[cctalk] Re: Old UNIX Systems

On 06/03/2013 03:11 PM, Christopher Satterfield wrote: Well, there are idiots everywhere. And there are a lot of salespeople who push lots of kickbacks to motivate people to purchase new hardware (and sometimes the WRONG hardware) when it isn't needed or appropriate. Well, there are three current major releases of Solaris: 9, 10, and 11. 9 and 10 fully support the systems we're talking about. Hardly anyone is running 11 yet. Look how long 10 has been out...and look how many shops are still running 9. A new major release of an OS that is almost exclusively used in production-critical environments does not normally result in a flurry of "hurry up and migrate!" activity, unless there is a really compelling reason to do so. There are no particularly compelling features in Solaris 11 other than the Crossbow stack. Admittedly Crossbow IS pretty compelling, but people got along just fine without it for a long time, and taking advantage of it can involve massive restructuring of infrastructure, which production shops tend to avoid until it's absolutely necessary. But for an OS that has very nearly (if not exactly) 100% binary compatibility going back more than twenty years, it's really immaterial. Oracle did a pretty shitty thing by dropping US-III hardware support from Solaris 11. I say it was shitty because they did it, according to an Oracle employee, to "reduce the amount of hardware out there that says Sun on the nameplate". The move was unprecedented, at least for hardware that young, in the Solaris world...Solaris 9 ran on stuff nearly a decade old when it was released. Solaris 11 de-supported hardware that was 1/3 that age at the time of its release. (including, most pissingly, a machine that I have a little bit of design work in!)

More than one shop, including me and my employer (separately), very nearly ditched Solaris for that reason. That kind of unpredictable, uncharacteristic behavior is dangerous in areas of business where upgrade cycles are measured in half-decades rather than half-years. But either way, don't forget OpenSXCE. There was a new release announced just this morning, in fact.

Too true. :-( Suits. Not so true, in our current context of Sun hardware. Oracle is pushing T3 and T4 hardware pretty hard in SPARC shops. (Talk to any salespeople lately?)

-Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA