[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[Ben Taylor]

James Dickens wrote:

>
>
> On 9/16/07, *Ihsan Dogan* <ihsan at blastwave.org 
> <mailto:ihsan at blastwave.org>> wrote:
>
>     on 14.09.2007 23:41 Ben Taylor said the following:
>
>     > I, for one, do not understand why blastwave insists on supporting a
>     > 7 year old operating system as it's base.  the amount of bad press
>     > blastwave gets for it's bloat (especially on solaris 9, 10 and
>     nevada
>     > based systems) out weighs it's usefulness to the marginal fringe who
>     > insist on staying on Solaris 8.  Solaris 8 is dead for intensive
>     purposes.
>     > Yeah, there are folks running Win 3.1 and Win 95 and Win98 and
>     Solaris
>     > 2.5.1, 2.6 and 7.  so what.
>
>     It's true that nobody is installing Solaris 8 anymore, but it's still
>     widely used and they are not going to be replaced that quickly. I
>     don't
>     see any reason, why we should drop the support for Solaris 8 
>
>
> sorry lots of people are still installing Solaris 8, we are deploying 
> 4 new database servers running oracle, all are running Solaris 8. On 
> large servers I think the number of Solaris 8 instances are growing 
> still...

You can't even put Solaris 8 on a new large server.  Who are you kidding?
You have to have the latest version of Solaris 9 just to run USIV+ systems.
Niagara based platforms and the new M series have to be Solaris 10 minimum.

Yes, you may have an installed base, and have a bunch of folks maintaining
the status quo.  This is typical entropic risk advoidance.  There's not 
enough
folks (and probably equipment) to baseline the apps on a newer OS, so
no-one wants to change.  And I understand that some ISV's have been very
slow about Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 certification, so that causes some folks
to be limited.  But Oracle?