Solaris is in maintenance mode – but Oracle added a significant feature anyway

Oracle's Solaris operating system remains widely used, even though Big Red more or less froze development of the product in 2018 save for regular Support Repository Updates (SRUs) that add minor updates and bug fixes. But on Wednesday the company announced a reasonably significant addition to the OS, called the ACT Service. …

[Anonymous Coward]

"If a Solaris box experiences a system panic, the OS takes a snapshot of memory, compresses it, and sends it to Oracle."

Um. I hope this is off by default.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Oracle. It's presumably something people have to pay to enable!

[Aitor 1]

Pay for

Also, once yoy deactivate the "feature" you have now a higher tier of support, and oayment is due.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine oracle would want a licence fee for that feature and to charge you not knowing its enabled by default.

[chasil]

Solaris Premier Support

I just confirmed that Oracle Solaris support is $1,000 per year. You can find this on https://shop.oracle.com then browse products / operating systems.

There are plenty of versions of Solaris. A lot of people like OpenIndiana, and Samsung was such a fan of SmartOS that they bought Joyent.

Give some of these a try!

https://www.oracle.com/solaris

https://www.openindiana.org/

https://tritondatacenter.com/smartos

[Some Random Kiwi]

Just what we've all been waiting for.

Oracle calls them Support Repository Updates. I call them Report Suppository Updates.

[Mister Dubious]

Report Suppository Updates

Or, "Stuff it where the Sun don't shine."

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't new

Solaris crash dumps have been sent to Sun ... errr ... Oracle for years if you enabled the service. It is/was called explorer and most customers had it turned on even if they didn't send the data automatically. If you called support - 1800USA4SUN - they'd ask you to run it and get details about the system as well as any crash dumps on the box. That included the panic strings. I mean ...

/usr/bin/mdb -k *.0

(Replace 0 with the one you want to debug.)

does the same thing and you just email that to the support person, if there are any left. I'm not sure what the difference is here but my badge was turned off years ago.

P.S. - Pretty sure ACT has been around for awhile. Installing it by default - Like we had to fight for years to get SUNWexplorer installed in the OS - is a good thing.

P.P.S. - Glad to see Chris is still fighting the good fight.

[druck]

Before the bits run out

Oracle has extended support for Solaris until the year 2034

I note that's still a good 4 years before signed 32 bit time values overflow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Before the bits run out

Solaris runs fine after 2038, as long as you're not still running on UFS...

[chasil]

SPARC

I don't know of any Solaris descendants that fully support SPARC.

One of the BSDs is really the only option with a long term future for this platform, if Oracle Solaris is eschewed.

[Roland6]

>Is OpenIndiana that bad?

To be attactive to enterprise, it really needs a business behind it; like what Red Hat Inc has done with the RedHat distribution.

Thinking about this does raise the question why HP haven't done this and got into bed with SPARC International, given HP court battles with Oracle.

Aside: A quick look at the OpenIndiana website, indicates they didn't get rights to the full system documentation - the document list and contents does seem to be thinner than I remember the box of documentation Sun shipped.

[karlkarl]

An old stable OS that is barely going to change until 2034? Sounds bloody awesome on paper to be honest.

Annoyingly the only unreliable input is Oracle.

[trevorde]

Not what I was expecting

I thought the only 'significant' feature Oracle would be interested in adding would be an impenetrable license agreement

[Anonymous Coward]

18h for 2TB, I can do that in 6 on my home connection. I must live I Monaco.

[-v(o.o)v-]

Solaris has some great features. I l fondly recall the service manager, really good one - which systemd kinda sorta tried to copy failing miserably.

[Anonymous Coward]

As old as the hills

ACT is decades old and grew out of the support organisation. It tried to do some automated diagnosis, while SolarisCAT (aka FM) was interpreted crash dumps to display the most useful info, again created by the support organisation.