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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?

#171

Post by orangepurple »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #127
dcminter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rewind the system clock by 100 years and add 100 years to the data output :)

It should buy you another 100 years.

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

#172

Post by mkl »

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…

Since you're accessing it via telnet, could you just scrape the screen? Then you could have a script that pages through the data, copying it out a screenfull at a time.

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

#174

Post by blacklion »

We've used Solaris on x86_64 for very long, until Oracle effectively shut it down, as it was best platform to run high performance JVM jobs. Much more predictable and observable than on Linux.

But later Oracle shell out JVM/Solaris integration/QA team, and shortly after that discontinued Solaris for new hardware completely.

Linux it is now.

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

#175

Post by orangepurple »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #139
anyfoo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugly. This makes me seriously wonder whether they just did not put an index in, and unfathomably many hours have been wasted on useless full table scans for something that would have been fixed with a handful of CREATE INDEX statements? Though that's a lot of conjecture, and the real answer is probably more complex. But your examples do make me wonder...

I remember running some very large reports over multiple years of inventory movement. Disk access on the server was totally saturated for a good 20-30 minutes. Thinking about it now, it had to have read out the entire database multiple times. Oh yeah, these reports weren't processed on the server, either. The network link on the terminal I used would be pegged at the max rate the server could read from the disk. I ne…

Some genius probably thought processing queries locally would be faster than on the database server. Fail.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

mkl wrote: post #172
PreInternet01 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since you're accessing it via telnet, could you just scrape the screen? Then you could have a script that pages through the data, copying it out a screenfull at a time.

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by dillab2 »

racingmars wrote: post #121
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!)

Which folks haven't mentioned yet, but z/OS is also a proprietary UNIX, albeit in a very strange way given that it is sorta like a subsystem/different way of looking at the same things, but is also in implemented in the base control program (kernel), so it isn't really a subsystem.

And it isn't the same as AIX. IBM has two alive commercial UNIXs, which is kinda wild.

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

#178

Post by proaralyst »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #169

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 th…

Silicon graphics workstations?
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