If you have ever administered Sun machines, updates were a big part of your work. In the past, information about them were available on SunSolve, the Sun support website, to help sysadmins sort everything out. SunSolve has been decomissioned by Oracle and its replacement hasn’t received a warm welcome from the Solaris community due in large part to technologies used (Flash,…). We Sun Solve was created to avoid this problem.According to its creator, Thomas Gouverneur, it “complies with the old Sun principle and Unix mentality in general: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).” Its workflow is simple: as soon as a patch is out, it’s downloaded right away to extract metadata it contains inside a database which can be queried online. In addition to patch information it provides the ability for sysadmins to search for patches and bugs with some advanced search features. For example you can search the patches database to know which patches have modified /usr/bin/cp recently; or which bugs have affected ZFS. Note also that the website is regularly checking for new patches: it announces them on IRC, RSS as well as Twitter.
On the community side, We Sun Solve has also been in touch with Openindiana and Illumos developers to help them find the information they need for their daily developments. Its future objective is “to complete the sysadmin toolkit and information with whatever could be useful for a Solaris sysadmin.” Site maintainers say, “This website belong first to its users! We’re then eager to hear any suggestion or comment about it!”
Some We Sun Solve stats:
- 74 000+ indexed patches since 1990;
- 360 000+ indexed bugs;
- a 6GB+ database.
They use former Sun logo as favicon, there is “Sun” name in the title, and Oracle is… well, Oracle. They will sue or issue DMCA takedown notice.
Is Oracle that bad that they’d take down a site that encourages and improves the lives of Solaris administrators?
I didn’t think they were that bad, yet.
They’ve been this bad and worse for a long time.
Oracle always seemed to be Evil-Smart. This seems Evil-Stupid.
rest assured – they will….
I think they might be that stupid. Recently they asked organizers of Javarsovia (Warsaw Java Conference here in Poland) to change the name because it had “Java” in it.
I actually thought the same thing when I saw the Sun favicon, then I remembered that I’ve seen the Sun favicon on a lot of web sites, so I think it’s the default for sites using a Sun web server.
And building shitty all-flash turds for their support sites?
I used to hate working with My Oracle Support – horrible mess of a site. Thankfully that job is behind me now.
…they could make critical security patches downloadable without paying thousands of dollars to Oracle for support. Until that happens, Solaris cannot be a viable competitor for Linux, which is a shame, given many of its technical strengths.
I may have to fire up my old Ultra 2 Enterprise box again.
oracle does have a support page that does not use flash . https://supporthtml.oracle.com . it is still hard to navigate but it is faster .
i so miss the old sunsolve www site . almost everything i needed was right there on the home page . simple and very useful .
the new http://wesunsolve.net looks to be a good replacement .
thanks for the info
-Nich
I work with Solaris on a daily basis.. means its my bread and butter. I do like 20-30 JET installs every day and get fucked up with every Update they release.
New EIS-DVDs, new Firmwares are my biggest headaches. While the EIS-DVDs play mostly nice they eat a lot of time while the installation (Installing the EIS-DVD takes 3x longer than installing the Base OS). The Oracle My Support site is horrible. It is so time consuming finding some infos on any topic.
I definetly will try the new We Sun Solve site. It cant be worse.