. And, really, nearly every PC out there is crap. Microsoft has done nothing to help this reputation, so Sun is really doing a balancing act with x86 and Linux. Done right, Sun will really benefit, but, done poorly, Sun will end up in the pit with everyone else.
    • when did Sun buy Cobalt? I knew that Gateway bought them, then they were sold to someone else, and now Sun owns them?

      This makes sense in a marketing move. Sun's biggest fear about linux is that folks can replace their Sparc Solaris boxen with x86 linux boxen. By marketing an x86 box (a sexy x86 box, I should add...) they can keep their hardware niche and use free software.

      Now, the question that I didn't see answered was whether or not x86 Solaris 9 will be free. Solaris 8 was, and I like playing with other (even though sometimes crappy) OSs.
      • No, Gateway didn't buy Cobalt -- they just sold relabeled Cobalt equipment for a time. Sun bought Cobalt quite a while ago, although there wasn't a whole lot of fanfare around the purchase itself.

        And, frankly, the Sun Linux distribution isn't really a distribution at all. According to Sun, it's only available (now) on the LX50, which is pretty much par for the course for the old Cobalt equipment. What _is_ new about the LX50 is that it's built to be a general purpose server platform as opposed to a Web server (Cobalt's mainstay product lines -- the RaQ series).

        I know there are a bunch of people out there that think that Sun has a motive for releasing their own distribution. I've even seen a few people claim that they might be doing this to stratify the Linux marketplace. I don't buy it. Cobalt has been shipping their units with a "distribution" called Cobalt Linux for years -- and from what I know of the LX50, it's pretty much the same thing.

        Interestingly, back then, Cobalt Linux was basically a hybrid Redhat distribution. I expect that Sun Linux is exactly the same thing -- the next permutation of Cobalt Linux.

        As it is, I've stopped being all that interested in the Cobalt platforms after they have wholesale _stopped_ putting out Security fixes for their older platforms. I have a poor, dejected Cobalt Qube that I don't even use anymore because the software on it is so full of holes that it would be suicide to use it as a server. The last updates to the unit were posted by Sun in 2000.

        That being said, now that Sun has its nameplate on the front of the unit and its moniker on the issue.net, maybe they'll be more proficient about updates.
        • I have a poor, dejected Cobalt Qube that I don't even use anymore because the software on it is so full of holes that it would be suicide to use it as a server.

          I'd be happy to take that off your hands, if you really can't use it. I certainly could =)

      • This makes sense in a marketing move. Sun's biggest fear about linux is that folks can replace their Sparc Solaris boxen with x86 linux boxen. By marketing an x86 box (a sexy x86 box, I should add...) they can keep their hardware niche and use free software.

        But it's a big shift for them to make.

        Sun's accustomed to manufacturing their own in-house RISC hardware, with exacting quality specs for a small fixed-size market.

        They'll need less in-house hardware expertise for a given volume of sales in the x86 world.

        And they can't afford too much expensive expertise competing with Dell, HP, IBM where the margins are a lot lower than they were in the old model.

        It's a big change for them. It's a scary new market where they could either surf or flounder. Despite their late entry into Linux, Sun has some of the strongest UNIX credentials in the industry. That could be used as a selling point for them to sell Linux to customers that would dearly like some reassurance that, for example, the NIS and NFS inventors are the ones that setup their Linux deployment.

  • Not exactly... (Score:2, Informative)

    by KenCrandall ( 13860 )
    Apparently, Solaris for x86 is not going to be GA like Solaris for SPARC is.

    It appears to only be available as a shipping option on the x86-based LX-class servers...

    Cheers,
    Ken
  • to make my x86 run like a (x-1)86.
  • Do penguins like sun?

    because, you know I thought they didn't.

    • Re:yeah but... (Score:3, Informative)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 )
      Galapagos penguins live right on the equator, thus getting plenty of sun. Since the colony on the north coast of Isabela Island is just north of the equator, it is not quite true that penguins all live in the southern hemisphere, a "fact" that is stated quite often in zoos and on animal shows on television. Austrailia also has quite a few penguins. All quite sunny places.

      Plus you have the giant eletric penguins with tenticles that you have to watch out for when you're in the Sahara... plenty of sun there.

