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

[Wyche, George PW]

I appreciate your attempts to review our options.
Remember, I originally replied only to point out that pockets of Sun workstations do exist without external connections, thus do not pose an internet security risk by using Solaris <anything>.
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No Oracle contract, so no patch clusters. Don't know what PCA is. Live Upgrade? I looked into that, but can't remember right now why that can't work. Seems like the base Solaris 10 is too old for Live Upgrade or there is nowhere to hold the thing which to upgrade to. ISO files? Like from the DVD for Solaris final (the only thing offered last I looked (2 years ago?))? We have no Workstation with a sufficiently working DVD reader. I tried to get the supposed manufacturer driver "fix", but failed (I cannot remember why, but I was sure motivated to get it at the time). I tried to find a DVD reader to be used totally in place of any Sun/Oracle supported one. Failed.

If there is a way to host the DVD on a Microsoft PC and get it across a network... Oh yeah... samba is among the openCSW that won't work the earlier versions of Solaris 10.

At some point it's not worth the hit on the company overhead to keep bucking the Oracle (or whoever) indifference to these kind of wants from workstation outfits like us. I wanted samba, emacs, daylight savings time proper transition, gimp, python, and an html browser (for our own documentation). All of those have disappeared from openCSW  unless we have a later version of Solaris10. To heck with 'em. ALL of those exist, no problem, on Solaris 8. We really tried to become upstanding Solaris 10 users, but we (me) didn't clearly understand just what was coming down the line and that we better take action before the window closed. Now  we are paying for that lack of foresight.

We are working our way out of this by ultimately abandoning Oracle. I say this despite my boss buying  2 additional used SunBlade2500s because one of ours' power supply died this last weekend, and one is to be the roving "instant" hardware replacement should this happen again. At that level we can make purchases for whatever. Believe me, when they arrive, I will be looking at the level of the OS that happens to be on the internal disks.... ya' never know.

-----Original Message-----
From: users [mailto:users-bounces+george.wyche=pw.utc.com at lists.opencsw.org] On Behalf Of Laurent Blume
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2014 3:07 AM
To: users at lists.opencsw.org
Subject: Re: [External] IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

Le 2014/12/05 18:23 +0100, George             Pw Wyche a écrit:
> No. By owning company decree.

It's still perfectly possible to upgrade to an OpenCSW supported point, using eg PCA, or patch clusters, or Live Upgrade and ISO files, whatever.

Laurent