[External] IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

Wyche, George PW George.Wyche at pw.utc.com
Fri Dec 5 01:17:16 CET 2014


My only point was our Solaris 8 endangers the security of no one. Hopefully, we are not the only such data point.

Our proprietary software is leaving Solaris as fast as a single, aging programmer can manage... but, Solaris 8 has shown no problems whatsoever, so we are leaving a sleeping dog alone. I threw away many hours trying hardware tricks and software tricks to get Solaris 10 (base) to Solaris 10u6 (I think) just so I could please have emacs run again and have Samba to access files from a PC (which I have found that I really can do without). I now live with a (slightly) crippled emacs on the Solaris 10 box in my office.

Newer hardware (not warranted for the current $ making work load) would allow getting whatever Oracle is willing to let slip in the way of software, but, Oracle has made it clear we are beneath attention. We got the message and are on the path to exit.

-----Original Message-----
From: users [mailto:users-bounces+george.wyche=pw.utc.com at lists.opencsw.org] On Behalf Of Laurent Blume
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2014 2:45 PM
To: users at lists.opencsw.org
Subject: Re: [External] IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

Le 2014/12/04 20:46 +0100, George             Pw Wyche a écrit:
> If you want to play the #s, then fine. However, your characterization 
> is faulty.
>
> Our Sun workstations are all in house. Not a single one has access to 
> anything outside. All are Solaris 8. Now and then somebody asks for a 
> feature which does exist for Solaris 8, so we used to easily get it 
> from openCSW. This is a small outfit... this department. It's a 
> Windows place that'd just as soon get rid all *nix anything, but they 
> inherited us and moved us around on the books, so nobody outside has 
> been exposed (for any length of time) to our Solaris workstations and 
> see the light of another world of computing.

Well, it is your choice, but then, if your attachment to those old systems is so great, you should plan on keeping them running. The S8 packages haven't changed in 4 years, you can surely spend 5€ on a USB key to keep a mirror of them.

> We did not download the entire offering of openCSW Solaris 8. I did 
> pay $ for DVDs back in the time of Blastwave, but evidently "it was 
> lost in the mail". We really screwed up by not doing what was 
> absolutely necessary to capture the entire offering of Solaris 10 
> BEFORE OpenCSW had advanced past the version where you could install 
> Solaris with 5 CDs, because after that... too bad if you don't have a 
> DVD reader, no later version of Solaris 10 for you.

You can perfectly well install Solaris 10 from the CD version then either patch or update it to a level that can run OpenCSW.

> Without the later
> version of Solaris 10... Grr! We have Solaris 8 because we cannot get 
> Solaris 10 with the same set of features as Solaris 8.

I'm curious, what features are missing in Solaris 10? In any recent Linux distro, for that matter?

And not to worry you too much, but basing a business, and your job, on Solaris workstations doesn't sound like the best future-proofing ever. 
You might not like it, I sure don't like it, but fact is, Solaris on the desktop is dead, and won't come back.

So, are you volunteering to maintain S8 packages until you can get around to replace it?

Laurent



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