      --
      Evan

  • Big Bear only (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mooset ( 9986 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @04:58PM (#4056785)
    Don't get excited yet, According to Infoworld [infoworld.com] the new Solaris x86 will only run on Sun hardware such as the Sun LX50. You won't be able to download it for free and use it on any system as in the past.

    They are only doing this for the admins who want cheap Solaris hardware to mix in with their SPARC stuff. No more free lunches.

    • Re:Big Bear only (Score:3, Informative)

      by jeffy124 ( 453342 )
      not quite. according to the article on eweek (linked above):

      On Monday, Sun CEO, Chairman and President Scott McNealy will also unveil a new, general-purpose x86-based server, the Sun LX50, ....
      [emphasis mine]
  • This is not meant to be a flame or troll...

    Why would I want to run Solaris x86 over Linux or BSD? I have used Solaris on Sun boxen but never have touched it on the x86.

    • you might not want to, but some customers of Sun's do.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Why would you remove Solaris from a Sun box??? Is there an advantage I'm missing?

      • Unless your Sun boxes are really old and unsupported this can only be a bad idea imho. Solaris gets the very best out of the Sparc architecture. It will be a long long while before Linux can even approach that.
      • Typical linux idiocy..."Waah waah Solaris is hard, it doesn't ship with GNU utilities...let's replace it with linux."

        This isn't flamebait - this is the real attitude! I've seen it dozens of times, if someone is used to linux, they'll never like Solaris, due to Solaris' emphasis on the kernel and OS, rather than spending time on a nicety-nice administrator environment. Say what you want, you can drop a ton of bricks on a Solaris box and it absolutely will not go down. They're real machines, without niceties, intended for real work, and real men work on them. Flame away.

        • Plus gnu utils are freely available from most places... I thought Solaris 8/9 even shipped with one extra CD that contains optional stuff including lots of gnu goodies?

          And then both KDE and Gnome work on Solaris platform; Gnome is easier to install since Sun is committed to making it that way.

          So, although Solaris is hardly the best platform for Gnu tools, it's not all that bad either.

    • You've been running Solaris X86 on your systems since the early 90's and would have a training and support hassle if you tried to switch now.

      Though I suspect, given sun's dabbling in the Linux realm, that they will be moving away from Solaris X86 in the long run. As long as money spent on keeping it up to date is less than they are bringing in from the sales and support contracts they'll keep at it, but Solaris X86 seems silly these days with so many unix variants on the market.
    • Why would I want to run Solaris x86 over Linux or BSD?

      Um, to cross-train and maybe certify, so that you can work effectively with Slowlaris in a production environment if you have to?
    • Why would I want to run Solaris x86 over Linux or BSD? I have used Solaris on Sun boxen but never have touched it on the x86.

      One Word: NFS-Server

      OK, two words, actually. But from what I've heard, getting the locking-issues right on Linux is a PITA.
      On FreeBSD, rpc_lockd is marked as broken anyway. So there's honest at least.


  • Any word?

    I guess since Sun is in the 64 bit domain....it might not make sense. But then again, it might!
    • Um, Sun said it had to stop the Slowlaris port to Itanium because Intel stopped giving them needed documentation, etc.
      I'm sure AMD could exploit this to offer Sun some handholding with the Opteron.

      It's all spelled out in a Register article or two - I just don't have the time to find those URLs again.

  • In other Sun news: LX50 behind the times (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sun is releasing their LX50 today as well, their first general purpose Intel 1U server.
    http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/lx50/

    I actually participated in the beta and was very underwhelmed.

    This machine is nothing more than an identical clone of the: http://www.penguincomputing.com/store/relion-125.p hp

    Which in turn is an OEMed Intel server:
    http://www.intel.com/design/servers/acces sories/sr 1200/index.htm

    Very pathetic, Sun is becoming another Dell! I guess they realize that their market for "boutique" servers with SPARC CPUs is no longer profitable, at least at the 2 range.

    The part that annoys me the most is that they are taking RedHat advanced server and re-branding it Sun Linux 5.0...they will waterdown thrid-party ISVs support by doing this IMO.
  • Just a shot of reality, Solaris 9 x86 will be available, but licensed only 'for use on systems shipped by Sun.' There is talk between Sun and 'the community' for future licensing, but this is how it stands now.

