Oracle Restricts Access To Sun Firmware Downloads

boer lee writes with the news that you can expect trouble in downloading firmware updates for your Sun server if you purchased it before March 16, 2010. "In a somewhat surprising move (and without any notification to customers), Oracle shut down public access to firmware downloads. I learned this the hard way when I contacted Oracle customer service almost two weeks ago. Yes, it took 13 days for me to get access to the firmware download for systems under the standard warranty (i.e. less than a year old)."

Comments

Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Purchased Before March 16, 2010? Doesn't that exclude, like, almost all purchases of Sun hardware?

Re:Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[Too Much Noise]

Purchased Before March 16, 2010? Doesn't that exclude, like, almost all purchases of Sun hardware?

No 'almost' about it. According to TFA, systems sold before that date come with the 'old' Sun warranty, while the ones after have the 'Oracle Global Warranty'. The two don't mix and the old systems require 'opening a formal service case' to get the firmware that they're entitled to.

Re:Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[ender-]

I just tested this and I was able to download firmware for some of our x86 servers with no issues.

Re:Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[LWATCDR]

It may have been a glitch.
The new owners trying merge Sun's customer base into their system. Maybe it is fixed now?

Re:Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[Too Much Noise]

Then maybe TFA is wrong - or at least in part. However, March 16th was the date Oracle changed its hardware support policy. Seeing that the Sun acquisition was concluded at the end of January, any new changes of policy most definitely do not include old Sun kit.

Re:Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[Anonymous Coward]

No 'almost' about it. According to TFA, systems sold before that date come with the 'old' Sun warranty, while the ones after have the 'Oracle Global Warranty'. The two don't mix and the old systems require 'opening a formal service case' to get the firmware that they're entitled to.

Cisco does that crap too.

Cisco has a policy of giving away free IOS firmware for security problems, even without a support contract. They've had this policy for years.

But you can't just download the firmware. You have to call Cisco and open a case. And most of their staff have never heard of this policy, so you spend 15 minutes telling them that Cisco does actually have this policy, and even telling them where on Cisco's website it explicitly says Cisco does have this policy.

Then they assign you to an engineer who will work with you to resolve the case. The engineer will call you back.

Then the engineer asks what is the problem, you explain, and they give you a special time-limited url to download the firmware.

Then you download the firmware and upgrade your router. Then they close the case and send you a survey.

I estimate it costs Cisco $50 to handle each "free" download.

If Cisco wasn't so paranoid, it would cost them next to nothing for a simple webapp where you create an account, select your router model & serial number, and click on the generated link to download the firmware.

Bound to Happen

[Stregano]

I really don't like that this happened, but it is not something completely unexpected.

I did think that Oracle said something about continuing support for Sun stuff. I could be incorrect in that, but I was under the assumption they would continue support.

Re:Bound to Happen

[Jeng]

For small values of support.

Re:Bound to Happen

[h4rr4r]

Oracle does not support anything. Oracle support is total joke for their own products, for things they bought it is even more worthless.

Re:Bound to Happen

[rnturn]

> for things they bought it is even more worthless.

Ah... Reminds me of how CA deals with the product lines of the companies they buy. Price those products -- and their support -- to death. Apparently, they hope that enough saps will continue to pay and deal with the devil they know. Those customers who don't pay the higher costs and who want to migrate to someone else's product weren't worth keeping around as a customer anyway. Besides, their new vendor will eventually get bought out and we'll get 'em in the end.

Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[ProdigyPuNk]

This seems rather odd as the firmware is just a binary blob anyway, right? I'm not sure what they achieve by doing this other than alienating their customers. However, does the firmware just happen to fall under an umbrella of things that non-customers should not have access to? That would better explain their position. Or they could just be trying to squeeze an extra dime out of people...

Re:Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

More than that. Plenty of binary blobs are considered to be serious business(see just about any proprietary software).

Firmware, though, has more or less the ultimate in dongle-based copy protection... It's of essentially no use at all without the hardware, which is what you paid for anyway(the only exception would be those situations where the difference between the high end model and the midrange/low-end model is a couple of firmware locks. In such cases, the "high end" firmware is probably of considerable interest to owners of the "low-end" model who know which way to point a hex editor...).

Re:Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[vlm]

It's of essentially no use at all without the hardware

Or a clone of the hardware. As if there's a vibrant sun-compatible gray market.

Re:Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[bhtooefr]

To be fair, um... you could make a Sun XVR-100 out of an ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition PCI. But that's stretching, and they never offered THAT firmware for download anyway (although General Dynamics did.) (Same for an XVR-300 out of (presumably) a FireMV 2200 PCIe or Radeon X300 SE, except no download anywhere..)

Re:Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[coredog64]

As someone who did the Radeon 7000 to XVR-100 conversion myself, I'd suggest that someone wanting to pursue the latter could start by picking up an honest-to-goodness XVR-300 and dumping the firmware out of that. The big win on that GD firmware was that it enabled a feature that you couldn't get otherwise (console on the DVI output).

Re:Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[bhtooefr]

I actually want to go even further, and use a (Dremel-modded) PCIe x1 to PCI adapter, on top of that mod, to get an XVR-300 into a Blade 2500.

Not entirely unexpected

[ilikejam]

Linky linky
http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunSolve/How+Entitlement+Works

Cut off free Solaris patches too

[homer_ca]

You need a maintenance contract to download software patches now, including security patches. Not that they were good with security patches before, they were months behind the Linux distros on releasing them.

Re:Cut off free Solaris patches too

[Zubby]

~~Fly away troll~~

Find the users...

[OMA1981]

What's the easiest way to find out who/what is using an a network port? Disable/unplug the port and wait for someone to call in and complain. This might be the same mentality at work, just a little larger scale.

Re:Find the users...

[noidentity]

What's the easiest way to find out who/what is using an a network port? Disable/unplug the port and wait for someone to call in and complain. This might be the same mentality at work, just a little larger scale.

Couldn't Oracle just stare into its crystal ball and get the answer to this more quickly?

Re:Find the users...

[Panaflex]

No, they snort the noxious gases from a chasm and quack. Using the power of Oracle 13i and a huge dataset of duck calls, they are able to manage a software empire. Recently Oracle, announced the procurement of the Sun God Ra, after he defeated Osiris and left Isis searching the river for his missing uh... firmware.

Re:Find the users...

[dkf]

Recently Oracle, announced the procurement of the Sun God Ra, after he defeated Osiris and left Isis searching the river for his missing uh... firmware.

I know this concept might be foreign to you, but Isis is female.

Re:Find the users...

[stwrtpj]

Recently Oracle, announced the procurement of the Sun God Ra, after he defeated Osiris and left Isis searching the river for his missing uh... firmware.

I know this concept might be foreign to you, but Isis is female.

"His" = "Osiris"

I know this concept might be foreign you, but maybe you should bone up on Egyptian mythology before making snarky comments like this (though it was Set that defeated Osiris, not Ra).

Re:Find the users...

[powerlord]

Yes, and either you didn't catch that the "his" in this case refers to Osiris, Egyptian mythology is foreign to you, or you just like to nitpick.

(I'm leaning toward the second choice myself)

Just another symptom of declining customer service

[cruff]

Sun's service has been sliding for some time now. Oracle appears to be accelerating that decline. We had some RAIDs, originally purchased from StorageTek before the Sun acquisition, come off of the three year warranty they were purchased with. We've been unable to get Sun (now Oracle) to recognize the RAID's serial numbers to get them on the maintenance contract for quite some time now. You'd think Oracle would want our money?

Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

Speaking as a Solaris admin of nine years, this is the best news Dell and Red Hat could ever get.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Mr. Foogle]

I wonder if the FreeBSD guys saw a jump in downloads? Need an OS to lay on that non-Snoracle hardware.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Sponge Bath]

Dell is a leader in the race to the bottom in terms of support and hardware. If you are migrating from Sun hardware, I would think there are other competitors (HP, IBM) better suited to your needs.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Anonymous Coward]

In my first hand experience, here is what is happening:

Dell, HP, and to a lesser extent IBM are gaining with servers. HP is viewed by a lot of people as being more of a server-grade company, but both Dell and HP have mature products for the server rack.

Oddly enough, Cisco is getting a boost too. Since Cisco sells rackable x64 servers, businesses who buy a lot of hardware from Cisco find it easy to just buy the PCs from them too for a better deal.

OS-wise, RedHat is the platform of choice that is being moved to from Solaris. This is boosting RedHat's sales, as well as use of CentOS for non-production testing and staging. Windows is also getting a boost. Since a lot of Sun installs are islands in a Windows-based sea, sometimes companies make sure their applications run well on Windows, then just wholesale migrate that direction.

In general, the sea change is from Solaris -> RHEL in the big data centers. There is a lot of concern about Sun's direction these days.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[TooMuchToDo]

Don't discount CentOS. My organization just did some consulting work with a Fortune 500 company that has several thousand CentOS boxes. They just couldn't justify the cost to run RHEL when they had enough in-house talent to fix problems when they came up (it being open source and all).

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[fm6]

Huh? Don't get the relevance of BSD to this discussion. We're talking firmware, not OSs.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[forkazoo]

Speaking as a Solaris admin of nine years, this is the best news Dell and Red Hat could ever get.

Yeah, Oracle has been so unkind to customers since the Sun acquisition that at this point, it's less like Oracle is a doctor trying to bring Sun back to life, and more like Oracle is a drug addled psychotic who filled the rotted corpse of Sun with a bunch of knives and used needles and has decided to rape it continuously until sunrise. At this point, so many would-be Sun customers have been hearing this steady drumbeat of "Oracle are acting like jackass" stories that even if they became the perfect vendor tomorrow, almost nobody would touch them with a ten foot pole.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[fm6]

If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites. I used to have a hell of a time finding the download I needed — and I was a Sun employee. That's one reason other server vendors (like Dell) have cleaning Sun's clock for a long time.

I wrote technical docs for Sun, some of which appeared on the web. One of the least favorite parts of my job was dealing with the company's web bureaucrats. They were in denial about the many problems with their tech, knew jack about clean web design, and had way too many processes that should have been automated but weren't. Worst of all, Sun's politics and organizational dysfunction meant that web content was generated by a half dozen different groups with overlapping and conflicting responsibilities.

Naturally, Oracle is trying to clean up this mess. And it's predictable that whoever is reworking Sun's web presence is going to screw up now and then — something that complicated is Murphy's Law waiting to happen. It's still a step in the right direction.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[mlts]

Even though my preference is IBM or HP for servers (mainly out of old time's sake), Dell's offerings are just as good, and they support RedHat as a server OS. Dell knows where their bread is buttered, and if their products do not do well in the data center, companies will change to HP, IBM, or Cisco brands in the next hardware upgrade cycle. With modern virtualization technology, it is not difficult to change out the hardware without much production impact [1][2].

There is a BIG quality and service level difference between stuff that goes in a server rack, and a bargain basement PC bought from a big box store. As always, you get what you pay for.

[1]: Install the OS/VM server on the new hardware and get it up to date with patches, power off the VMs in production, swap hardware, import the VMs, power them back on. Of course, it never goes this easy in reality, but this is a LOT easier than replacing a physical machine, rebuilding the OS, apps, paths to data, and other stuff.

[2]: As an alternative, I've seen some companies that are Mac based use XServes and VMWare Fusion to replace aging PC servers. They do this for services that can't be moved to OS X like Active Directory and Exchange. This is a completely supported way to run production systems, especially if a company has a great deal for hardware with Apple.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[rubycodez]

plenty of production sites use CentOS, several of my clients do that as well as my employer. Search engines plus forums beat a RedHat help desk 99 times out of 100; I've never needed RedHat support.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Don't get the relevance of BSD to this discussion. We're talking firmware, not OSs.

Yes, it's quite obvious you don't get it.

Well, let me clarify that for you:

this is the beginning of the end for Snoracle hardware, because unless you are a Swiss bank so deeply entrenched in SPARC and Solaris, nobody in their right mind will go along with this bullshit, when they can get cheap-ass generic hardware off of avadirect, siliconmechanics or whoever the next reasonable volume discounter is.

Unfortunately, that also means the beginning of the end of Solaris.

It's about getting to be that time to say "goodbye dear Solaris, trusty companion, the best operating system on the planet. You'll continue live in my memory."

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

In my experience, both Dell and Sun are about equal as x86 server suppliers, on quality of hardware, price and quality of service. They were quite good to play off against each other too.

(Dell's desktop build and service is shit, their server build and service is excellent. In my experience. YMMV. Etc.)

HP are about the same as either. IBM are better on quality and service but pricier.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[FlyingBishop]

No, Oracle is just trying to put it behind a paywall so you don't know what you're getting into until it's too late and you already own the hardware.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

My experience concurs with most of that, except that CentOS is just fine for production machinery.

We run a lot of Java on Solaris. Mostly that can be moved to Solaris x86, which is a supported platform on Dell. Until Oracle think they can screw Dell out of pennies too. Then we have to move it to (ew, icky) Linux.

(Moving Java from Solaris to Red Hat is actually something I have done. The Java is easy, the Unix glue is all different.)

HP or Dell blades are damn fine too, if you're willing to pay VMware the big bucks for the nice version. (VirtualBox is ludicrously unrobust rubbish and I really think Sun bought a pup.) That takes care of Solaris x86, Linux and Windows nicely.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

I've dealt with Red Hat support. They're really fucking awful and eminently not worth paying a penny. (YMMV.)

The actual reason to buy a copy of Red Hat is (1) you're running Oracle and want a supported OS (1a) you're running similarly pricey proprietary software and want a supported OS (2) you have a paranoid whose fears you have to assuage (3) you think giving Red Hat at least a bit of cash is a good thing and you can convince someone who signs the cheques to do so.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

There's a reason I always search docs.sun.com from Google ;-) It's also until now been good for finding firmware upgrades. (e.g. every X2200/X4500/X4600 shipped with firmware so immature it would be Not Fit For Purpose if UK consumer law applied; Sun won't send a field engineer until you've upgraded the firmware, or tried and failed to do so. Fantastic boxes once that's done, of course.)

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

Mod parent up. This is what it feels like. Except that I would phrase them as "Oracle are acting like Oracle" stories.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Luke has no name]

You mean Silicon Mechanics and Canonical.

Right?

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Pharmboy]

We use Dell servers (small company, 4x lower prices servers like the T300 series) and while I like the hardware "ok", the service is pretty thin when it comes to Linux. We run CentOS, which half of the techs that I have talked to have never heard of. They have flatly told me that they are a "Microsoft shop" and they can't help with Linux. In my experience, they are useless for anything relative to software unless it is Microsoft.

On the other hand, I have a couple of spare servers (testing only, dual PIII, around $2500 ea. back them) that run 24/7, from the late 1990s, and they still run perfectly in every way with never a replaced part. I have installed Redhat/Fedora/CentOS on a dozen Dell servers, 4 different models, and have never had an issue with everything installing perfect the first time. So from my experience, their hardware is easy to install, lasts a very long time, and the few times I have had warranty issues, they were handled quickly.

I did once have a cooling fan die out of warranty, and their price for a rebuilt fan "kit" was $75. I went and bought the exact same fan online from a industrial supplier for $13 and just soldered the wires into their proprietary connector (the extra part in the "kit"). They are too expensive for replacement parts. But all and all, if you can take care of your own software, I still recommend Dell. We even use them on the desktop (meh, they are ok) because of price vs performance. The big difference is that while Dell isn't the most powerful systems, you get a little less performance for about half the price.

I also have some IBM servers from 96/97 that still ran when I finally retired them, after cannibalizing them a little. Of course, those were $4500 with one PPro and no hard drives, making them closer to $6k+ each for similar reliability, but exceptional performance.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[h4rr4r]

Then why in the devil would they run BSD?
Linux is the default choice these days in the server room. Linux has been killing solaris for years, we are far past the beginning of the end.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[h4rr4r]

Dell Enterprise linux support is very competent. Tell them you are running redhat next time.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Anonymous Coward]

The advantage of IBM is that you might pay a high price for support, but if things are going to hell in a handbasket really fast, you can always get a tech onsite to help with the problem. Of course, this is a lot better with the pSeries line where IBM makes the hardware, the OS, and quite likely the software (if using DB/2, CATIA, or something along those lines.)

HP support I've seen has been middle of the road. However, in my experience, they tend to be better than Dell. Dell is great if you have a MS shop with a whole bunch of A+ techs who either can pull out a soldering iron and do exactly what you did, or find a solution by heading to a Fry's, buying a part and making it work. However, on production critical equipment, a soldering iron may void the warranty, so you need to have at least 24/7/365 with a 4 hour response time at the minimum. This is why I like HP. They actually won't give you crap if you need a tech on-site because your primary DC's motherboard ate itself and the secondary DC is groaning under the stress of twice as many queries.

Some server maker's service is OK... but in general, make *sure* to get the premium/gold/platinum/whatever is their upper tier service plan. Elsewise you will be screaming in Hindi, "Ma' mai apan paryavkaka s bta k?" repeatedly when the tech tries to read down a script asking you to run hard disk diagnostics when the box won't POST, then gets mad that you don't.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[soundguy]

I have a rack full of Asus quad-core/4-bay 1U machines that are about half the price of equivalent Dell, HP, etc. I get them from NewEgg. I don't know why "service and support" is such a big deal to everyone. I've never had a single hardware failure of any kind in 3 years of using these commodity boxes, but if I did, I'd just swap the drives into another chassis and get on with my life. (I have hot spares in the rack) If both RAID1 drives failed or were irretrievably corrupted, I'd restore to a spare machine from either the 3rd onboard daily backup drive or the redundant weekly offsite backups. (these are cPanel web servers - account restoration from backups is trivial and completely automated)

I especially don't understand why people insist on OS support from their hardware vendor. I use CentOS exclusively and have never had any kind of problem that wasn't an easy fix with info from a Google search. Are they trying to run an IT department without any IT people or something? Exactly what kind of "support" are they getting from the likes of Dell? Are they trying to use Dell CS as their sysadmins? Are they adding bleeding-edge hardware with no available drivers or kernel support?

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Agarax]

We run CentOS, which half of the techs that I have talked to have never heard of. They have flatly told me that they are a "Microsoft shop" and they can't help with Linux. .

This is kind of the trade off you get when going with CentOS instead of an actual RedHat install, you can't just call tech support if something is broken (and Redhat has pretty damn good tech support).

Or you could just lie to Dell and say you have Redhat installed and see if they will help you figure it out.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Agarax]

plenty of production sites use CentOS, several of my clients do that as well as my employer. Search engines plus forums beat a RedHat help desk 99 times out of 100; I've never needed RedHat support.

True but that one time where the shit really hits the fan and the interweb does not provide you a solution having that tech support (especially if you shelled out enough for the 24x7 phone tech support) might save your skin. Or at least let you foist blame.

I would always ask management for a Red hat license over just going with CentOS so when Armageddon hits the server room I can say "6 months ago when we bought these machines I requested X number of RedHat seats in case something happened, and that was denied."

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Agarax]

(4) You running some sort of extremely mission critical server where shelling out $2500 a year is chump change compared to the cost having that thing stay down and/or telling management "I'm googling how to fix it" might not fly.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[nexex]

ZFS

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Achromatic1978]

VMWare Fusion to replace aging PC servers. They do this for services that can't be moved to OS X like Active Directory and Exchange. This is a completely supported way to run production systems

Cite please. Really? Microsoft complete supports running EXCHANGE, and DOMAIN CONTROLLERS, on a virtual machine (I know they 'allow' some virtualization, through their VPC solution only, and with the caveat that 'in some cases we may not be able to support you if the problem cannot be tested on bare hardware'), on OS X?!?

No, really, it's not completely supported. Not at all.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[afidel]

Ha, downtime to swap out hardware?!? That's the biggest reason to go VMWare, swap out servers or storage with zero downtime (vmotion and svmotion for the win). Heck with Windows Enterprise I can hot add ram without downtime (CPU's too but most stuff won't take advantage without a reboot).

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[afidel]

IBM better on service that HP? Either your from a different world or you work for a Fortune10.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[ishobo]

Ah yes, Linux, the McDonalds of server operating systems.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Third Position]

Unfortunately my experience has been that shelling out the $2500 only buys you the convenience of having the Red Hat tech do the googling for you.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Anarke_Incarnate]

IBM can't find their ass with both hands, a map and a Sherpa. Their X series is a frackin' nightmare and when you try to do things with Linux, it goes to hell fast. My group runs RHEL on their servers, and besides the firmware being junk (uEFI, blargh and slow as frozen shit), their support is abysmal. Try getting internal cables for hardware or recognizing that the machines that are capable of running 12 drives can't actually run 12 drives at full speed, or redundant PSUs that cause a machine to run at 1/2 speed when one fails, RAM that runs at the wrong speed, and all sorts of other nightmares such as having weird firmware settings that need to be applied in order to get it to even boot

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Anpheus]

Enterprise support is only available for Enterprise support customers, but yes, it's very excellent. They usually get me right to someone who knows exactly what they're doing, and they don't BS me with tiers of support calls.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Mr. Foogle]

Like Mr. AC said, it's yet another sign that Solaris is a doomed operating system. I don't work at a Swiss Bank, just a middlin' sized company. I owe it to my employer to consider alternatives.

One of the big reasons - not mentioned by AC - is that I already deal with Oracle for app, db and more apps. We spend a lot of money _on_ Oracle but from Oracle's POV we're nobody special and their level of customer support shows it. I never got that feeling from Sun.

So. Time to consider alternatives. On my short list is FreeBSD. The big reason for FreeBSD is a) I've used it before and b) ZFS.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Mr. Foogle]

Then why in the devil would they run BSD?

* ZFS.

* I like the development philosophy behind the BSD family.

* Going with the herd is a great way to make a mediocre salary and never rising above the fray.

It's the law of supply and demand. Consider fire fighters. Now this is not the place for an essay so this is rather simplified ...

Anyone can aspire to be a fire-fighter for the city. Initial training is a few months and you're in. There are a lot of these guy, they're a dime a dozen, the pay is meh to average, depending on your location.

Above that you have specialized fire-fighters. Smoke jumpers, maybe the guys at the airport. Guys who put out oil well fires. More training, more experience. You don't have a lot of these, not everyone is qualified. Better pay.

At the top of the heap you had Red Adair. There was only one Red Adair, his expertise was priceless. You paid him what he asked for because he was worth it.

I can't be Red Adair, but I can specialize in stuff you don't see everyday. It's worked out well, so far. When the herd said 'Novell' I did Banyan Vines. When they said 'NT' is where you go, I got into Solaris.

Now the herd is chanting Linux (you ain't the only one) and ... it's a lot like what I read about NetWare and NT and so on.

Not turning my nose up at Linux - I've used it and I'll use it again. I just don't feel like it's all that and a bag of chips.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Mr. Foogle]

Hey, now.

That's rather harsh on McDonald's, don't you think?

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Mr. Foogle]

If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites

It's not great, but it's not bad, in my opinion. I've been doing 'Sun' for a decade and change and I can't say I can recall any problems.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[secolactico]

Perhaps the googling itself is not the issue but being able to point fingers at someone else is.

