“The Sudden Death and Eternal Life of Solaris” is a blog article by Bryan Cantrill with his thoughts on Oracle’s recent staff terminations.

Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to my GoFundMe for kidney cancer treatment and medical expenses.
In six days, we’re just under the half-way point to the goal!

https://www.gofundme.com/misterbill

Donate now: https://www.gofundme.com/misterbill

Almost two months ago, I had an 8-day hospital stay wherein I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes… my body had been eating itself (diabetic ketoacidosis) for a couple of months and my discharge weight indicated I’d lost 100 lbs over the previous two months. I had thought I was just not getting over the flu very well.

The diabetes is (easily) now under control with metformin and diet changes. During the hospital stay, they found out a large mass on my left kidney and spots on my lungs – I have Stage 4 kidney cancer.

3-4 weeks from now, I’ll be having robotic laproscopic surgery to remove that left kidney and tumor, and a few weeks after that, will start immunotherapy to hopefully get rid of the spots in my lungs.

I’m recovered from the ketoacidosis and have most of my strengh and balance back, just in time to deal with this surgery. I’m looking at 4-5 days in the hospital,
then a couple of weeks at home to rest and heal before I go back to my (desk) job.

All of my paid time off and sick leave was used up during that hospital stay, and after insurance, I owe the hospital $4200 (my yearly out of pocket maximum of $5K has been met). Right now the only payment option I can afford is to send them a monthly payment for the next three years.

Work does not offer any short or long-term disability, but they’ve offered to “advance” me next year’s PTO/sick leave for this next hospital stay and being out of work.

However, that’s only three weeks of leave, total – and using all of it up would leave me with no vacation or time off at all for the next year. If there’s complications and I’m out for more than three weeks, I won’t get paid, and won’t be able to pay my bills.

I set the goal at $20K. This covers my existing hospital bill + doctor bills that I haven’t received yet, up to two months of my normal salary amount, and GoFundMe’s overhead/percentage. I’m usually the guy who goes out of his way to help others; I hate having to ask for charity from other people. Any amount you can contribute will help.

Thank you so much. If the goal is met and I don’t end up having to be out of work for long, I’ll use the extra funds to pay for ongoing treatment after the end of the year and to keep my decrepit car on the road so I have reliable transportation.

Today would have been Sun’s 35th anniversary as a company.

Larry Wake on Twitter shared this video from 2002 at the 20th Anniversary of Sun.

This IEEE Spectrum article tells about the Sun employee reunion that happened last Saturday evening at Sun’s first corporate headquarters building in Mountain View.

I’m quoted in this TechTarget article about Oracle’s attitude toward the “hobbyist” community.

I’ve completely removed all advertising from SunHELP, and will be redesigning the site soon. If you happen to run into a page with an ad on it, please let me know.

Apologies for the lack of updates or news items lately. I’m still here, just have been dealing with a lot of problems in my personal life and things related to my wife’s untimely death. When stuff like that happens, you tend to lose enthusiasm for personal projects and at times it’s hard to start caring about some things again. I’m on the upswing finally, and look forward to completing a site redesign for SunHELP by the end of the year. One of my eventual goals is to make the site into more of a reference / database than it is now, full of helpful information for people that want to keep their Sun-branded hardware going for as long as possible. Part of that is a “back burner” project I’ve got going on to collect and archive online as many different versions of SunOS and Solaris (SPARC *and* x86) as possible, to have available for the hobbyist community when needed and allowable under Oracle’s copyright guidelines.

Speaking of Oracle, Sun’s “new” owners (it’s been a few years now, hasn’t it?) – I’ve not seen otherwise, and I can’t speak for all of the Oracle/Sun employees, but their attitude towards the hobbyist community and sites like mine seems to be a large upraised middle finger. I’m not even able to run SunHELP on actual Sun / Oracle hardware or software, as the cost of a support contract in order to get Solaris patches is more than any income that this site brings in nowadays (basically zero).

My question to you, the Sun and Solaris and SPARC enthusiasts, is – is it worth it? Do you get any benefit, education, or enjoyment out of my continuing work keeping this site and the mailing lists going? Has it helped you solve a problem, defeat an emergency, “put out a fire”, be a hero, get a job, keep a job, get a better job? Have you learned anything that you might not have found out anywhere else? Have you scored awesome computer systems that a company was just going to toss out, and got them running at home? Does your spouse understand the desire for raised flooring in the garage?

