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Oracle Sun Microsystems IT

RIP, SunSolve 100

Posted by timothy from the to-the-moon-instead dept.
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."
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RIP, SunSolve More

RIP, SunSolve

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  • Memo to employees. (Score:5, Funny)

    by copponex ( 13876 ) on Thursday December 09, 2010 @10:13PM (#34510126) Homepage

    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

    • 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

      You're not the real Larry Ellison, you're an imposter.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by 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: (Score:2)

          by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

          What exactly was this product?

          I have not been doing sun stuff for years, so I really am wondering.

        • I'm guessing s/he's talking about Xen (Sun xVM), but then s/he uses the term "softwware suite," so I'm not sure. Maybe Solstice DiskSuite, but I thought that was already unbundled.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Signed, The One who is more magnificent than your greatest conception of God

        You're not the real Larry Ellison, you're an imposter.

        You're right. Those extra 11 words were a dead giveaway. :-D

    • Signed,
      The One who is more magnificent than your greatest conception of God (but wearing girl's kimono)

  • together with the (mostly proffessional and helpful) people that were working behind.

  • my orcale suppor sucks (Score:5, Informative)

    by h4rr4r ( 612664 ) on Thursday December 09, 2010 @10:38PM (#34510312)

    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Pf0tzenpfritz ( 1402005 )
      Yes... But it's "industry leading" all over now!

    • Re:my orcale suppor sucks (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 09, 2010 @11:07PM (#34510520)

      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: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Don't forget the quadruple ROT-13 requirement.

      • 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.

      • Bye bye Sun. It was nice knowing you.

        Are there ANY Sun shops left out there? Who are they selling to???

        Moving away from Sun/Solaris is so easy now.

        • Enterprise, mostly.
          It's great hardware, and mostly resides in midrange and up.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ti1ion ( 239188 )

          Yes there are.

          They sell to companies run by older, conservative managers, such as banks and other established companies (think essential service providers, for example). These people still think Linux is some crazy, unproven, security hole ridden toy not ready for the enterprise. Many of them have not kept up with tech for 30 years and believe anything they are told by salespeople. Oh, and many of them hate IBM (the good old days, you know).

          I've tried to move my company away from Sun hardware and was shot

          • 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 transparen

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by ti1ion ( 239188 )

              You said that better than I could, and I agree with you. Tellingly, your comments regarding virtualization bear out precisely what is happening in my organization today.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        Oracle has some really intriguing products, but they've raised arrogant indifference to their customers to an art form. For years their attitude toward tech support was that if their wonderful product bites you on the ass, it must be because you aren't smart enough to use it. And of course we all know about their byzantine licensing models which they're all too happy to let customers trip over, after which they are not at all inclined to extend a helpful hand.

        What drives this is a sense of entitlement; a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by syousef ( 465911 )

      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.

      I can fix that for you. Buy a Dell laptop. It is now the second worst you've seen.

    • I'm guessing you think MSC and SunSolve you great apps right?

    • You obviously never used the Sun Member Support Center. Getting a report on your installed base felt like one of those children's book with the 45rpm record that would read a few words to you and then play a xylophone note when you should turn the page:

      20 rows of results... ding! Turn the page!
      Another 20 rows... ding!
      Losing will to live... ding!

      ...with no apparent way to export the data as a big file. Wow, who would have thought that the big future of computing was somebody copying and pasting rows of da

    • Good news for you:

      https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ [oracle.com]

      no joke. Under-advertised, but actually works.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sysjkb ( 574960 )

      Fortunately, you don't have to use the flash-based support site. If you go to http://supporthtml.oracle.com/ [oracle.com] , you get the HTML-based version, which is much more user friendly.

  • Oracle is pure evil. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Thursday December 09, 2010 @11:22PM (#34510614) Homepage

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 )

      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.

      • 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: (Score:1)

      by h8sg8s ( 559966 )
      I miss Sun too. I never thought I'd admit this, but HPUX is a pretty decent UNIX after all. Too much Solaris/SPARC koolaid for too many years, but I'm recovering.

      • I got my start on SunOS, then Solaris and IRIX. When I went professional, I spent years on HP-UX and AIX. I played a tiny bit with various *BSDs and even NextStep in there as well. HP-UX is a fine OS, and even has some advantages over Solaris. Between the two, I'd probably choose Solaris in a perfect world and HP-UX in a compromise world, but in a practical world, Linux, not HP-UX is going to replace Solaris.

    • How's that for "the web is the computer", mister Ellison?

    • Nowadays not only do you need a web browser with a modern version of Flash and an account, but you can't get patches at all without an expensive support contract.

      FTFY

    • Honestly any company that buys another always wants to get rid of the old ways. No matter how well they worked. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

    • Wow. Just wow. Given how bad things eventually got for Sun you would have thought that Oracle would want to look after the remaining paying customers, wouldn't you?

    • 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.

  • The Oracle Store sucks too... (Score:4, Informative)

    by DorkFest ( 857124 ) on Thursday December 09, 2010 @11:40PM (#34510722)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @01:38AM (#34511314) Journal

    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.

    • 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 Ora

    • If Oracle isn't rebuilding Sun, I don't know what it's doing. MSC and SunSolve were the worst websites I've even seen in my life. MOS isn't great but it's much better. The patch bundles have always been available only to paying customers. What's your point? What a bunch of crap.

      • True as that may be, the replacement is even worse. It require flash for gods sake. How can Oracle be so fucked up?

        I think it went like this.

        Sun support: Well, our current support website sucks. It is in fact the worst support site I can possible imagine.
        Oracle developer: Ha, I can beat that. (Implements new hell site in flash).
        Sun support: Ok you win, our old site was not the worst possible support site. Now let's get a beer while we listen to our (Soon to be ex) customers scream.

  • My Whatever (Score:3)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:11AM (#34511848) Homepage

    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: (Score:3)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      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

  • 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

  • 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 wrote SunSolve (Score:3, Insightful)

    by willsnow ( 1956660 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @12:09PM (#34514644)
    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.

  • 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

  • 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 t

  • 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 updat

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