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.

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.

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...

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[ishobo]

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

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.

[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.

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: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:Bound to Happen

[Jeng]

For small values of support.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

Apparently Larry doesn't have enough ...

[Jerry]

airplanes, yachts or mansions.

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

[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: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.

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: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: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.

Coming up next on the Pirate Bay...

[GameboyRMH]

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