RIP, SunSolve
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Oracle loves to destroy a good thing, don't they?
Back in the old days you could simply FTP anonymously to sunsolve.sun.com to download Solaris patches. It worked great; you could do it from the command line, no need for a browser or logins or anything like that.
Heck, I remember setting up Enterprise 250s using serial consoles, and FTPing to sunsolve to download the patch clusters, then installing them.
Nowadays not only do you need a web browser and an account, but you can't get patches at all without an expensive support contract. And on top of that, when we got our support contract they screwed things up and didn't even give us the proper permissions to get our patches. It took a *MONTH* of wrangling to get them to fix their festering pile of shit.
I miss you, Sun Microsystems. Oracle is the devil. We won't be buying any more Sun/Oracle hardware from this point forth, that's for sure.
Seriously, go download all the patches you can, because knowing Oracle, you won't be able to afterward. I'm personally grabbing the last releases of Solaris 10 (Sparc and X86), as well as the latest recommended patch sets, the last OpenBoot Prom for my Sparc system, and the latest Sun/Oracle Compilers and their associated patches. With all the changes Oracle has been making putting all this further and further behind paywalls tied to their support contracts (without which according to some interpretations, you can't even upgrade the OS release revision past what came with your system anymore, unlike Sun's attitude where if you bought a sparc box, you can run any version as long as the architecture is still on the supported list).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"