Hello Everyone!
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but mrbill passed in August of 2019 after a long fight with cancer. Before his passing, he entrusted me (firestorm_v1) with his electronic accounts for sunhelp.org, sunmanagers.org, his domain registrar, and many other domains along with the physical server hardware that he was hosting them on. I was fortunate to have access to a colocation facility where the server has continued to run pretty much hands-off for almost the last two years. I have already migrated the domains to my registrar account and renewed them for several more years (and will continue to do so).

Unfortunately, life (read: COVID) has been way too busy for me to consider doing anything with the server outside of simply moving it to the colocation facility and ensuring that it remains online. Fortunately, the server has otherwise remained functional and operational and according to the most recent checks of the archives, is still running the mailing lists as if nothing had happened.

Recently, there was an issue with the site that caused the pages not to render properly (although the mailinglists continued to operate) and a deep dive into the system revealed multiple issues that indicated that the underlying software is simply too old to keep running. Fortunately, I just so happen to have a server that’s more than capable of hosting sunhelp, sunmanagers and many other domains that Bill was operating.

It is my intent to move the content, the mailing lists, and the domain over to the new server sometime within the next couple of months. It is also my intent to keep this site and the mailing lists operating as it has been since the site was originally provisioned. I’m not going to change the site in any way, shape, or form, except for those necessary changes to allow me to keep the site up to date (security updates, application updates, etc..). Y’all trusted mrbill to keep the site and lists online, and I’m hoping that y’all can trust me to do the same. I’ll post updates to the site as progress is made, but to avoid bombarding users with non-update updates, I’ll limit posts to the site to once in a seven day period and only if there are significant updates.

Thank you for your patience as we move forward.

FIRESTORM_v1

Courtesy of Khosla Ventures, here’s Sun’s original business plan from 1982.

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.

According to this post at thelayoff.com, Solaris and any future SPARC hardware is being cancelled / discontinued.

Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF’d in short term
All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading.
Hardware teams being told to cease development.
There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4.
Orders coming straight from Larry.
No info on timing yet.

From this blog post comes the news that Solaris will soon be adopting the OpenBSD “pf” firewall / packet filter in Solaris 11.3, and Oracle hopes to make it the default in Solaris 12. I think this is a good thing, as current IPF in Solaris is ancient, and is what “pf” was designed to replace originally in OpenBSD.

The latest iteration of the tech, the Sparc M7, is due to launch sometime next year – although exact dates remain vague – and to hear Ellison tell it, it’s “the most important thing we’ve done in silicon, maybe ever.”

Ellison pins Oracle’s hopes on cloud… and Sparc

Ellison: Sparc M7 is Oracle’s most important silicon EVER

Oracle reveals 32-core, 10 BEEELLION-transistor SPARC M7

Solaris 11.2 GA has been released, and is available for download in the standard spot.

Download Oracle Solaris 11.2

Lots of good Oracle Solaris 11.2 howto’s here:

Solaris 11.2 getting started items

Oracle Cranks Up The Cores To 32 With Sparc M7 Chip

Say what you will about Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison, but when the software giant bought Sun Microsystems more than four years ago, for $7.4 billion, he said that he had seen the light and wanted Oracle to control its own hardware and created specialized machinery tuned up to run Oracle’s software stack. Despite falling sales in the early years, which have now stabilized and are now growing, Oracle has continued to invest in hardware.

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.

In this InfoWorld article, Java founder James Gosling rates Oracle’s handling of Sun’s technologies in the four years since the acquisition.

In short, Java gets a passing grade, while the treatment of the Solaris operating system fails miserably.

Adobe supports ColdFusion on Solaris 10/11 (SPARC)

Adobe supports ColdFusion 10 on Solaris 11 (SPARC). The Adobe “Tech Specs” document discusses the details of the supported configurations.

https://blogs.oracle.com/partnertech/entry/adobe_supports_coldfusion_on_solaris

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-standard/tech-specs.html

Oracle will soon be announcing that it’s discontinuing development of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray software and hardware, and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client product lines.

https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/important_information_about_oracle_desktop

http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-to-halt-development-of-sun-virtualization-technologies-7000018028/

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

OpenSolaris.org shutting down 24 March 2013

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/

If you need anything from OpenSolaris.org, now is the time to download and archive it.

Solaris 10 update 11 is available now.

Get it here:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/solaris/solaris10/overview/index.html