But yeah. Sometimes you need to deal with software vendors that absolutely won't support you unless you are running it on one of the "enterprise" linux distro which usually means Suse or Redhat.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[TedRiot]

Where I work Linux is far from default choice.

The real servers doing real work here run Solaris and HP-UX.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[rodgerd]

I've dealt with RedHat, and their support has been superb for the most part, working through weekends for crticial problems and shipping us kernel patches for feature enhancements when we've needed them.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[javiercero]

"... we just don't trust the code because we don't trust the principals used for getting where they are today..."

So by "shop" you meant the couple PeeCees you use down at you parents basement. Right?

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[JackieBrown]

Are they trying to run an IT department without any IT people or something? Exactly what kind of "support" are they getting from the likes of Dell? Are they trying to use Dell CS as their sysadmins?

I think it is more a cover your ass type thing.

If you can fix it, great and you look good. If you can't, you can say you are "still waiting for the Dell/IBM guys."

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

I did say YMMV ;-) The incident that really unimpressed me was a three-way issue between Red Hat and HP over Ethernet bonding on RHAS 2.1 on a DL580, where each blamed the other and we got nowhere at all.

This is what I like(d) about Sun on Sun x86 - even running Red Hat, they support the whole stack. With Solaris in particular, we got a kernel developer working on our case when we hit an obscure but nasty ZFS bug.

Whole-stack can lead to monoculture, but as I said above, playing Dell and Sun off against each other works well. And we happily ran RHEL/CentOS on Sun hardware or Solaris on Dell hardware where appropriate at the time. All pretty good, actually.

That's why Oracle's inept fuckery is really pissing me off.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[drinkypoo]

IBM is more competent at service than HP. That is a fact. How much trouble it will take to get the guy on site is another matter, but in my experience, if you have a support contract that's not hard. HP will swear up and down that there isn't even a problem even when they know internally that the problem is theirs, as with a laptop I had which had a Quadro with bad die bonding. Support knew it was a lemon but it took me weeks (over 24 hours on the phone in total) to get a replacement. NEVER AGAIN. HP can not have any more of my money. I'm not even buying their DVD media if I can help it :p

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[e3m4n]

even if this were true it takes the burden of liability off you. Just think about how things work in the WinSuck world... they have countless issues all the time. Sometimes they dont fix critical shit for months. Yet employers just accept the 'i opened a ticket with microsoft' answer even if its been 6 months. There's always someone further down the food chain that you can pass the blame off to which preserves your job.

With having a support contract with an OS vendor like Sun or RedHat, you once again have a faceless organization you can pass the blame off to. Sure, sometimes you can find the answer faster than they can and solve the problem yourself. The same can be said about M$ or a few others. IMHO the real advantage is when you can't figure it out, and the vendor also can't figure it out.. you're completely dumbfounded as to why something is happening. Going it alone leaves you catching all the shit from the top down with all the pressures of resolving a potentially unresolvable issue. Stating you have a ticket open with redhat and that they are at a loss right now as to why its happening suddenly carries more weight than just you saying the same thing. Its not about competency or credibility. Its simply human psychology that 'oh, the guys that wrote the OS cant figure this out it must be seriously difficult' passes through the minds of those not-in-the-know.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[barnacle]

man that was funny

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Snorbert Xangox]

If you've been running Sun systems for that long, you know what a pain it is to navigate Sun's absolute mess of customer web sites. I used to have a hell of a time finding the download I needed — and I was a Sun employee.

I did always wonder if there was somebody inside Sun who thought their incoherent "choose your own adventure" web presence was actually the best that they could manage, or whether it was the product of a fragmented and dysfunctional organisation that didn't actually care.

But once I realised that the Sun management loved Java so much that they insisted on calling everything "Java [mumble]", even their Linux environment which AFAIK contained precious little actual Java, I knew that there was a lot of self delusion going on at that company. I had to reassure a number of people old enough to remember the wretched "Javastations" that there was none of that "Java crap" in the Java Desktop System. It seems that the corporate memory of Sun's failures has been maintained mostly outside the company.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though my preference is IBM or HP for servers (mainly out of old time's sake), Dell's offerings are just as good,

...

NOT

Try adding a NIC or HBA to a Dell server more than a month old. You will likely NOT get the same model as shipped on the original. Different firmware, different vendor, whatever. It won't be the same.

And every now and then, that MATTERS. Big time. Especially for complex enterprise systems.

Whether or not you need to pay more for that is up to you. But Dell servers are NOT in the same league as IBM and HP.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[fm6]

I've read one or two of those CYOA books. I seem to recall that they were much more coherent than any Sun web site.

Incidentally, Java Desktop is primarily run on top of Solaris, not Linux. And aside from the (extremely lame) rebranding, it is just GNOME. This was Sun's fifth attempt to provide a Solaris desktop that could compete with PCs and Macs.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[fm6]

My job at Sun was to document their x86 servers, and it was my perception that Sun's were much better than Dell's. Obviously I was biased ;) but I don't recall Dell (or anybody else) building systems that compared with our best 4U systems:

http://sharikou.blogspot.com/2006/07/sun-x4600-x4500-servers-and-8000.html

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[David Gerard]

I did like the build. The shipping firmware was unmitigated shit though. The Sun field engineer was rather curt about it.

The Sun blade servers weren't cost-effective for VMware when we were looking because of VMware's per-CPU-package licensing (wut). Annoying.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[fm6]

The shipping firmware was unmitigated shit though.

Sigh. I spent a lot of time writing up firmware bugs.

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[Cheaty]

I know they 'allow' some virtualization, through their VPC solution only, and with the caveat that 'in some cases we may not be able to support you if the problem cannot be tested on bare hardware'

This isn't true anymore, see http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm

The referenced configuration (Fusion on OSX) definitely isn't on the SVVP list, but the bulk of Microsoft's applications (including SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, etc) are now fully supported on VMware ESX(i), Citrix XenServer, Hyper-V and several other virtualization platforms. Really they had to get behind running apps in virtualized environments if they wanted Hyper-V to gain any traction. There is a caveat in the support agreement that they won't support application problems that are definitively caused by virtualization-specific behavior (app crashes consistently after a VMotion/Live Motion, problems caused by hypervisor-level swapping, etc) but it's still a vastly improved stance

Greedy Sun, and in turn greedy oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

"support contracts". making people pay for critical security patches. It's like a virus writer holding your machine for ransom until you pay up, and then your machine is "secure" again. This is nothing more than legalized extortion.

Fuck Oracle, and Fuck Sun.

Re:Oracle will kill Sun

[Mr. Foogle]

SUN's not pinin'! 'SUN's passed on! This company is no more! SUN has ceased to be! 'SUN's expired and gone to meet 'its maker! SUN's a stiff! Bereft of life, SUN rests in peace!

If Oracle hadn't bought it SUN'd be pushing up the daisies!

Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! SUN's off the twig! SUN's kicked the bucket, SUNs shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!

THIS IS AN EX-COMPANY!!

Re:Oracle will kill Sun

[jpmoney]

A lot of small and mid-sized customers are switching too ;)

Looking more and more like I will stop using Sun..

[Fallen Kell]

I mean, come on. This is firmware which ONLY WORKS on your Sun/Oracle hardware. If you own the hardware, you should be able to get the latest system firmware. This might be the final straw in terms of me recommending Sun/Oracle hardware anymore. Personally, I loved them. My work loved them as well. But this is getting ridiculous. Ok, I can understand closing off downloads of different patches to the OS. You want updates, get a service contract because the OS was free. But to cut off firmware updates to their hardware? No one does this. You can freely download the firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because, to use that firmware, you needed to OWN the hardware which means, the company received their money for it... We have thousands of Sun desktops and servers (no exaggeration, literally, thousands) at work. I have been a very happy Sun Unix Administrator for the last 12 years, but I have to say anymore, I can't recommend we keep buying these things (especially as the majority of the codebase has been slowly ported from SPARC to x86 over the last 5 years). I have still been recommending Sun x86 hardware for their ALOM/ILOM interface and very well engineered gear which tends to last for many years longer than a Dell or HP... But the nickle/dimming to death is starting to make it so that it is not worth it to purchase a Sun box with the extra premium when I similar spec'ed Dell for 30% less, and take that extra 30% savings knowing that about 20% of it will be used in needing to replace the box a few years sooner due to hardware failure.