When I was a young beginner sysadmin, I received a lot of help and mentoring from other folks, and have always appreciated that. SunHELP started in July 1997 (then as sunhelp.com) as a collection of links and resources, and gradually expanded into a major web site, I believe at one point this was the largest third-party non-official Sun-enthusiast informational resource. I became the official home for the Sun Hardware FAQ – a document that was a big part of my learning about Sun systems in the first place. In 2000 I became one of the list maintainers of the Sun-Managers Mailing list (and hosted it from my own hardware for a few years; I still help with and in 2005, I was honored to take over hosting of Celeste Stokeley’s Unix Serial Port Resources pages. All of my efforts over the past fifteen years have been an attempt to give something back to the community, and I hope that my peers feel that my contributions have been worthwhile.

I’ll keep putting my money and effort into SunHELP and the mailing lists for as long as it proves useful to someone else – and if it has been useful, entertaining, or educational, please let me know. Send email to mrbill@sunhelp.org, and tell me your story.

Update: Don’t worry – I have no plans to stop doing all this or cease hosting the mailing lists and web site! I’d just like to know, for my own personal knowledge, what benefit you’ve gotten out of everything here.

I’ve been VERY busy over the past few months and haven’t had much time to dedicate to SunHELP, but the site’s still here and isn’t going away! With Oracle’s seemingly new policy of not caring about the “little guy” and dropping all support for older UltraSPARC hardware in Solaris 11, SunHELP is needed more than ever by people who want to keep the older systems up and running.

I’ve made some minor clean-up changes today, and will be continuing this work. Would also like to thank Jerry for posting the occasional news article over the past few months.

According to this article, Oracle is proposing to give the OpenOffice.Org code to the Apache Software Foundation incubator for further development.

After its recent fork as the LibreOffice project, according to this Register article, Oracle is turning the OpenOffice effort into a purely community-driven project and no longer plans to offer a commercial “StarOffice” version.

In what I think is a really stupid decision on Oracle’s part, the SUN.COM website is going away after June 1, 2011.

(March 30th Update: Thanks to Jerry Kemp for pointing out an update where it is clarified that SUN.COM will not be going away, and 1:1 redirects will be in place)

Timely news and information updates will resume soon; I’m in the process of migrating everything from my current colocated system in Austin to new hardware and bandwidth in Houston. Thank you for your support.

Thanks to donations from supporters and people whose websites I host, the hardware for the new ohno.mrbill.net server is in place and the Comcast Business Class line with static IPs was installed yesterday. The current server will remain in-place until the end of the year, giving me plenty of time to migrate content without having to rush. I will also be hosting two “machines” (converted to VMs) for a friend on this system; he has paid for a good part of the hardware and is paying for the Comcast installation fee in exchange.

Antec Sonata Proto case, Corsair VX450 power supply, Gigabyte motherboard, AMD Athlon II x4 640 CPU, 8GB RAM, and pairs of WD Caviar Blue 250G and Caviar Green 1TB drives each mirrored in a RAID-1 configuration.

Thanks to the users of the SunHELP website and mailing lists who have donated enough to cover the existing colo facility fees for a couple of months! This lets me leave the machine as-is while I do a gradual peaceful migration.

I’ve decided that instead of going with another “favor from a friend” hosting deal or discount, that I will be getting a Comcast Business Class connection with static IPs here at home (in addition to the ATT Uverse line I have for my “personal” Internet use), building a quiet and energy-efficient multi-core x86-64 system, and hosting everything there. All current sites and services will move to the new machine with no changes; all you’ll see is a different IP address once the DNS propagates. This also means direct physical access to the hardware in case of problems.

Due to Oracle’s policy changes over the past few months, I will *not* be able to host SunHELP on a Solaris system! This is strictly a hobby and labor of love, and I cannot afford to pay for a service contract that would give me access to security patches and updates for Solaris x86. At this point it looks like the OS of choice will be either Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Server 10.10 (opinions and suggestions welcome, in email). The existing T1000 system is way too loud to run in a residential environment.

In any case, the current system isn’t going anywhere till at least the beginning of the year, and I will keep posting updates. Thank you for your support over the past 13 years.