Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by racingmars » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 5:39 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #120

AIX Luckily it had bash, so it felt like a Linux system for my scripts. There is a Command to enumerate all the hardware running on it, I remember running that command to see what was assigned to the LPAR the Aix instance was running on. It took 3 minutes to run and complete :) So yeah, a mainframe. Twlco. IBM obviously. It was used as a massive Oracle database.

> AIX > So yeah, a mainframe.

If it was AIX, it wasn't a mainframe. AIX runs on IBM's POWER systems, which are their "midrange" line. (There was, for a brief time, AIX for S/370 I believe... but that disappeared long ago.)

Mainframe would be a System z (the S/360->S/370->S/390->z/Arch lineage), typically running z/OS (or Linux for z!)

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

#122

Post by lamontcg » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

I worked at Chef Software up until last year and we maintained binary distributions of the software (including ruby and lots of lower level libraries) that were built on Solaris, AIX and Windows in addition to Ubuntu, RHEL and FreeBSD.

Most customers were on Ubuntu/RHEL/Windows. There was very little on FreeBSD, AIX or Solaris. We had zero interest for HP-UX, I think that is dead enough to be ignoreable. Banks and financial services have a tendency towards AIX, while Solaris I think was primarily one customer that had a lot of legacy. AIX and Windows were the biggest pain in the ass, but every time we tried to kill support for it, people discovered sizable contracts that had been signed with us (yeah, our tracking in salesforce was bad).

My background is that I learned C and Unix on a Tandy 6000 back in 1989/1990, then in college used and worked on a wide variety of O/Sen (Dynix, BSD4.3, Digital Unix 4.0, SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.4+, Irix 5.x/6.x (i think), something that ran on a VAX, NetBSD and later Linux). I ported NMAP to a bunch of those and did the original GNU autoconf work on it. I've been mostly Linux since 2001 (Amazon from 2001-2006).

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

#123

Post by not2b » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

I work in electronic design automation. When I started, Solaris on Sparcs was dominant and we supported a number of Unix flavors, but all that died long ago, Linux killed it off. The Solaris port was the last to die, and we were very happy when it went so we no longer had to support their crappy proprietary C++ compiler that, at the time, still was missing important C++98 features.

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

#124

Post by divbzero » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #122

I worked at Chef Software up until last year and we maintained binary distributions of the software (including ruby and lots of lower level libraries) that were built on Solaris, AIX and Windows in addition to Ubuntu, RHEL and FreeBSD. Most customers were on Ubuntu/RHEL/Windows. There was very little on FreeBSD, AIX or Solaris. We had zero interest for HP-UX, I think that is dead enough to be ignoreable. Banks and fi…

Is AIX functionally superior for banks and financial services? Or is it a matter of legacy software requiring AIX?

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

#125

Post by laurentoget » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:26 AM UTC

i had a solaris workstation on my desk from 2000 to 2005 and we had an industrial fridge size IBM pseries running AIX to run big linear programming problems on. You could not run linux or BSD on those machines and you could not get close to the performance of those machines with intel CPUs. We also had an itanium HP box for a while, running Digital UNIX.

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

#126

Post by laurentoget » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

spc476 wrote: post #93

jle17 wrote: post #85

Towards 2014 or 2015 my previous work (some hosting company) had some AIX, Solaris and SCO, as well as some IBM i (aka OS 400) which isn't a Unix. AFAIK they were used because of choices of slow-moving/risk-averse big corps, mostly to run some java software or oracle/postgres/sybase databases that could just as well run on Linux. My take on each of the OSes was: AIX and the associated IBM stuff is kind of a mess. I e…

The thing I loved about AIX is SMIT (System Managment Interface Tool). Available both from the command line and GUI, you could completely manage the AIX system from it, but at any point, you could also have it print out what commands it was going to run (yes, it built a shell script as you navigated through the system). I've never seen a system like it anywhere else.

i had totally forgotten about smit - good times

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

#127

Post by PreInternet01 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 7:11 AM UTC

dcminter wrote: post #25

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…

Will it all blow up in 2038? Do you have a plan (to kill it, upgrade it, or retire) if so? :)

That is an excellent question, one I should investigate using a VM clone one of these days. The accounting data is frozen in time, so it should not be affected, but if the system starts refusing logons or just crashing, that would not be great (and I'm pretty sure the SCO licensing management thingy would fall over, as that was a previous source of, eh, entertainment).

The plan is definitely to retire the system Real Soon Now, but with the subjects of the underlying data springing new generations with new lawyers, ensuring some kind of Y2K38 compliance might be wise...

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

#128

Post by malermeister » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 7:17 AM UTC

mootzville wrote: post #94

jraph wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are modern proprietary systems as well. RHEL is a good example. RHEL is free software, isn't it? (it's just that if you decide to fully use the rights given by the licenses, bye bye support and updates from Red Hat IIRC)

RHEL is not free, but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world. RHEL is open source, yet it is also proprietary. Yes, if you wanted to build from source you can, for free, but you get no access to the repos or service and you have to strip out all references to Red Hat (trademark / copyright infringement) if you want to use it commercially. So, ya if you want to use it at home or to learn, it's free.

Isn't that what CentOS is?

edit: just googled, seems dead these days, but Rocky Linux is more or less the same thing

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

#129

Post by rolenthedeep » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 7:37 AM UTC

zeruch wrote: post #112

rolenthedeep wrote: post #38

I used to work for Sherwin-Williams. The in-store computers run some custom *nix OS. The software that company runs on is a text based ui that hasn't changed since it was introduced in the 90s. They released a major update in 2020 that allowed you to move windows around the screen. It was groundbreaking. But let me tell you, this system was absolutely terrible. All the machines were full x86 desktops with no hard dri…

I worked for a vendor that SW was a customer, and we were asked about integrating with some SW systems...what you are describing resonates

Was it EDI? I had a problem with a vendor where my store ordered something in 2015, marked it as not received, then received it later and sold it without correcting inventory.

The vendor went into a cycle of refunding and re-billing my store for that part every few months for years.

Fortunately both our books came out even in the end, but Jesus what a stupid thing to happen.

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

#130

Post by PreInternet01 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 7:38 AM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #89

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…

Why?

Fair question, although the basic answer should be obvious: the users still need access to the data! So, the question becomes more like "why not upgrade", or more specifically "why not migrate the data to something that is not so shockingly obsolete", since it's probably clear that there is no real upgrade path here (both SCO and the vendor of the accounting system are long gone).

Usually with systems of this vintage, "just dump all the data to Excel or PDF and get it over with" is a good option, but in this case both the volume (with the requirement to run queries on it) and the limited options available for export (the system can only print predefined reports, and they don't contain everything required for filtering) prohibit that.

So, next stop would usually be "reverse engineer the application data format and convert it", but the unholy collection of binary files used by the accounting software here has defied analysis: it's not Btrieve or MS-ISAM (popular semi-database formats for COBOL and BASIC apps of the time), and decompiling the binaries only yielded some generated-by-another-set-of-tools braindamage that didn't clarify anything either.

The choice then became spending huge amounts of money, or wallpapering over the tirefire and keeping it running. Unsurprisingly, the outcome was the latter, which is perfectly OK in this case, as the system is not exactly load-bearing, and actually sort of fun to maintain.