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."

Comments

Re:hmm

[Shikaku]

[ ] Confirmed by Netcraft

Re:so what?

[JonySuede]

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

Memo to employees.

[copponex]

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

Re:Memo to employees.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know; Oracle rebranded and unbundled a particular product that was a free part of the base OS until recently, and just quoted a (large) company already locked in to using it a million dollars (minus epsilon) for the licensing and support for 3 years.

Multiply by (probably several thousand enterprise users of that software suite)...

It may not be Larry posting here *cough* but a lot of customers feel like turnips right now.

Re:Memo to employees.

[angus77]

chaise-lounge

It's chaise longue, bozo -- as in long chair.

You didn't get the memo. Larry's had the spelling changed. You're expected to have migrated already.

my orcale suppor sucks

[h4rr4r]

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.

Re:my orcale suppor sucks

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

Yes... But it's "industry leading" all over now!

Re:my orcale suppor sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

And every Oracle DBA on the planet says "Well duh, but it's better than what we had..."

I was told a story by a DBA (around 2002) that in order to place a support question to Oracle they had to do the following:

1) Type the question into a text file. It had to be in MS-DOS format.
2) Tar and gzip the question. It had to have the extension .tgz - tar.gz would not be accepted.
3) Upload the question via a support forum on their website. You could not e-mail the question.
4) Wait 3-5 business days for a response. If after no response after 5 days you could then submit another request asking what happened to the first request. It had to be in a .tgz as well.

For the hundreds of thousands of dollars we paid in licensing fees, I was dumbstruck. I believe the only thing I could say was "but, but, but..."

Bye bye Sun. It was nice knowing you.

Re:my orcale suppor sucks

[dgatwood]

Don't forget the quadruple ROT-13 requirement.

Re:my orcale suppor sucks

[morgan_greywolf]

This is true. Unless your company happened to employee an Oracle DBA who happened to be a former Oracle employee, that is. I learned a lot from that guy, though.

Re:my orcale suppor sucks

[dogsbreath]

Obviously they have their heads stuck in the sand. Data center footprint issues alone make it cost friendly to move off of Sun. Given how much now runs on IBM or Intel chips and given the maturity of Linux, there really is no reason not to and lots of positives for getting rid of Sun.

I will say this though, IMHO, Solaris is still a far better industrial strength o/s than Linux. This is an opinion based on years of work with both. Solaris' i/o handling, network stack, scheduler, stability, and transparency of upgrades are superior to Linux across the board.

But Linux works, and it works well. And there are no problems with Linux that cannot be dealt with one way or another. And there's no bullshit. And I can run it on the best h/w. Sun h/w sucks. I know this is a troll statement but I have worked with Sun h/w for 20 yrs and the current offerings are outdated, relatively poor performing and power hungry. And heavy. And ugly.

Virtualization choices and functionality are better with Linux, and that is the number one issue today.

The only place I would use Sun h/w today is for either web or dns services. The T servers running Solaris really kick butt for high network connectivity, highly parallel internet services.

Oracle is pure evil.

[ZorinLynx]

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.

Re:Oracle is pure evil.

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

To be fair, that happened before Oracle acquired Sun.

Re:Oracle is pure evil.

[EvilStein]

I logged into the mess we knew as Slashdot to point out that very same thing. Sun went to the stupid "web portal for everything!" setup way before they were gobbled up by Oracle. It sucked then, and it *really* sucks now.

Oracle just turned the suck knob to 11.

Re:so what? : Get your patches now!!!

[Fallen Kell]

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).

The Oracle Store sucks too...

[DorkFest]

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.

A moment of silence, please

[swordgeek]

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.

Re:A moment of silence, please

[turtleshadow]

We are in the process of sunsetting all SUN branded equipment for vendors other than Oracle. Its taken over 6 months to renew some contracts and expended far too many cycles & was so painful for us to be worth it to do it again.

For us as a customer its obvious that its a circus inside.

Oracle has chopped off those that used to resell SUN support and service at the knees. These were the guys that would go the extra mile for us, their local customers, yet were told by the great Oracle to take a hike as Oracle would do it better. Apparently we are not worthy of a gov sector sales call back for the EOL boxes we are looking to shelve at this point next year.

We are neither big nor tiny but do a lot of .gov.. I remember cutting my teeth in univ on both IBM & SUN equipment; that led to favorable sales when I entered the industry. I'll miss SUN so much .

On the bright side I hope a bunch of good ex-SUN or ex-IBM or ex whoever people are working hard to bury their former companies who make decisions because of investor avarice not because of in house innovation and genius.

My Whatever

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:My Whatever

[DarkOx]

Well I think the idea behind it from a marketing perspective is to make people feel like its a sort of concierge service and it will be catered directly to them. The thing is with big high dollar enterprisy type stuff is I don't want it to feel that way, I expect it to be that way. A little personal attention and a prompt response is not much to ask for considering the dollars attached to many of these support contracts.

I agree with you My Whatever makes me think I am calling some generalized helpdesk. I want to talk to a professional who can help solve my problem, and BTW Oracle, you are not HP you don't also sell consumer stuff, if we are are calling you we know what are problem *is* we actually need help fixing it not identifying it, skip the first level crap please.

I wrote SunSolve

[willsnow]

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.