Everything's fresh at the source as the sun goes down.

[reddragdiva]

This is distinctly unpleasant news for anyone for whom the juicy bits of their CV consist of Solaris admin experience. I won't be acting this apocalyptically urgently, but fear this assessment's likelihood. I see leegnux in my professional future.

The weekend has otherwise been quite nice, thank you. We are making a vague start to cleaning the house before going on holiday, in between recovering from illness and failing to catch up on sleep. I took the rats over to arkady's and spent some quality time before three weeks' absence. She had an early shift this morning, so we woke up at 5:15am thinking, "It's still Saturday night. People are still at Slimelight." I think I shall be going back to bed now.

I am off w*rk for three weeks. I am presently in Recovery.

redcountess has a laptop! And Internet in bed! With all the candy! We've just bought a battery for it as well, to be picked up in Australia.

Update: Sun's future business model.

Comments

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

Certain people I know where going on about how that settlement somehow implied that Sun was dying, that Sun was contractually bound to import Microsoft software, and that Sun was contractually bound to use the money they just got from Microsoft to import Microsoft software.

But, uh, none of those things are true.

Sun hasn't been able to turn a profit in about 9 months, but they're a very long way from dying in a sense where you and I wouldn't see Solaris on the job any more.

I find it marginally revolting that Linux (and, not just that, Red Hat) is "where we're going". Sheesh; why couldn't somebody get off their ass and market FreeBSD decently?

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

Sun hasn't been able to turn a profit in about 9 months

Typo. 9 quarters (yeah, worse).

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

grumpy_sysadmin (grumpy_sysadmin) wrote,

> Sun hasn't been able to turn a profit in about 9 months

Typo. 9 quarters (yeah, worse).

The keys are like right next to each other.

[reddragdiva]

Every compnay that's entered a deal like this with Microsoft has been royally screwed. You'd think they'd have learnt by now.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Apple seems to have done OK from its similar deal with Microsoft. Well, they don't appear to have wound up dead as a result, at any rate.

I honestly don't think the cessation of hostilities is a big deal. If anything is going to kill Sun it's the lack of profit and the slashing of the R&D budget, not agreeing to call off the lawyers.

[reddragdiva]

Well, it's not like they'd kill off their R&D department.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I find it marginally revolting that Linux (and, not just that, Red Hat) is "where we're going".

I have come to the conclusion that Linux -- even Red Hat -- isn't especially evil. The real problem is the hardware: people (read "management") see Linux as being cheap, and thus buy cheap boxes to run it on, and cheap PCs don't have serial consoles.

At least with Solaris on *SPARC kit they don't get the chance to cut the price of the box by opting-out on the serial console or the LOM.

(This is not a big deal to your average ex-Windows admin type, because they're not used to being able to do just about everything short of swapping parts out from the comfort of their office. It's a bloody big deal to me, particularly given that the machines are usually off in some other part of the city or on a different continent.)

There are problems with every Linux distro (and, quite frankly, with FreeBSD, particularly if you run it in a highish kernel security level), but most of those can be ironed out. Cheap-arse machines, however, are much trickier to deal with.

Still, where I work (and will hopefully continue working until I retire in thirty years) this sort of consideration is quite a high priority, so we won't be touching Linux any time soon, and if we do at some point find ourselves forced to go there, it'll be on boxes with serial consoles and other nice things.

[giolla.livejournal.com]

The real problem is the hardware: people
I think puts it more accurately. My biggest problem with Linux is Linux users and all the shite bloody code they put out which claims to run on "unix" when in fact they mean what ever particular distro they happen to be running. Oh and whose documentation for install consists of a standard bolier plate which lists options which may sometimes work.

Ahem.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who has written and taught a Linux system administration course at a university, anything that makes Linux more widespread can't be a bad thing. :-)

(Btw, what's the IT job market in the UK like these days? Just wondering...)

[reddragdiva]

The IT job market in London: all the IT jobs in the world appear to be here. The number of jobs that come up in a month in Melbourne come up in a day here. The competition is fierce, but that they exist is the wonderful thing.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I've always tried to be a general-purpose UNIX sysadmin - well, it might take me a few days to brush the AIX bits of my brain off, but... and I think really most of us are - if you can do one you can get to grips with them all, and it's really just about not making the CV too specific to a particular flavour.

[giolla.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't worry don't forget that there's still IRIX and VMS work out there, and people having being saying that both of those have been dead for years.

That said we seem to be doing red hat stuff here, but skillfully avoiding any cost savings by buying inappropriate over specced boxes.