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back to article Oracle pledges annual Solaris updates for you to install each summer

Oracle will deliver “update releases” of Solaris every northern Summer, under a new plan it revealed this week along with news of the Solaris 11.4 beta and a hurry-along for users of old Sun hardware. In a post detailing “minor changes” to its release schedule, Scott Lynn, director of product management for Oracle Linux and …

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  1. FrankAlphaXII

    >>The Register asked Oracle for a briefing about Solaris 11.4 on April 9th. As of April 19th we were told the company is considering our request. The blog post on which we’ve based this story was dated April 17th. Oracle did not direct us to the post. Just why is anyone’s guess.

    Perhaps someone from Apple's PR department, which El Reg is anathema to, jumped ship and went to Oracle, spreading the immature hate over there. Or possibly its that Solaris matters so little to Oracle as a whole that they couldn't be bothered to go find out what the Solaris product team was doing.

    17 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Solaris

      Is a pimple on Oracles's Bum IMHO. They'd rather it all went away so that Oracle could become 100% 'serverless' and 'cloudy' at the same time.

      Either way, their software licensing policies and especially prices are driving a lot of lower tier customers away. Even Microsoft seems more receptive to their needs than Oracle.

      Regards,

      Former Oracle 7.3.4 Certified DBA, Solaris Certified(lapsed) and retired RHCE

      12 0 Reply
      1. Simon Sharwood, Reg APAC Editor (Written by Reg staff)
        Reply Icon

        Re: Re: Solaris

        But a lucrative pimple: if you are still in the SPARC ecosystem the number of suppliers will keep shrinking and Oracle can keep raising prices ... I've heard of old platforms where the handful of remaining vendors and/or service providers can charge whatever they want just to answer the phone.

        11 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Or possibly its that Solaris matters so little to Oracle as a whole

      Or possibly its that The Register matters so little to Oracle as a whole ...

      5 2 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        "Or possibly its that Solaris matters so little to Oracle as a whole

        Or possibly its that The Register matters so little to Oracle as a whole .."

        NOPE! OBVIOUSLY! NOT! IT!

        0 1 Reply
    3. TVU Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      "Or possibly its that Solaris matters so little to Oracle as a whole that they couldn't be bothered to go find out what the Solaris product team was doing"

      I think the term I'd use there is "benign neglect". It's as if they do now realise that they're still effectively stuck in a past era in many ways and that they think only way that they can get out of it now is by gaining money and income through litigation. Experience has shown that approach doesn't usually have a happy ending (Hi, SCO Group).

      4 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Did I read that right?

    So every year you'll get your batch of updates?

    That's going to be fun; when a major exploit has been discovered then you'll have to try and keep your box secured for at least another 6 months before you can expect any updates?

    Definitely sounds very appealing to me!

    2 7 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Did I read that right?

      Did I read that right?

      No.

      There will be a new update release every summer, but also:

      "New features will be made available as they are ready to ship in whatever is the next available and appropriate delivery vehicle. This could be an Support Repository Update (SRU), Critical Patch Update (CPU) or a new release."

      so the usual SRUs (patches) will appear when appropriate (for bugfixes, new features, new HW support, etc.), Critical Patch Updates will continue to appear quarterly, etc.

      No change, except for the guarantee of an update release every summer.

      10 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Their incentive to upgrade kit is priceless

    A deal you can't refuse (if you want security patches).

    1 2 Reply
  4. kloczek the iOS6 user

    No longer long oudated official downloads

    Between 11.3 GA and 11.4 GA were almost 2.5 years and all this time officially for free and test was possible to download old and outdated with hundreds not fixed security issues.

    IMO sooner or later Oracle will realise that for what people want to pay is not free download but support with the possibility to contact some specialist, diagnose the issue and fix them ASAP.

    Free download even latest patches does kill such needs.

    1 0 Reply
  5. woodcruft

    Unimpressed

    From the 1st para of Oracle blog:

    "On January 30, 2018, we released the Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta. It has been a quite successful."

    Spot the grammatical error staring at you like the proverbial dog's 'nads. I'd say that gives a pretty good indicator about how much Oracle 'cares'.

    Further down:

    "Some new features in this release are:

    ...

    * ZFS Scheduled Scrub

    ..."

    Bleeding edge stuff: a shell script and cron job.

    From a FreeBSD 11.1 box's /etc/default/periodic.conf (which was probably committed years ago) :

    daily_scrub_zfs_enable="NO"

    daily_scrub_zfs_pools="" # empty string selects all pools

    daily_scrub_zfs_default_threshold="35" # days between scrubs

    #daily_scrub_zfs_${poolname}_threshold="35" # pool specific threshold

    Also no mention of a Solaris 12 which kind of confirms it's zombie status.

    Somebody mentioned Oracle's Solaris "team". I'm not entirely sure 'one old bloke with Alzheimers' constitutes a "team".

    3 2 Reply
  6. Loud Speaker

    T1, T2 and T3 completely obsolete - send to landfill now!

    Having declared Sparcs T1, T2 and T3 completely obsolete, implying no longer a source of profit, Does the Shower of Shit plan to allow firmware patches for them to be freely distributed to people with these systems so a future generation of users can learn the benefits of their architecture at home, or is their commitment to "dog in the manger" philosophy of suing people who are so impertinent as to look at their software, so great that they prefer to demonstrate that the best way to improve your ability to stand on your own two feet is to cut off your legs at the knees?

    3 0 Reply
  7. Jan 0 Silver badge

    Plans, we've heard of before.

    Like many other plans, what's to stop this being dropped next year?

    2 0 Reply
  8. -tim
    FAIL

    I guess its time to dump sun hardware forever

    Not only are the older systems out of the running on 11.4, it now appears they have less than a year of useful life left on 11.3. This includes systems that they were selling new less than 6 years ago. The last patches for Solars 9 were 3 years ago and that would run on hardware made in 1995. Solaris 11.3 was back to the point of being useful as a server after the Solaris 10 mess and the ZFS stuff is far ahead of what is running in Linux today.

    2 1 Reply
    1. HCV
      Reply Icon

      Re: I guess its time to dump sun hardware forever

      Exactly what "Solaris 10 mess" was fixed by Solaris 11.3?

      1 0 Reply
  9. sturdy1234

    The writing is on the wall, Oracle is killing Solaris slowly will

    be dumping the old PARC hardware. They have laid off

    nearly all of the hardware and software folks in the silicon

    valley, so the only thing left is bare bones maintenance.

    Larry is spending the cash on the Oracle Cloud trying to

    handle his declining revenue from selling software licenses

    in favor of pay as you use model. Capitalism at it's best.

    Can the old folks, hire new different folks and forget about

    ever re-training the software folks you can. God to love it!

    0 0 Reply
  10. Thornhill

    I found a 2019 bug report in MyOracleSupport about Solaris 12 Sparc :

    Bug 22229116 - Solaris: INS-13001 error during GI/RAC installation on S12 Sparc (Doc ID 22229116.8)

    Type:

    Status:

    Last Major Update:

    Last Update:

    PATCH

    PUBLISHED

    17-Feb-2019

    19-Mar-2019

    Description

    INS-13001 error occurs during GI/RAC installation on S12 Sparc

    Rediscovery Notes

    CVU checks run with -r 12.1 fail saying Solaris 5.12 is not supported.

    Workaround

    None

    Does it mean Solaris 12 will be finally released ?

    0 0 Reply

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