Fake news is posted on this board as Solaris is alive and well and will be used for many more years by large established companies who are disinclined to move to Linux. Sure, if I were 22 years old and right out of college I wouldn’t want to take a Job developing/selling Solaris, but for the old timers who are still at the company, Solaris is a ship that should bring them safety into retirement as it is not going away anytime soon. The types of companies who use Solaris are old school and loath to make any change to their production servers.
35 replies (most recent on top)
"
Fujitsu will release Solaris 12 sometime in 2019
In your dreams
"
and in your a--, @SUJmFOC-9lro mh s?ck?r.
Fujitsu will release Solaris 12 sometime in 2019
In your dreams
Fujitsu will release Solaris 12 sometime in 2019
Almost always cases where the sysadmin did not keep up with critical security patches.
But that's the problem. Now even good admins can't keep their users safe because Oracle is falling behind on security fixes. Unforgivable!
I've certainly seen compromised Solaris boxes before. Almost always cases where the sysadmin did not keep up with critical security patches. Solaris is like any other OS, if you don't patch known vulnerabilities, you'll get burned.
YEA REALLY!
If NSA bothered to write remote access/authentication tools for Solaris 2.6 - 10, that means they also used these tools on Solaris 2.6 - 10. They don't bother writing cyber-offensive tools for operating systems they have no interest in.
Since you probably don't understand what these NSA tools really are: these are viruses.
Again I have never seen a customer actually hit by one virus on the Solaris OS in over 20 years of working
That's because you are demonstrably too inept to be allowed to do any work of more than minimal consequence.
What about customer bugs? Don't those count? Why don't we see any customer bugs being fixed anymore. The backlog is huge and growing.
@SUJmFOC-4vun: YEA REALLY! Those links are vulnerabilities that "could" of effected the OS. Again I have never seen a customer actually hit by one virus on the Solaris OS in over 20 years of working on literally THOUSANDS of systems on 100's of customer sites. I am not saying it never happened but I have never seen it. Again, the point is - don't state a OS is dead because of one firmware bug that still is being looked at when new OS bugs are released every month.
A vulnerability list and a customer who claims they where actually infected by them are 2 different things.
Really.
And it stands that after 20 years I have never seen a customer actually reporting they where infected by a virus on the Solaris OS.
Really.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/solaris_shadow_brokers_nsa_exploits/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/19/oracle_april_security_patches_nsa/
Care to expand on your latest discharge of bold-faced lies?
A vulnerability list and a customer who claims they where actually infected by them are 2 different things. The whole point is the person claiming this one bug that has not been fixed for Intel CPU's on x86 proves the OS is dead is BS. It is a firmware fix on the hardware, and we release bug fixes for the OS every month. And it stands that after 20 years I have never seen a customer actually reporting they where infected by a virus on the Solaris OS.
I think the person saying Meltdown was already fixed for SPARC was just confused about the difference between Spectre and Meltdown. It's not the kind of distinction non-engineers really understand. I guess that's the point, Oracle doesn't have many engineers left who are skilled enough to understand, let alone fix, difficult problems like Meltdown.
Was there supposed to be a link after this?
Yes, sorry. I forgot to paste it. Here it is:
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/31/SUN-Solaris.html?vendor_id=5
And here's the list of Oracle Solaris vulnerabilities for Solaris 10 and 11:
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-93/product_id-19755/Oracle-Solaris.html
Not a single bug, huh?
The fix is already out for all Sparc
Sparc was not even impacted by Meltdown. Again, you seem to lack a basic grasp of the technology. There are other mistakes in your post, but it's already late and my time would be better spent sleeping that trying to document every mistake you make.
I mention the Meltdown issue because it is public and any customer or employee can see for themselves how behind we are from the rest of the entire industry. But it is far from the only reason I say Solaris is dead. How many Solaris on-prem bug reports from customers have you seen fixed lately? It seems like Oracle has already entered into "file and forget" mode for Solaris bugs. Our customers are not happy.
Guess what happened after 2010, the year when Oracle acquired Sun: Oracle stopped reporting the vulnerabilities. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
Ok, same old Oracle trick, what you hide doesn't exist.
And here's the list of all known Solaris vulnerabilities over time, from 1999 to 2010.
Was there supposed to be a link after this?
Again, never heard of a bug ever effecting the Solaris OS --- ever.
Really.
Here's a list for Solaris 10:
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-5/product_id-31/version_id-12741/SUN-Solaris-10.html
Instead of spewing lies, why don't you count the security vulnerabilities with a CVSS Score greater than 5.
And here's the list of all known Solaris vulnerabilities over time, from 1999 to 2010.
Guess what happened after 2010, the year when Oracle acquired Sun: Oracle stopped reporting the vulnerabilities. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
@SUJmFOC-3kaj: Just because 11.4 is coming out does not mean that Solaris is doing great. They have to put 11.4 out, it's what they are doing in stead of Solaris 12. I predict the Solaris footprint will continue to shrink over time. It isn't dead yet, but it will continue to shrink until it finally goes on EOL support.
The fix is already out for all Sparc and only Inlet X86 CPU systems are effected but this one bug, not the AMD x86 CPU's systems . I do not work in the Hardware Group, but it appears the fix would be to roll it out to all the different firmware for the Intel x86 CPU systems. Again, never heard of a bug ever effecting the Solaris OS --- ever.
