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Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#101

Post by thwarted »

jolmg wrote: post #65
silverwasthere wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining access to a 20 year old ssh server will not be trivial. A modern client would usually fail to agree on encryption protocols in my experience.

It's pretty trivial. Some things are disabled by default, but still available on the latest versions of clients. For the OpenSSH client, it will tell you what specifically the client and server failed to agree on, and you can just add the option to enable on the client one of the ciphers, kex algos, or whatever that the server accepts. I've had no trouble with neither the latest version of the OpenSSH client nor Putt…

Using ancient ciphers and kex algos can end up being just as secure as telnet.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#102

Post by icedchai »

bdavis__ wrote: post #99
icedchai wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an AlphaServer in my collection, running OpenVMS. It's been a while since I've booted it up. It's very loud.

ssh'd to a live alpha server at work last year. there were some files on there I wanted to look at. the machine has to be at least 20 years old at this point. but it feels fast. bash. find. xargs grep. command line stuff very responsive. it felt fast back then. i do remember that.

Alphas were incredible when they first came out. The one I have is a DS10, probably also 20 years old-ish. It still feels responsive.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#103

Post by justsomehnguy »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #5

Yup. SCO OpenServer 5.0.something, for some partner's accounting department. Neither the OS nor the application software have been updated since the late 1990s, but if it works, it works, I guess... (to be honest: the application software is only used to run reports in response to requests from the legal department, but apparently still can't be shut down -- I ask once a year, next upcoming 'query date' in my agenda…

> with an AD-authenticating-HTTPS-to-Telnet bridge

Apache Guacamole supports AD auth and (surprisingly) telnet.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#104

Post by calvinmorrison »

sarahdellysse wrote: post #10

Back when I worked at OmniTI (from like 2015 to 2017), we had an in-house Illumos neé Solaris distro for cloud servers named OmniOS. I didn't use it too much myself as it was somewhat legacy but all the other devs who used it for prod debugging loved all the dtrace/zfs stuffs on it.

Pobox also had a few racks of hardware running Illumos/SmartOS as parts of their older stack. it was a pleasure to use once I wrapped my head around it, which was little enough because it was so reliable.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#105

Post by Nursie »

Last time I got near any sort of proprietary unix was probably AIX at IBM. It is still actively developed for their p-series POWER servers. But that was probably 7 years ago now.

Back in the 00s it was common to have to work on multiple proprietary platforms. I did a lot of platform engineering work for one product that ran across Solaris (Sparc and x86), AIX (POWER), HPUX (PA-RISC and Itanium), Linux (x86 and System Z) and Windows.

Now ... if I'm lucky I don't have to care about the platform at all, I just write lambdas in my language of choice and throw them at AWS. It's a very different world!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#107

Post by slotrans »

Not since 2012. Company ran on a big Oracle DB on very expensive Solaris machines. They started in 98 or 99 so this was a vaguely defensible choice.

Several times we looked at moving the DB to Linux/x86 but Oracle's pricing made it non-economical, or so I was told. All the app-tier servers (Java) ran Linux.

Haven't used a non-Linux system in production since leaving that company.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#108

Post by mgarfias »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #5

Yup. SCO OpenServer 5.0.something, for some partner's accounting department. Neither the OS nor the application software have been updated since the late 1990s, but if it works, it works, I guess... (to be honest: the application software is only used to run reports in response to requests from the legal department, but apparently still can't be shut down -- I ask once a year, next upcoming 'query date' in my agenda…

Man, that brings back memories. When I kept a tile store/distributor running on SCO with their whack ass Keymark darabase.

Good times

Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

#110

Post by Postosuchus »

bdavis__ wrote: post #48

How about proprietary "non unix's"? Anyone running VMS? RSTS/E ? Or on rare hardware, OS-32 on a PE 8/32, or MPX on any SEL 32 family? MPE on Harris ?

Part of our business-critical financial analytics software was running on VAX/VMS, then AlphaVMS decades ago. Written in DEC Pascal (let's just say - not really compatible with any other Pascal dialects I am aware of). We managed to port the whole system to Linux (before Linux became fashionable) by a godawful contraption made of Scheme, Perl, shell and elisp - it "translated" the Pascal code into a dialect understood by p2c, which in turn translated it to C. That was mucho fun!
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