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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?

#161

Post by nibbleshifter »

silverwasthere wrote: post #49
jolmg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Access is the biggest issue, as the OS only supports telnet, and serial access. OpenSSH works on it. This page has links to precompiled packages: https://scosales.com/knowledge-base/how-to-install-ssh-for-s... links: ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/openssh-3.4p1-VOLS.tar ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/prngd-0.9.23-VOLS.tar ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/zlib-1.1.4-VOLS.tar Probabl…

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.

> A modern client would usually fail to agree on encryption protocols in my experience.

I run into this issue frequently. Usually its a "client soft disabled, alter config", but sometimes... Just sometimes its "spin up an old VM to use its ssh client".

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

#162

Post by nibbleshifter »

hrrsn wrote: post #136

I work at a telco. We have many museum-grade Unices in production, mostly AIX and Solaris - we even have a Wang still running in one of our datacenters. It's largely a case of there isn't a business case to migrate it to modern hardware - one day we'll no longer operate a legacy copper PSTN network, but until that day comes, we still need it all. We still have maintenance contracts on some hardware, like our Sun Fire…

I love when we get telcos as customers for security assessments, because it means I get to see what weird old shit they have on their networks.

I find the sysadmins at telcos come in three flavours: the ones who will work with me to secure their cool old shit, the ones who want to get rid of it, and the ones who have fucking meltdowns if I consider to touch their weird old shit.

What's neat is the weird old shit usually gets support forever, whereas support for modern shit tends to be short.

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

#163

Post by nibbleshifter »

piyh wrote: post #80
icedchai wrote: post #27

The last "proprietary Unix" I worked with was AIX, way back in 2006. And that was only because their primary customer was an AIX shop. The code itself would actually run on Linux. Previous to that (late 90's, early 2000's) it was mainly Solaris. One place was fairly heterogeneous, and had Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix (aka OSF/1, Tru64), and a couple others.

We had AIX at my last job in 2021 and it was the least actively terrible part of our tech stack.

There is genuinely nothing wrong with a lot of the old stuff, in many cases its simply better than the latest and greatest React/Mongo/Whatever webshit stack that modern devs seem to emit.

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

#164

Post by mrweasel »

yokoprime wrote: post #142
humanistbot wrote: post #43

I'd argue Mac OS X is proprietary UNIX, but I'll admit to that being a bit pedantic.

It's certified, so I would say it counts as proprietary Unix

Interestingly enough Solaris isn't certified.

At a previous employer we would run a large number of Oracle installations on Solaris, on Oracle hardware (SPARC64). I don't think that uncommon.

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

#166

Post by Annatar »

Solaris is used in life-critical environments, like for example medical systems or energetics. Anything that's absolutely life critical and must run for thousands of days without rebooting. And it's really nice for running software because of its advanced features like the runtime linker, zones containerization and fault management architecure features like SMF. It's awesome software on awesome hardware.

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

#167

Post by quickthrower2 »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #130
29athrowaway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely only legacy data? No new data going into it?

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

#169

Post by BrandoElFollito »

Yes, mostly IBM's AIX and a few ... ah the name escapes me now ... the top notch graphical design workstations of the time.

The reason are maintenance contracts for very long-term systems that never upgrade (they are ultimately completely replaced by something else).

They are similar to that old bulb in a fire station[1]: it is strictly forbidden to breathe when around these systems, if you sneeze you are fired on the spot :)

We had to move them twice between data centers. I had some popcorn with me when they were powered off, transported as if it was Mona Lisa and then restarted with the sysadmins not watching and asking for the flashing numbers. Good memories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

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

#170

Post by Annatar »

mrweasel wrote: post #164
yokoprime wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certified, so I would say it counts as proprietary Unix

Interestingly enough Solaris isn't certified. At a previous employer we would run a large number of Oracle installations on Solaris, on Oracle hardware (SPARC64). I don't think that uncommon.

Solaris is UNIX 03 certified. Solaris is actually a reference implementation platform for:

- TCP / IP; - NFS; - POSIX; - XPG4; - XPG6; - SVR4.

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