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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."
[ ] Confirmed by Netcraft
sun hardware fuel the first dot.com revolution
the fact that sun solve died means something to some of the hardcorest nerd so I consider that it is revelant
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
It is I, Ellison of Larry.
I am communicating from my iPad device on my yacht, which is constructed out of the carcasses of a thousand dead corporations. As I recline on my chaise-lounge and ponder your meaninglessness as I wait for the completion of my moon base, I want to assure you that the rumors stating that the turnip is almost dry are simply untrue. I have rebranded it as Oracle Turnip and raised the price by 10,000% for all of our hapless clients who are locked into the platform. Everything will be just fine.
Signed,
The One who is more magnificent than your greatest conception of God
together with the (mostly proffessional and helpful) people that were working behind.
:wq!
My Oracle support sucks, the damn thing is flash, you can't reply via email only by logging back in and trying to use it. It fails quite often and loses anything you typed in. Plus they do anything to avoid calling you.
It is the worst support portal I have ever seen.
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"
I ordered a couple of spare drive modules for some Sun X4540's I manage. I used the online store at Oracle.com It took a month to get the parts for one, and two, when I tried to get updates on the order, they never could connect me to the right people. I always ended up getting connected to some place in India who told me they were the wrong people to talk to. They gave me the "correct" number, which connected me back to the people who connected me to India in the first place, who connected me to India again. You see the vicious cycle. I ended up emailing store@sun.com and someone finally figured out WTF was going on. Oracle, eat a plate of dick. You suck.
This is no longer the beginning of the end - it's rapidly approaching the 'fat lady sings' point in time. Sunsolve's demise is one of the last nails in the coffin.
We're a big Sun customer in a city of many big sun customers. We have tried hard to work with Oracle, but when they say that our division in the company will have its applications software maintenance (Apps _only!_ No hardware, no OS support) increased by nearly $4M/year, it very quickly becomes time to look at alternatives. We have two years to divest ourselves of all Sun/Oracle solutions, and with the extra cost of OS licensing (not support!) on non-Oracle hardware (I believe $1500/socket/year to install Solaris on third party gear), the incentive to run a superior OS fades. In two years, I suspect that we'll have gone from >90% Sun/Oracle gear running Solaris to 30%, and it'll only be that high because of the inertia shift required to replace 500+ servers.
TO be fair, Jonathan Schwartz killed Sun before Larry ponied up the cash, but Oracle had a choice to rebuild the Sun brand, and chose to go the other way instead.
I just wish I'd remembered to grab the latest patch bundles today--they may not be available tomorrow.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
chaise-lounge
It's chaise longue, bozo -- as in long chair.
Your argument is about two hundred years too late, English speakers haven't said long chair in a long time. It is lounge as in lazy.
Ironic ain't it that you can buy Sun Ray Thin Clients for less than $20 now with free shipping. But I'll probably get hate for saying it but Sun deserved to die. Lets be honest folks they have been flailing around with no real business plan or clue for longer than most would like to admit. One day they were "yay Linux!" the next "Linux boo!" one day "yay SPARC" the next "X86 roxorz!". At least with oracle buying them Solaris and SPARC will continue, and will actually probably gain some share.
My prediction is that Oracle setting a new DB record is a sign of what is to come: Oracle will offer a customized SPARC running a highly tweaked Solaris with both made from the ground up to maximize Oracle DB TPM. For smaller companies they will offer an "Oracle Cloud" solution where you can have Oracle host the DB and get crazy TPM without having to have the crazy hardware, and for the larger enterprises they will have a combo cloud/offline solution where you can host it all with them, all on site, or any combo you desire.
As much as the FLOSS guys want to cuss at Oracle, even they should be willing to admit old Larry knows how to make a ROI, and honestly they should be thanking their lucky stars as it could have been MUCH worse. Imagine if some patent troll would have bought out Sun. It would have made the SCO mess look like a Sunday tea party with all the patents they had. And the GPL still says you can have the code, just not the patents and copyrights. So I really don't get all the Oracle hate around here. Sure they're not throwing their weight behind FLOSS but you know what? why should they, Oracle isn't Red hat. And frankly I don't see the FLOSS community being big Oracle customers anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I have long worried about stuff like this and ended up with a basement and a loft full of redundant old crap nobody is interested in anymore. In five years time, all you will have is some old sun boxes that have been surpassed by who knows what new hardware the future brings. Why is that? Because within one year, competitors computers will be so much cheaper to buy and get support for that replacing sun boxes will be cheaper than maintaining them. You're flogging a dying horse trying to get a few "free" more steps out of it before you'll have to pay for them. Sell the horse while it's still walking, and buy something not cursed with the money you get for your hardware.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How's that for "the web is the computer", mister Ellison?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Why do companies insist on calling things "My Oracle Support" or "MySpace" or "My Whatever". It just sound so childish. "SunSolve" sounds like a tool which will actually help you solve stuff, "My Oracle Support" sounds like a helpdesk where some idiot asks me which version of Windows is running on my Solaris server or if I tried rebooting my Mainframe yet.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
chaise-lounge
It's chaise longue, bozo -- as in long chair.
Your argument is about two hundred years too late, English speakers haven't said long chair in a long time. It is lounge as in lazy.
Au contraire:
Great, what is a Sunray good for any more?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was intrigued to see those Suse/Novell/IBM sponsored ads at the top of the page when I wasn't logged in. Now I understand why. Whereas Sun have steadily got themselves into trouble over the past ten years Oracle have now really accelerated the process to the point where you can see the end for anything SPARC or Solaris related in the next couple of years. Not even Oracle can absorb the kind of losses Sun must be making now.