    Try here [solaris-x86.org] for further info...

    • why risk a reputation of stability on hardware configs they havent tested well? This way they can build and sell x86 machines with hardware configs they know WILL work stable.
  • I don't realy see why I would run solaris on an x86 system. Sun hardware combined with solaris is great, because you get a good OS and very well tested stable hardware. On an x86 based system however, there are better options for servers with were made natively for x86 and not ported, such as windows 2000. Personally I find native x86 OS's more reliable than ported ones. If you use sun hardware however, solaris is great and the only real option to use.
  • The reason for keeping Solaris for x86 alive?
    • When I was in college, I put together a group of CS majors who wanted to learn practical computer usage, UNIX-centered development, networking and etc. -- topics definately not covered in CS classes.

      We took over the student ACM, weaseled an unused facilty office from the CS department and went to work on assembling a small lab based on the UPL at UW-Madison (we stole their name, too, which really frosted them and nearly earned me a beating from a guy with a crowbar, but I digress).

      The real trouble was getting machines to run "real" UNIX distros on.

      Given that, the Solaris x86 distribution was an attractive alternative. In the end, we didn't go with it because $99 was prohibitive (hey, we were *college* students). However, if I knew then what I know now (how good Solaris use and admin is on a resume), I would have insisted we spring for it on the second machine we put together from donated bits -- as it was we just used Linux.

      So, there's your roundabout answer: It's for people who can't afford Big Iron but want to learn Solaris.

  • This is what Solaris x86 should be used for... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cnelzie ( 451984 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:03PM (#4056822) Homepage

    As a stepping stone for those geeks that want to learn and work on Solaris, but are unable to afford real Sun hardware and don't want to take the risks associated with second-hand-could-be-missing-important-pieces-of-h ardware Sparcstations from Ebay.

    For instance, I personally used Solaris 8 x86 for this purpose. I loaded it up on an old 200Mhz system that I had laying around. Granted the installation took way to long, the boot process took way to long. However, in the end, I had a functioning Solaris running box to play with.

    I started learning the Solaris commands. The files in /etc. How to configure it for a network. How to setup services. A variety of things that I simply would have been unable to do, if Solaris x86 didn't exist.

    Why knock Solaris x86 as slow? As a Solaris learning platform, it is more than perfect for someone on a budget who may have a spare PC, but little dough to blow on Ebay. Personally, I wouldn't use it in a production environment, on the hardware that it came with.

    I am quite certain that it will be faster with specially provided drivers for hardware that has the "blessing" of Sun.

    If you ignore a tool for the other uses it has, does that make the tool less usefull or you less usefull?

    -.-
    • I heartily agree.

      As a geek with limited resources, I must say that running any version of Slowlaris on my spare P3/733 (or even my old P/200) is considerably faster than running OpenBSD 3.0 on my Sun IPX, and yet there are several people here who would rather have "real" Sun gear, even extremely lame and out of date gear, to train on.

      I don't see why, at all. I'm sure, after I get serious and certify for Slowlaris, that I'll be able to play with the "real" stuff later. But in the meantime, I can reboot into SuSE or BeOS or a Windoze whenever I need to.
      • How do you do OBP stuff on an x86 box?

        This is the sort of stuff it is very handy to know in an emergency.

        Alex
  • Is the phrase "Going Forward" the 21st century equivalent of the telegraph statement "STOP"?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:13PM (#4056895)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • For the Linux crowd, the Solaris OS has a level of stability, maturity, and unified feel that Linux simply lacks. It's a one-company vision of how a Unix OS should work and, while I don't always agree with them, the consistency is refreshing.

      Change a few words in this..and..

      For the Linux crowd, FreeBSD has a level of stability, maturity, and unified feel that Linux simply lacks. It's a single vision of how a Unix OS should work and, while I don't always agree with them, the consistency is refreshing.

