[GRLUG] A Moment of Silence

[scott.tanner at comcast.net]

OpenSolaris is officially dead, too bad as it had some great promise and features (like the SMF). There's also Nexenta (www.nexenta.com) which fuses the OpenSolaris kernel with debian user-land. I had a nightmare of a time getting it to run on my computers. 

We have quite a few x86-based Sun fire servers, and they're top-notch in terms of remote management, build quality and ease of maintenance. Far better than Dell and HP ( at least they were a couple of years ago). I've been dealing with Oracle support for the past 2 weeks on what started as a simple dead fan on an x4240, and its been ridiculous. At one point I had the canned "We don't support CentOS, so we can't help you". I now loathe Oracle. 

I ran Sun workstations and servers throughout the late 90's and early 2000's, as well as SGI, HP and IBM ( and a couple of Dec's). Sun definitely had the cost-advantage, but hardware wise they were all about equal. Maybe I was just exceptional at finding machines weaknesses? 

Regards, 
Scott 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Brondsema" <dave at brondsema.net> 
To: grlug at grlug.org 
Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2011 11:31:17 PM 
Subject: Re: [GRLUG] A Moment of Silence 

On 09/08/2011 01:57 PM, Bob Kline wrote: 
> I had Sun machines at work when 
> they were still called "workstations." 
> 
> Solaris was indeed a wonderful OS. 
> Too bad Sun didn't make it open source 
> before Oracle got hold of it.... 
> 

I thought they did, OpenSolaris. It doesn't look like it's active any 
more, but there are some forks. 

> How much of the reliability would you 
> attribute to Sun's hardware? Pretty 
> clearly an OS can't totally shine running 
> on junk iron. 
> 
> -- Bob 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Philip J. Robar <philip.robar at gmail.com 
> <mailto:philip.robar at gmail.com>> wrote: 
> 
> 
> On Sep 7, 2011, at 3:10 PM, Ben Rousch wrote: 
> 
> > I would like to ask for a moment of silence. I just decommissioned my 
> > company's main Samba virtual machine which had been running Ubuntu 
> > 6.06 LTS since 2006. 
> 
> At Sun we regularly heard about machines that had been running for 
> years. Solaris is so reliable that smaller customers have forgotten 
> where their servers are. One story, perhaps apocryphal, told of a 
> small server that got walled up when a room was rearanged and had to 
> be found by breaking through the wall board. A field support person 
> once found a machine in a closet that was so clogged with dust that 
> the fans were no longer spinning, but it still running happily. 
> 
> I wouldn’t be surprised if AIX or HP/UX were similarly as reliable, 
> but I’m pretty sure that SGI’s IRIX couldn’t make similar claims: 
> 
> A friend of mine (also an ex-Sun person) early on in his new job as 
> VP of Eng. at an Internet Bubble Startup* asked the founder, “I’ve 
> noticed that the SGI servers panic rather regularly. Has anyone 
> looked into this or called SGI?” 
> 
> Founder, “No need to worry, they just do that. And they were free." 
> 
> My friend’s head then exploded. 
> 
> 
> Phil 
> 
> *Bigfoot for those of you with long memories. 
> 
> 
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-- 
Dave Brondsema : dave at brondsema.net 
http://www.brondsema.net : personal 
http://www.splike.com : programming 
<>< 


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