SCSA, GSOH, WLTM RHCE

Last updated: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:26:00 GMT

Likes: holding hands, long walks, watching Sun finally set.

Yahoo: Sun Microsystems cuts up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 pct of staff, software chief leaves.

I wept for IRIX. Figuratively speaking, of course. Solaris? Well, I guess I'll miss being good at something that paid me enough to keep the wife and kids fed and watered.

My friend Elliott has been saying that Sun had a smell of SGI about them for a few years now. Being entirely human, I spent a while in denail about it. I had to admit that they seemed to have an air of desperation about them; they were running around buying random shit, pushing out half-baked products before they were ready, but there had been some fairly major advances, too. Takes some time to iron out the wrinkles, and there was a lot of change going on.

I was pretty excited about the whole thing. Playing with the betas, messing with zones, by the time they went FCS with Solaris 10 we had some hardware racked up, hoping that our embryonic zone hosting company could ride whatever wave was coming to the brave new world of Solaris dominance.

Sadly not to be. Three years later I folded the company up and, I have to admit, I was thoroughly sick of Sun.

I'm still employed as a Solaris SA, and I've got my hands on some nice big kit lately, but I've lost count of the show-stoppers I've found. Every corner we turn, another panic, another filesystem wedged beyond hope, another dumb-ass, bonehead design flaw. I was prepared to suffer this stuff for the first year. Slightly less so another year later. But, as they keep harping at us, Solaris 10 is nearly four years old now. Mature!

My arse.

Oh, another birthday coming up. Another 12 months of explaining to clients why they just lost three weeks' data. So stick another candle in that turd and call Big Whoop Magazine.

I spend way more time talking to Sun engineers than I should have to, about stuff they should have caught long before it got out of the factory. And, make no mistakes, I get spoken to like I'm a liar or a moron for my troubles. I mean, what does it matter how many thousands of dollars we're pouring into their company for support?

"Hi, thank you for calling. We're Sun Microsystems, who the fuck are you?"

It used to be that I could accept the things that Linux seemed to have, that Solaris didn't. I could stomach it because of the things that Solaris had that Linux did not. Support. Stability. Maturity. Documentation. Industry endorsement. A rock-solid, reliable platform; no dramas.

Maybe I was naive. Maybe it was never that way, maybe I was just being religious. But whatever, it seems clear to me now that Solaris no longer has those things. Sun's hardware is not rock-solid. Sun's operating system is not sufficiently stable. Sun's new technologies are not new, and not yet cooked. And their support blows. It's beyond belief.

What's more, they seem to have lost the faith of the industry, too. They still have their fans, but we're seeing vendors favouring Linux more than ever. Hell, I had to fight to force a vendor to allow us to use Solaris just six months ago.

I'm no good at predicting the future. If I was that smart, I'd have listened to my friends two years ago and hedged my bets a little better. I doubt that Sun or Solaris will be consigned to history just yet. My job's safe enough for now.

But I'm reaching for those Redhat DVDs. I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but I stopped looking forward to dealing with Sun's shit some time ago.