GARBAGE

[mysidia]

This act by Oracle is simply outrageous.

You see if I ever recommend anyone buying a Sun/Oracle server ever again.

Not going to happen. I will now recommend all owners of Sun/Oracle servers phase them out as quickly as possible, since Oracle has proven so unreliable.

And I actually used to prefer Sun's hardware, and recommended them highly...

Re:GARBAGE

[hpavc]

Agreed, if this is after market issues (like cisco had with ios and did the same thing) they could have addressed it in a different issue.

This coupled with the Solaris support changes, not sure what there is in their product line thats worth it.

Cannot wait for a real zfs/dtrace/crossbow/zome alternative elsewhere.

Re:GARBAGE

[gtirloni]

You can try FreeBSD 8-STABLE today for ZFS.

Re:GARBAGE

[mysidia]

Well, Cisco is basically in a different world. The software is essentially a majority of the value in many of Cisco's products which are software-based routing platforms, sometimes with a few hardware ASICs or specialized ICs thrown in when required (for example, for switching, or carrier grade apps).

The closest Sun equivalent would be Solaris, but they went another direction... they opened that.. (OpenSolaris)

If Cisco didn't limit the IOS distribution, by now, there would probably be 3rd party manufacturers making routers that you could load IOS firmware on as drop-in replacement, due to the immense value and basically industry de-facto standard status of the IOS.

The Cisco IOS software is very unique, enterprise routing/switching equipment isn't a commodity, or at least it wasn't at the time, and it has a very long useful lifetime, in that it can still do its job just fine, and serve a useful role for otherwise lucrative customers, even long after 10 year sales and support EOL.

Used Cisco equipment would be a very good cost-effective alternative for small/mid-size enterprises to run their network infrastructure with, if they wanted, were willing to forego support, and if the IOS/other updates needed to provide any added features or performance/fixes were publicly available..

And these people would have little option but to buy brand new Cisco equipment, if not for aftermarket.

Servers are really quite different...

Servers have an aftermarket, but they lose value much more quickly.

A server that was cutting edge 10 years ago, is basically worthless today for new purchases. Whereas a router that was high-end and cutting edge 10 years ago can still have a lot of value in the aftermarket.

As for the large enterprises that buy most Sun equipment, it would be almost unheard of for them to seek equipment in the aftermarket.

The most likely reason they would be looking for firmware updates is that they have old equipment doing something important that they cannot or do not want to migrate away from at that point.

Oh, yeah, and they have an issue related to an old bug in Sun firmware, that they had delayed patching for a long time.

So... they go to Sun's website... looking for answers, their Sun hardware is being flaky due to a defect, it's out of support contract and Sun won't provide the fix

IOW, the hardware is going to have to be replaced to fix the issue.

They will be forced to buy new hardware... but are they going to buy more hardware from Oracle after having this issue, after Oracle denied them access to the fix?

Are they going to keep support contracts on all their other Oracle servers, and replace them with new Oracles when they reach their 5 year server replacement cycle? Or will they buy shiny new Compaq or IBM servers for a fraction of the price? I think the latter...

More importantly... when some small business or individual picks up their old server [with firmware-related issues] on the aftermarket sold as-is to get rid of it by the original company...

What is this going to do to their opinion about Oracle, when they find there is a fix for the issue, but Oracle decided they can't have access to it?

Well, they will be more concerned that there was an issue in the first place, it makes the manufacturer look bad.

Arguably, this move could increase the number of old Sun/Oracle servers on the aftermarket and reduce the price they sell for, making the brand look even cheaper than it does today.

Re:GARBAGE

[butlerm]

The closest Sun equivalent would be Solaris, but they went another direction... they opened that.. (OpenSolaris)

That sound you hear is a door closing. OpenSolaris != Solaris, and now that Oracle is in charge that is likely to become more true every passing day. I don't think Oracle has any interest in becoming the next RedHat. Rather they dearly want to become the next IBM.

Re:GARBAGE

[mysidia]

That sounds futile.. there can be only one IBM. If Oracle even tries, IBM will send their goon squad out, and return home, leaving behind the charred remains of Oracle HQ, carrying the severed heads of the executives and board members.

Re:If

[MightyMartian]

If a woman is talking and no is there to listen, is she still wrong?

If you're jacking off to pictures of 1920s film stars, is it still sex?

jonbenson

[jonbenson]

I am downloading the firmware for my Sparc T5520 server right now. This sounds like a personal problem.

Re:jonbenson

[Kymermosst]

Just downloaded firmware for my first-gen X4100, GA date Nov 2005.

So, no issue for me either.

Re:jonbenson

[Cramer]

You're lucky. I cannot even login. Their "maintenance" has all sorts of shit broken.

Re:pwned

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you get for buying from a company that bet on open source hippie crap lol.

That's the weakest and most transparent trolling post I've ever seen. You're giving the rest of us a bad name. On the ground and give me twenty!

In a somewhat surprising move

[BestNicksRTaken]

Erm, i'd say its totally *unsurprising* given what we've seen of how oracle is handling sun nowadays - you tried to get a patch cluster (or even patch info!) lately?

i'm not even going to mention killing off opensolaris or charging for odf plugins.

Confirmed

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just confirmed this with my Sun account (that doesn't have our contract attached.) At my day job we've purchased over mid-six figures worth of Sun hardware (retail over $1M) in the last two years; this and other Oracle-ization has nearly guaranteed that it's the last that we'll ever buy.

Hardware, Software, Complete.

[ak3ldama]

...and it's gone!

Seriously... that is retarded. Horrible way to treat customers, even if they are only past customers. The new slogan sucks too. Sorta like: "We want to be like IBM, we are not sure how yet, but we are going to try this out."

Re:Open office

[mlts]

I don't think it would happen, but who knows. IBM has standardized on a variant of OOo (Lotus Symphony), so if Oracle decided to abandon it, IBM would take up the mantle of keeping the project alive. Even if IBM forced everyone to move to MS Office 2010, the users on AIX and RHEL would be left out in the cold.

I'm expecting a bigger split between StarOffice (Sun's commercial version of OOo) and Open Office.org though. OOo might get a few token updates while SO would likely receive major makeovers. Similar to the concern about OpenSolaris versus Solaris.

The Oracle Speaks

[Anonymous Coward]

At Delphi, the Oracle Larry Ellison speaks:

Larry: "Hmmm... everybody thinks we bought Sun in a clever ploy to offer integrated solutions. That would allow us to out maneuver IBM and their crappy DB2. I know how to show them how wrong they were... I'll shoot Sun hardware in the foot! Along with strangling MySQL and putting a fatal bullet in OpenSolaris, I'll make sure anything valuable from Sun is gone forever. Then let them try to figure out why I bought it."

Tech Analysts: "Curses, he is too clever for us!"

Re:The Oracle Speaks

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bet money that M$ paid them through some back door deal to buy Sun and kill OpenOffice. Not to mention the side benefit of getting rid of mySQL, and Solaris. Think about it. It's going to be huge blow to the OSS community. It's time for a new set of forks.

Re:Open office

[blair1q]

Simple. You left it open.

Re:Oracle will kill Sun

[blair1q]

My Oracle is full of Ellisons.

Re:If

[chibiace]

If they are dead, is it necrophilia?