You keep pointing to one bug fix in your claim the Solaris OS is dead but why are we still seeing: entire patch bundles for Solaris 10 with bug fixes - issued quarterly, monthly Solaris 11.3 SRU updates with bug fixes and a new Solaris 11.4 OS this year? I am sure you will come up with yet another idea for your propaganda campaign , and I am tired of beating a dead horse.
Oracle doesn't have the technical wherewithal to fix these security issues. They RIF'd all the experts and the other experts left of their own accord. The only ones left are sustaining and a few kids. Please don't blame Oracle for not having the technical expertise to fix these issues.
What do viruses have to do with anything? Just because no-one ever bothered to write viruses for Solaris does not mean it is OK that Oracle has just abandoned its customers when it comes to urgent security fixes. Meltdown is one of the worst privilege escalation issues we've seen on any OS in years. I have a few customers going totally nuts over the fact that they are still unprotected. So yeah, Solaris seems pretty darn dead to me. It was great for its time, but Oracle has clearly lost interest in taking care of our customers.
@3qel Please point to all the Virus's you have seen that "actually" have effected the Solaris OS. I have never seen ONE call generated on this and I have never heard of any customer who has stated they where effected by a Virus on Solaris. If there are any, it is something that is so rare it is off anyone's radar. New patch sets are still being released for Solaris 10 for customers on extended support (latest is April 2018), and Solaris 11.3 SRU package updates still come out every month. And Solaris 11.4 is being released this year. Does that seem like a dead OS?
Sparc is not effected by meltdown and the fix for x86 needs to also be in the firmware for the hardware.
Why? I haven't see any other OS that needs a firmware fix for Meltdown. Spectre yes, but Meltdown, no. What is so special about Solaris that it can't do kernel address space isolation without a firmware update? Seems like you don't know what you are talking about. Maybe you should have done some more studying those 20 years.
Like FedEx? Morgan Stanley? JPMorgan? United Airlines? Citigroup? AT&T? UPS? Lufthansa? Nike?
All of them moved to Oracle Cloud
-- Do you mean Oracle Cloud or Oracle Cloud Machine, big difference as the cloud machines are still on premise and the customer has total control over who they share the box with.
Don't get me wrong I think the cloud machines are great as there are some workloads that can't be scaled/distributed easily on AWS/Azure but as the same time its hard to call it cloud sales when its all in a customer's data center.
Sparc is not effected by meltdown and the fix for x86 needs to also be in the firmware for the hardware. In my 20 years of working with Solaris I never remember ONE virus that infected it. That is probably why it is the most secure OS on the planet.
OP must work in Sales or Marketing. Why he's posting here is anybody's guess, but it's hilarious if he thinks he's going to affect marketshare by a percentile of an iota. lol
Nobody gives a sh-- about Solaris or SPARC, except the few companies that still run it. There are no new customers in the pipeline. Linux on x86 is the king, and has been for some time, in the data centers.
x86 customers still don't even have any protection from Meltdown yet. Every other OS was fixed months ago. When an OS can't even ship security fixes, it is dead, plain and simple.
I don't know how far away your retirement is, OP, but it really sounds like a lot of wishful thinking on your part. Oracle doesn't care about your retirement, they will kill it when they need to kill it. Don't be caught off-guard, think about what you could do if the grim RIF'er comes after you.
If I had a 5 year retirement window I would have stayed (having survived the RIF). I don't so I left.
Interestingly I moved to a company that still has some Solaris boxes but they have an active project to retire them. They are moving lots of stuff to the cloud, but not the Oracle cloud!
I agree it will be around for a while but I do think there will be more cuts - smallish ones, each year.
OP:
that sounds really much as a desperate hope than a realistic thinking.
I'm in contact daily with Solaris customers. 90% of them are thinking of moving away from Solaris, 50% have already planned the path, 25% are already executing.
and, much worse from a strategic point of view, none, and I mean 0%, of them are thinking of starting a new prj on Solaris. all new projects are Linux.
yes, many of them tell me "Solaris is a great OS, if I could I would have never switched it off, but given the situation I must", but that's helping only the morale, not the sales or the future of Solaris.
nope, unfortunately given the errors in the past (including the incredibly stupid and arrogant management in Sun Microsystems who effectively determied the death of Solaris) the future of Solaris in the real world, the world of customers and not the utopian world of our Solaris enigeering, is very clearly defined.
only a very small niche of hard-lovers will remain, nothing close to enough to sustain a Solaris org in Oracle.
the only reamaining uncertainty is how long Fujitsu will fund Solaris development. they have a plan to switch their M platform to Linux/ARM in the next 3 to 5 years, so maybe we can have some more time to find a new job.....
Have you see how bad the customer bug queue is?! GTFO man. Oracle has ALREADY abandoned these customers. They just don't know they have been abandoned until they need something fixed.
Like FedEx? Morgan Stanley? JPMorgan? United Airlines? Citigroup? AT&T? UPS? Lufthansa? Nike?
All of them moved to Oracle Cloud
OP:
Solaris is a ship that should bring them safety into retirement
Yeah right. Because Oracle cares about its employees and will make sure none of the unemployable Solaris greybeards will get RIF'ed.
large established companies who are disinclined to move to Linux.
Like FedEx? Morgan Stanley? JPMorgan? United Airlines? Citigroup? AT&T? UPS? Lufthansa? Nike?
They all moved to Linux years ago. And they are not the only ones.
For the people who are left, that may be the case. For the people who were laid off, they are not able to just work on this area forever into retirement. You have to be prepared for what could happen.
Agreed