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?

[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.

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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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]

Hey, now.

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

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.

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: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.

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!"

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: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: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...