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[countSudoku()]

I hear that! Sun and Solaris have provided me a very good living for some 20+ years now, briefly as an employee several times and just about every contract and position thereafter, but Oracle is just poisoning the well. They fumbled the MySQL relationship, lost the inventor of Java itself, and countless other valued employees. All in the name of making a quick buck off of Sun's corpse. Long live Open Solaris, but I'm supporting Linux and VMWare data centers from now on. So long Solaris, and thanks for all the fish!

Just in: Gigabyte & ASUS 2 charge for BIOS upd

[Proudrooster]

Good job Oracle! You will only hurt the ones that buy your hardware :) I know, I know, I know maintaining that 20-30% annual support contract is part of the business model, but FIRMWARE updates? Please.....

In other news, Gigabyte and ASUS will start charging for BIOS updates. You just thought your were going to purchase that new 6-core AMD PhenomII and use it with your motherboard. Not so fast... get a premium support contract first! Of course I am just kidding, I hope. Better go download the new BIOS just in case it disappears.

Apparently Larry doesn't have enough ...

[Jerry]

airplanes, yachts or mansions.

Re:Apparently Larry doesn't have enough ...

[Clandestine_Blaze]

Or movie lines.

Sun confirmed it to me on April 9th

[borcharc]

Its not a glitch, I received this email from sun after submitting a ticket that i was unable to download the firmware for my workstation on 04/09/2010:

Hello,

As of April 5th customers now need either hardware warranty or a 'system' level contract to download firmware, drivers, etc from either SunSolve or the Download Center.

Sincerely,

Sun Web Team
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

-

When trying to download the current bios and driver iso for my Sun Ultra 24 it says i am not authorized. Please advise.

Re:Sun confirmed it to me on April 9th

[LWATCDR]

Okay I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. Frankly I would say this is a bad move if Sun wants to stay in the Hardware biz.

Re:Sun confirmed it to me on April 9th

[mysidia]

The big question is... does one warranty or contract give you access to all firmware, or just that system's firmware?? Based on the article, I am thinking the latter, and I am thinking that you lose access to your firmware the moment the warranty expires.

Re:Sun confirmed it to me on April 9th

[gstoddart]

Frankly I would say this is a bad move if Sun wants to stay in the Hardware biz.

Well, you see, the new owners (Oracle) have decided that the Hardware business isn't nearly as lucrative as the maintenance business.

That's where the big money is. Oracle figured that out a long time ago, and they're just moving Sun to be in line with existing corporate policies.

Same greed, different day.

Re:Sun confirmed it to me on April 9th

[LWATCDR]

When it comes to software I agree but with hardware it becomes a little more complex.
Hardware wears out. New Hardware that is faster comes out.
If Sun ticks me off as a hardware customer I can always look at Dell, HP, or SuperMicro as a replacement. X86 is getting faster and faster and can be used to replace Sparc based systems with ease. Also I am pretty sure that those manufactures don't charge for firmware updates.
Solaris has some really nice features but for many users Linux will work as a replacement.
RedHat and Novell will be glad to sell you support
If you don't want to go X86 you can turn to IBM or HP for a Power or Itantium based solution. And you can us AIX or HPUX if you don't want Linux.

Re:Sun confirmed it to me on April 9th

[whitelabrat]

That sucks. Definitely not going to help sell servers.

Kicking away customers with both feet

[otis wildflower]

I have to say, at a completely anecdotal level, this shit is absolutely driving a significant migration off of Sun/Solaris and onto Linux with HP/Dell x86 hardware. We're looking at consolidating several hundred SPARC/Solaris boxes onto a significantly smaller number of modern multicore commodity boxes.

I'd been nagging to start on this for the last 3-3.5 years, but it's finally getting traction. Ironically, OpenSolaris would likely have been a better option, but nobody here's got faith in that platform. Just when ZFS was gettin' real good too! :/

Thanks, Larry!!

Re:Kicking away customers with both feet

[gtirloni]

As a sysadmin I'm thinking if I should stop looking at Solaris/SPARC as a viable career path. I might not have enough companies to work for in the future with Oracle screwing up like this. Oracle has already said they won't care about low-end hardware.. only mid-range and high-end stuff. That shrinks the number of potential employers.

Re:Kicking away customers with both feet

[John Hasler]

Why do you feel that Linux requires x86? Debian supports SPARC. I understand wanting to get away from Sun/Oracle hardware, but Linux on the existing SPARC boxes could be an intermediate step.

Re:Kicking away customers with both feet

[javiercero]

To run what software exactly?

Solaris 10 d/l was busted too...

[coredog64]

This weekend I was trying to download Solaris 10. The old license survey that you got in between selecting a platform
and the actual download was busted and redirected to www.oracle.com

I filled out their online trouble ticket and got an email pointing me to the instruction page. I then sent them
a screen shot showing that I was logged in and a zip file of the HTTP traffic between me and Oracle. I didn't get
a follow up email but the Solaris download is mysteriously working again.

I spent the weekend trying to grab a copy of ALOM 1.6 firmware. The Oracle dev site says the 1.6 version is public
and that only prior versions are restricted, but all attempts have resulted in failure. I even went so far as to use
a search engine to try and find an unsecured copy -- no dice. I did find an earlier version of the OBP firmware that
will allow me to install OpenSolaris 2010.03, er, 2010.04, er, 2010.H1

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[gtirloni]

Oracle is about predictable constant revenue generation. When you realize that it makes all sense. You want to own some Oracle gear, you must have a support contract. They don't see why you shouldn't have a support contract thus removing public downloads of firmware makes total sense to them. It's not about the end user, it's about $$$.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Skapare]

Most, almost all, other computer manufacturers do not do this. Sun itself did not do this until it was borged by Larry. In the sense of Oracle's approach and business model of shaking everyone down for every penny in their pocket, it makes sense. Except for the very top end giant servers that would be running Oracle software even if Oracle had not bought Sun, this is going to decimate the Sun market that is, for the most part, not accustomed to this much aggressive gouging. IBM now has an opportunity to push PPC based machines as the alternative to x86 architectures. I can only hope they do that.

Oracle is awful

[modmans2ndcoming]

Oracle are a bunch of morons with bad customer service.

we had a problem where local and remote connections to a fully patched 10G Database were timing out. it took down a major operation and the backup DB was having the same problem. Oracle blamed AIX, AIX blamed Oracle. we got them on a call together and instantly, the AIX support guy sounded way more knowledgeable about what was happening. we asked Oracle if there was a person that knew AIX better on their staff... he said there was but he was off that day. The director of infrastructure said "I have the number of 'so and so' SVP at Oracle, would it help if I contacted him to get the resources we needed on this call" and the Oracle support guy got offended and became very rude.

In the end, the AIX support folks figured out that every time Oracle was authenticating a connection to the database, it required a DNS lookup to get the network hostname of the AIX frame, even for local connections. We had a Domain controller down that day and that caused the connections to time out, even though we had two controllers defined for DNS. the only way around this problem was to use the Hosts file, but that becomes a pain because every entry will need to be validated every so often because if one entry is not correct in the hosts file (does not even have to be the DNS resource) the connection times out. We looked at some of the 11G environments we have and were able to replicate the problem there as well so Oracle has not fixed this issue in their latest release either.

nice that it is so reliable and all.

Re:Oracle is awful

[gtirloni]

I was at one of those Welcome Sun events. There were hammering the message "Oracle software will run better on Oracle hardware" all the time. At some point the guy saw all the worried faces thinking "what about my IBM/Dell/HP/etc server running Oracle?" and said "but it'll also run on other hardwares too" with a yellow smile on his face. So I think their troubleshooting procedures will probably follow this sequence: 1) Check if software is running on Oracle hardware 2) Suggest customer buy Oracle hardware 3) If doesn't work, actually troubleshoot the issue

Re:Oracle is awful

[butlerm]

DNS? Reliable? You have got to be kidding. A better answer is never take your DNS servers down. And if that is a problem, migrate the IP address to another server that is actually up.

Re:Oracle is awful

[1s44c]

...had a Domain controller...