      Sounds exactly like why I stick to FreeBSD these days rather than Linux, unless I'm working on a desktop machine. I dealt with Solaris machines for a couple years (on both Solaris 7 & 8), and while they did their jobs just fine, admin'ing those boxes was definitely not as well thought-out and easy as admin'ing any of the FreeBSD boxes--and the Solaris machines provided no additional benefit in uptime or stability, while costing about $2k more a piece at the time. Rightfully so, of the couple hundred or so machines I've been tasked with setting up in the couple years since, not a single one has been a Sun box.
    • A modern x86 running Solaris 9 will spank a Sun Blade 100, so providing an x86 version of Solaris seems likely to hurt sales of lower-end Sun workstations. A decent x86 box is blindingly fast, in fact, and I would not be surprised to see them even hurt sales of low-end UltraSPARC servers

      Well, maybe, but I don't think so.

      In places where they are not already a Sun shop, or only have x86 PCs and no unix servers, then I could see a company choosing x86 over a low end ultra - but really, how many companies like that would be seriously considering a low end ultra anyway.

      I have a Sunblade 100 on my desk. The reason? It runs the EXACT software as the really big suns in the computer room. In fact, the computer room suns are really not very big - just a cluster of 4-processors E4500 (I think, something like that). The company I'm working for also has alot of big old iron, but they chose Sun for some specific tasks, and want the same sort of hardware dependability as they're use to.

      I'm sorry to say, but even the best x86 boxes cannot compete against something like the multi-processor SunFire range (hot swapping of CPUs, etc).

      No, I think that this is more likely going to open up more of the really low end market to help Sun get their foot in the door to when the customer wants to scale up, they're already there ready to sell.


  • Sun has excellent products in both the hw and os arenas, but Sparc/Solaris isn't for everyone.

    By not fully embracing Sparc/Linux and x86/Solaris, Sun was cutting its own throat.

    Sun ought to make the new software products as Free as they possibly can in order to gain some mindshare. For example, I think they should give us an easy, free download of x86/Solaris for non-commercial use.

  • "Productization"? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by budalite ( 454527 )
    Am I the only one that doubts that there is (or, at least, wasn't) any such word as "Productization"? They used it *twice* in the article. [ahbadee-ahbadee-ahbadee (the sound made by a toon when shaking his head to clear it!)] :)
    • nope, not a word - must be a "presidential vocabulary" kind of thing.
      • nope, not a word
        Evidently, you've never been out in the dot-con^Hm world. You'll hear Productization and "monetize eyeballs" 'til the Tucows come home... ...and no, I'm not bitter, not at all. ;)
        • yeh, I tend to go by dictionaries and not on what I hear when deciding what's a real word :)
          • The problem with that is that the dictionary is descriptive rather than prescriptive. A dictionary is just a list of the common usages of words. Therefore, when a word is used enough that editors learn of it, it goes in the dictionary.

            Note that I'm not encouraging the use of "productize" and other such words; I think people who say things like that should be tortured to death right in their own marketing boardrooms.

  • Return of Solaris (Score:3, Funny)

    by yeoua ( 86835 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @05:47PM (#4057165)
    I don't know how good this new Solaris [imdb.com] will, now that it includes George Clooney.

  • solarisx86 is already considered dead (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @06:01PM (#4057279) Journal
    All the big application vendors left solaris x86 fearing it is dead. Sun should of watched their mouths. I doubt they will come back because everyone else already left and the herd mentality is in. Why risc an investment in a platform in which everyone else already left?

    Most of the big name vendors whose products were only available on solarisx86 and solaris-sparc have been ported to Linux except for a few cad apps. Solarisx86 is used as a server and not a workstation anyway so it wont matter. Linux might be a better alternative to a nervous IT manager who has a budget only for cheap x86 hardware.

    I think sun should just let it die or opensource solarisx86. They are throwing money away and a now dead product thanks to the false annoncement they made on the death of solaris8 on x86.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yes, the mobo in the LX50 supports LOM, and there are tools for BIOS access, etc.

      Check the prices for the HP box you're talking about ... the LX50 product mgmt team was being very price-conscious when building the SKUs, and are cheaper than IBM and HP for similar configs, and very close to Dell as well (with better support and more goodies on the box than Dell's offerings)...

  • Prices for the Sun LX50 start at $2,795 and rise to some $5,295 for a richer configuration. The systems will be generally available on Aug. 26, O Brien said.

    I guess Sun won't be giving out free copies of its version of Linux at LWE tommorrow...?

  • my deep doubt (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bryam ( 449040 )
    Is Danese Cooper [slashdot.org] reading this comments thread?

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