Whereas you would have thought that Oracle would want to make existing customers as happy as possible and rebuild the customer base from there, their strategy seems to be to try and screw existing customers as hard as possible to maximise revenue. Whereas this has worked in software and their database business in the past because people have generally got themselves locked into PL/SQL and Oracle's archane infrastructure the fly-in-the-ointment is that people have proved that over the past ten years they have been more than willing to move away from Solaris and SPARC, and it's much easier to switch hardware and then operating systems with the advent of Linux than it is specific applications. Oracle's software runs on more than just Solaris so their customers have a migration path off anyway.
Oracle just don't understand the business, in other words. McNealy should have sold to IBM if he wanted anything at all to remain.
It is a sad sad day for the Sun community. I am an Enterprise Solaris admin, and it requires working with Sun on almost a daily basis. I still have trouble choking down the ability to call them Oracle. The change is not going to be easy to handle, especially with the fact that Oracle Mysupport is all Flash based (ugh). Hopefully the transition goes better than Sun's last update for their support site.
All you need is an 8-digit number to "claim" your support agreement! that's it! Just start making up random numbers if you need support for anything, or more importantly lists of customers, their locations, what they have. It's a marketing goldmine! What an epic failure. Does Oracle do business with the government? Thanks but no thanks. --edfardos
I personally wrote large portions of sunsolve - and deployed it world wide for Sun. It's a crying shame what Oracle has done to the support portal - even charging for device drivers for the Sun Hardware. There have been many great engineers that have worked on SunSolve over the years - and I can't begin to note them all. Rest in peace SunSolve, and as has been shown many times, the follow on products don't even approach your functionality.
Indeed. The start of the death of the "Old Sun" was the whole "we're the .com" or whatever it was, right before .com imploded.
The next step was taking an investment from KKR... In fact I wouldn't be surprised if KKR didn't push the Oracle deal.
So whatever Sun *was*, died in about 2002 and got buried in 2007 (KKR). At least Oracle found something to do with the body.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
I don't know about everyone else, but in the fortune 100 company I happen to work for they are moving all new projects to AIX and Linux. This has been going on for the last year. The sad part, for Sun/Oracle, is that it used to be a primarily Sun shop. Now all new projects are AIX and Linux and there is no interest in approving any Sun equipment. All the tech refresh projects we have are moving businesses to either AIX or Linux. This represents a fairly large revenue stream that they are losing. Seems to be a common trend from blogs/forums/etc. that I'm reading.
In fact it's probably still the biggest project I ever got my hands on.
I think there were always some patches that weren't available without a support contract. We ended up having to hack some support into the ftp server to talk to the java authentication backend somewhere.
Still i'm undoubtedly a little sad to see the end of it.
15 years ago, when I had hardware problems, Sun was on it. These days, Dell's on it, when it's a Dell server.
Sun: I've got a machine spewing ECC errors (as in, filling logs and mailboxes) today. The guy wants me to update the firmware. (this is several hours to get two emails, and the engineer's in Chile, and I'm in the US). I go to the link on SunSolve... and can't get in. If I have a contract number... no, my manager tells me that we don't have a contract, but it's on warranty.
No one at Sun/Oracle seems to be able or willing to solver this, and I'm over five hours into this joke. And when you call, even on an open tech support case, you always get someone nontechnical as the first line....
Larry, hire a few more support staff, and give them answers? Right now, if I had to make a recommendation for hardware, there's no way I'd recommend Oracle.
mark
linux was not mature enough when the party started, and things you could do on sun's hardware was only match by the things you could do on the SGI
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I think that your are quite right, they deserved to die. They were mismanaged, I had a minor role at Sun, in 2006, as a campus ambassador, but still I had to report to three different boss that each gave me partially conflicting objectives. I can imagine that higher up the hierarchy the management could only get worse
Also They were into a lot of greenfield project that did not have any hint of business case behind them. Sure it is a good idea to fund one or two of those projects, since you never know what might come out but to bet the company on that, it is reckless.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Reading about the underlying changes (terms and conditions) is a bit scary. Forget how annoying the new Oracle support site is - that's just your basic sub-par Flash interface that keeps the executives happy. Spend a little time investigating the Soylent Green underneath, and you'll find that things are rapidly becoming a ton more restrictive than they ever were with Sun.
Before, when working with Sun, a support contract entitled you to access to SunSolve and the majority of the information and updates. Sure, they started limiting access to end-of-life product updates like Solaris 8, but at least that's something you can plan for. They also had a limited subset of free materials which you could access (parts information), but you needed to have a support contract for other items (blown-up images, click-through links). Reasonable.
Now, with Oracle, if it's anything like the database support end of things, you get what you pay for. It looks like if you pay nothing, you get nothing: zero, zip, zilch. Without a valid support identifier or active contract number, the account you create won't even allow you to go to the front page of the support site. Wow!
Sun had a brand, a well-known brand, which Oracle is rapidly dismantling, and in doing so irritating a huge group of loyal customers. If the techie sentiments on this board are any indication, Oracle is going to have a really hard time keeping folks in the fold.
I realize there are benefits to using the Oracle database, but at what cost? Hopefully, enough people will choose open-source (free as in freedom and beer) database solutions to drive down the initial cost and maintenance costs of proprietary databases such as Oracle. Why use Oracle if you can use MySQL? And if you say "well, it doesn't do XYZ," you have to ask yourself "why not?" If enough companies and governments left Oracle to use an open-source option, there's no reason why the community couldn't create every single plug-in and specialized application that Oracle has - faster, cheaper, better and for sure better supported. A community of people coding because they love something is going to be far more robust and secure in the long run than a mercenary army dedicated exclusively to the almighty dollar. Just look at Microsoft versus Linux or BSD.
It's only a matter of time....
Hey, Larry. Is that you?