You don't mean an activity directory domain controller do you?

There are obvious ways to get a faster and more stable system, none of which require spending money.

Re:Oracle is awful

[modmans2ndcoming]

Power outage caused the Domain controller to go down.

Oracle should not be using DNS for local connections.

Re:Oracle is awful

[butlerm]

Oracle should not be using DNS for local connections.

But if you give it a DNS name to connect to, how is it supposed to know that an always local connection is really what you want? I always give it a static /etc/hosts name, because I don't like to see a local machine or cluster fall over when there is a DNS problem.

Re:Oracle is awful

[modmans2ndcoming]

which is what we ended up doing.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[gtirloni]

Agreed. One long-term downside of focusing only in the high-end hardware is that you make it easy for people in the low-end/mid-range areas to look for alternatives like IBM, HP, Dell, etc. When these companies grow enough to require high-end servers, they will biased towards what they've been running for years. And then Oracle will have a hard time getting into those markets. And even today Oracle's high-end servers aren't the most obvious choice, so they have to fight with IBM mostly.. and that company sure does have a hell of cash to go aggressively after Oracle customers. Oracle just shows how short-sighted and greedy it is.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[mxs]

firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because,

So you have never used Cisco gear then ?

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Skapare]

Maybe ... hopefully ... Oracle will spin-off or sell-off the low end Sparc hardware business. That would give them some cash for a business sector that apparently are not interested in. Then they could focus on competing for the high end database server market. IBM is diverse enough and experienced enough to carry out a wide range of business and still compete against Oracle for high-end database machines (they've been doing this for decades, with hardware ... mainframes). Oracle isn't experienced in that front. Sun certainly brings some in, but more work still needs to be done (including paying attention to what they bought).

Oracle sucks

[nurb432]

Need i say more?

The real reason ...

[Agarax]

The real reason for a support contract is so when your mission critical server shits the bed, the internet isn't providing an answer, and management is breathing down your neck, you have someone to help figure out WTF happened and get it back online.

Re:The real reason ...

[Anpheus]

Mod +1 "the support tech is remotely connected and figuring out the problem while my heart races and I worry about my job."

Perhaps...

[znerk]

Perhaps this will be enough to push Linux to the desktop... err... server... uhm, workstation?

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[coredog64]

To the extent that Solaris certs are still mildly valuable and EOL hardware is available for a pittance on eBay, wouldn't it make sense
for Oracle to at least offer some form of "hobbyist" license? IIRC, Digital did that for Tru-64, selling a license for the OS and compiler for $99.

I know I'd pay $99 for an extremely limited support contract that entitled me to drivers/firmware/software for EOL hardware and nothing else.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Achromatic1978]

[tongue in cheek]Cisco firmware is free. You're free to download any Cisco firmware you like, even for devices you don't have... you just have to have a support login...[/tongue in cheek]

Re:Just another symptom of declining customer serv

[drspliff]

Oracle want your money, when it's profitable.

Yeah, I hit this same thing.

[Toasterboy]

Yeah, I went to get firmware updates for some older Sun hardware I wanted to fix up and ran in to this too. Got the same "support contract is required for firmware updates" crap.

My 11 sun machines are headed to the dumpster, as a direct result of this policy. It's incredibly stupid. It's not like Sun was winning any new customers these days anyway, and now they'll bleed out the few they had. Obviously their intention is to kill off their hardware business, because no one in their right mind would decide to implement a policy like this.

Their model is vertical market with machiavellian control over customers. That model broke in the 1990's. Ridiculous to keep hanging on to it like a moldy wet blanket.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[illumin8]

For what it's worth, I'm also a UNIX/Linux sysadmin, and the HP iLO has been steadily improving to the point that it's much better than Sun's iLOM now. Also, the HP servers are now supporting cool features like RAID 6 on internal disks, cheap SAS expansion shelves that give me lots of inexpensive but fast locally attached disk.

We still have some of the X4600s. They were great boxes 2 years ago, but HP is making better servers now.

Oracle is just one member of this prestigous club.

[fenix849]

Just as a note, nortel systems have been pulling this shit for years. You practically need a service contract to access anything more than sales brochures. It's a farcical waste of time and money. A lot of people in the phone industry either avoid nortel, charge thier clients through the roof (if they think they'll get away with it, or install pirated firmware updates etc.

PPC or Sparc

[SgtChaireBourne]

It's a sad day when most know so little about architectures that PPC and Sparc are re-flagged as mere 'alternatives' rather than being recognized for the areas they excel in. The Wintel ideal is a ratio of worse that 2:1 of hardware to services. Each box burning tens if not hundreds of watts. Sparc is an open architecture and handles many threads per core, so for most things you should be able to replace a rack of Wintel boxes with a single Sparc. We'll see how long Oracle allows you to access that Sun paper.

Fujitsu also provides info sparc architecture because it also sells server hardware.

Re:PPC or Sparc

[drinkypoo]

It's a sad day when most know so little about architectures that PPC and Sparc are re-flagged as mere 'alternatives' rather than being recognized for the areas they excel in. The Wintel ideal is a ratio of worse that 2:1 of hardware to services. Each box burning tens if not hundreds of watts.

The problem with that notion is that incredible work has gone into saving power on PC processors, and the rest of the machine is under scrutiny now as well. Amusingly AMD has traditionally had the lowest x86 power consumption right up until the Atom. A lot of people thought it was during Pentium M but the truth is that since there's no North Bridge, a desktop Athlon 64 plus chipset has lower peak power consumption than Pentium M plus chipset. Pretty hilarious. AMD was way out in the lead with Geode LX, but it's incredibly slow by modern (Atom-era) standards. Still waiting for cheap ARM netbooks on shelves, though.

But more on-topic in server-land, SPARC handles lots of tiny threads these days. If your workload doesn't break down gracefully into shitloads of threads even while on a monolithic kernel, then your job isn't going to work well on a Sun machine. It's purpose-designed for embarrassingly parallelizable tasks. The problem is that these tasks are cheaper to run on PCs no matter what angle you approach from. I can't help but notice that a rack-sized SPARC has just as much cooling equipment as a rack of PCs...

Re:Never buy Sun/Oracle Hardware

[Third Position]

3. The world moves on... and quickly.

Too bad the IBM deal didn't go through. IBM's fabrication capabilities applied to SPARC architecture: I had a fantasy of a 4 GHz T CPU.

More likely you'd have seen Solaris migrated to PPC, and eventually merged with AIX. I can't see IBM supporting another proprietary architecture.

Re:Just another symptom of declining customer serv

[hardwarefreak]

Sun's service has been sliding for some time now. Oracle appears to be accelerating that decline. We had some RAIDs, originally purchased from StorageTek before the Sun acquisition, come off of the three year warranty they were purchased with. We've been unable to get Sun (now Oracle) to recognize the RAID's serial numbers to get them on the maintenance contract for quite some time now. You'd think Oracle would want our money?

Not for kit that old. They'd prolly rather sell you a new array, which their people can actually support. If they even have spare parts for it they probably can't locate them. How many years ago did Sun acquire StorageTek? 5? How old is that pre-acquisition array of yours? At least 5+ years old. Given its age and limited capacity/performance, may I ask why you're still using it? And given the plethora of quality cheap storage arrays on the market, such as Nexsan http://www.nexsan.com/ why would you not just replace that StorageTek array with such a unit instead of continuing your masochist ways with "lock in" vendors such as Sun and Oracle?

Solaris2AIX

[eugene_roux]

IBM is pushing PPC/AIX quite aggressively over here; and I'm porting our in-house code to AIX as fast as I can.

Thank $DEITY I've beed coding rather defensively for a while, so most of my C compiles just fine on AIX. Perl/Python is a cinch, but I will admit some of the Shell scripts (most of them written years before I started here) are giving me some headaches. Too many Sun-isms in those...

