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

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.

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: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.

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.