If it carries on like this we'll be on AIX as our majority platform before year-end (Power7/LPARS/AIX makes a convincing argument) with Solaris being relegated to only those systems where we really have no choice.

Re:Solaris2AIX

[h4rr4r]

Use the gnutools, why you would ever use sunisms I do not get. Even when I worked on solaris I installed those right away.

Re:Solaris2AIX

[tyen]

Were you guys using ZFS, and if so, how are you addressing its gargantuan addressing capacity under AIX? We think we have a way out using FreeBSD, but we're also evaluating AIX as we expect the schizophrenia at Oracle to continue for awhile.

Re:Solaris2AIX

[eugene_roux]

We'd only started investigating ZFS recently (I work for a VERY conservative company) so all our current storage live on EMC/Veritas/etc...

We use JFS2 (which seems to handle the load fairly well) and GPFS on AIX but most of the Solaris systems are on either UFS or VXFS.

Most of the heave lifting, database wise, gets done by the mainframe so we can still get away with it.

Most of the other Unixey systems (mostly RedHat, but some SuSE and some FreeBSD) are not SAN connected (yet, they will have to be within this year) so we have no worries there.

Re:Solaris2AIX

[eugene_roux]

Inherited code and scripts. Most of them looking like they'd been regurgitated by a deranged monkey. On LSD.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Fallen Kell]

Endianes plays a very large role when you are dealing with high performance computational models where parts are hand written at the chip level and not in a high-order language to be compiled by a compiler. There are a lot of places where compilers still do not do nearly as well as a skilled programmer will at the instruction level. And this is as a result, very much CPU architecture dependent. Even more so since different CPU's will perform certain instructions faster than others and even then may be better optimized by running a group of 14 instructions to perform a certain task then it would be to run a group of 10 which does the same operation, but needs to utilize a part of a shared chip component which may be in use by another application (think hyper threading and floating point arithmetic unit).

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[jimicus]

That's only because Cisco don't bother to tie your support login up with the products you have a support contract for. Instead, they use the EULA to do that. It says that unless you have an up to date service contract for the appropriate hardware, you're not allowed to download firmware.

Contract violation?

[the_arrow]

I don't know the details of the contract you sign when buying Sun-hardware, but if it says you have free access to BIOS-updates or similar for one year or during the warranty period, wouldn't this be considered a contract violation? Can't they be sued for this? I think it wouldn't go very well for Oracle in westen Europe, as many countries here have pretty strong consumer protections (whether the consumer is a company or a private person shouldn't matter in this case.)

How is this surprising?

[ThatsNotPudding]

Larry Ellison is the biggest jerk in the tech sector! By contrast, he makes the rest of that sociopathic coven appear almost human.

Re:Just another symptom of declining customer serv

[drinkypoo]

I met an employee of a storage company whose name I could swear started with "storage" when I was in vacation in Panama. She told me that Sun had fired almost everyone who knew anything after the acquisition because they were the best-paid, and that Oracle had canned everyone who was left; she wasn't even a tech lead, but she had been there longer than almost any other technical employee, so she had become the go-to girl. Assuming we're talking about the same company (are there any other candidates?) there is no one in support at StorageTek who truly understands the product any more and only one person who really knows how to fix problems with old kit like yours. Naturally they are not interested in supporting it.

Next time, buy from someone less likely to be bought out...

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[drinkypoo]

That's only because Cisco don't bother to tie your support login up with the products you have a support contract for.

That's totally false. I know because I've been both a Cisco customer and employee, and as an employee, I had access to way more firmware images. Presumably, customers are also allowed to download those images, but I sure wasn't. It may be true that some customer accounts have access to all firmware images though.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[drinkypoo]

But to cut off firmware updates to their hardware? No one does this.

Cisco does. I bet there's lots of other examples but this is the most frustrating one.

Coming up next on the Pirate Bay...

[GameboyRMH]

The May 5th 2010 Sun firmware & driver megapack! Please seed after downloading!

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[jimicus]

They don't do a very good job then. I've got a Smartnet login and a support contract for a single, specific model of router yet I can download firmware for virtually everything I can think of, including equipment which I've never owned, much less got a support contract for.

Sun won me, Oracle drove me away

[IanBal]

I'm a long time user of Sun Microsystems and the products they made. I first had contact with Sun's products at university in 1990, but never really had the chance to work with them until 2004. Then I got a Sun machine, a blade 100, at home, and I was able to download Solaris 10 and install and use it. I could see how it worked, learned about it, and began telling my employer, and IBM stronghold, how great it was and what I could do with Sun and Solaris. I got ridiculed, jokes made at me, but I perservered. I was able to convince them to take two Sun V440 servers to replace their failing web server. The success was huge, stability and availability of the web service under Solaris and my administration really got noticed. Despite the success, I still had to suffer massive amounts of jokes about Sun, Solaris, and their products, and anything that spoke out against the holy IBM was of the devil, especially me and the servers I administered. Still, I perservered, and I showed them what was possible. Through my dedication, my withstanding the jokes and straight out attacks against me and Sun/Solaris, and the ability and experience from trying things out on my expanding personal Sun server infrastructure at home, I convinced them to buy in total 28 Sun servers. The success with those was huge too, they worked and were reliable. At home I had a growing collection of Sun hardware, small used machines (V100's, V210's, Blade 2500's, S1 storage array) with Solais 10, and I was very happy with them. I was able to get the OS, and the critical patches to keep my personal systems happy, it worked as I wanted it. Now Oracle bought Sun, and promptly changed all the access rules. Suddenly I need a support contract to run my Sun's and Solaris at home. Suddenly I need a support contract to get firmware updates. Suddenly I need a support contract to get access to information, and all the things I previously had free access to, the things which let me show my employer what great products Sun has and what they could do for them. My employer bought 28 Sun Microsystems servers because of me. Sun was very grateful for what I did, and they showed it. They helped me get a cluster course when my employer didn't want to give me one, they gave small presents like Sun coffee cups, simple "thank you"'s from our Sun rep. and support with information that helped me a lot. I felt good with Sun, I was happy with them, really happy! How does Oracle thank me? By shutting me out of everything, no information, no updates, no access to anything. If I want something then I have to cough up lots of money. They have completely left me out in the cold with my hardware investments at home. In short, Oracle doesn't care about me, unless I have a fat bank account that is. Oracle has betrayed me badly. They've betrayed loyal Sun customers. They've betrayed the people who supported Sun through thick and thin. They're insulting us every step of the way. I'm sure more will come too. Oracles handling of us is a good way to make sure my employer won't buy anything more from them in the future, and migrate away from Solaris to other solutions. They have already made the right moves to make me and others I know recommend against Sun and Oracle solutions, and every change they make reinforces this decision. Oracle wont wake up to the damage they're doing until it's too late, far too late...

This is about killing sales of used Sun hardware

[gabrieltss]

If they make you buy support contracts now or have a current warrenty (re: new Sun hardware) to get firmware updates - this will kill people selling used Sun hardware. I bought a used Sun UltraSpark 10 off E-Bay - now I can't get updated firmware for it unless I know give Oracle $$$ for a support contract - something I DON'T need. This is going to hurt those buying/selling used Sun hardware...

Re:Just another symptom of declining customer serv

[cruff]

The units work fine, and will be decommissioned early next calendar year. No need to replace them.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Cramer]

To be fair, Cisco doesn't "cut off" access. You never had access in the first place without a service contract. And that contract includes access to everything -- not just updates and patches but completely new versions and completely different feature sets. Sure Cisco could lock that down a lot more than they ever have, but I don't think there's a need or any finacial motivation.

Whats the big deal?

[Zubby]

While I was tempted to troll I thought I'd be serious: What's the big deal? You're not running your production system on hardware without a support contact anyway are you? If anything this gives you some value for money!

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Zubby]

I've said it elsewhere in the thread but hey: you have boxes that are running production jobs. Surely you have them under support? Whats the big deal?