Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 221 posts

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

#191

Post by p_l »

technofiend wrote: post #67
stcroixx wrote: post #14

I worked on a system deployed on AIX for a few years. We used it to distribute batch workloads in parallel across a cluster of machines - no other software and OS did such a thing, maybe still doesn't. The machines themselves were PowerPC RS6000's which only ran AIX. The company already had a close relationship with IBM because they'd been running mainframes for decades. They made tons of money so saving money on lic…

Hey there! It depends on exactly how transparent you're talking, but I rewrote some Fortran and Honeywell assembly to 'C' on lowest-cost-bidder unix workstations on behalf of NASA in 91 or 92? We used NQS [1] to distribute the workload across the nodes and it worked pretty well. Well enough for NASA to retire the mainframe. The idea is hardly unique or novel - I believe DEC's clustering software allowed something sim…

Popular cross platform proprietary tooling for this is Control-M, but I didn't work personally with it. There are now also batch systems with executors on k8s or Mesos, and in a simplified sense apache airflow is often used for this

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

#192

Post by timc3 »

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.

I use OmniOS - its actually not that rare to use if you want a good ZFS server. I am about to do a fresh install on new hardware of it as well. Its not legacy at all.

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

#193

Post by cwillu »

anyfoo wrote: post #95
jle17 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also reboot, which is safe on Linux, but does an instant power cycle with no proper shutdown on others.

Good one. That as well, and the reason why I'm still first trying "shutdown -r now", and if that doesn't work cautiously type in "reboot --help" (hoping that it parses the argument and does nothing at first), even on busybox.

I know what you mean, but I still laughed at “cautiously type in ‹thing that doesn't care how cautiously you typed it if it's going to screw up›”

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

#194

Post by cwillu »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #162
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 usua…

Replacing something that has worked for 25 years is a good way to end up with something that doesn't last another 25 years.

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

#197

Post by sitkack »

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.

You SSH to sibling VM running under the same VMM, connect the serial port of the SSHVM to the application VM, clear text only runs over that virtual serial connection traveling through the VMM.

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

#198

Post by rolenthedeep »

wil421 wrote: post #183
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…

That explains why they had me drive across town only to find out another store very close had the color I need.

Oh no, that's an entirely different problem. Because of supply chain issues, stores are allocated product based on how much of that product they sell. That sounds like it makes sense, but really what it means is that smaller stores slowly get less and less product until they can no longer meet local demand. There is no way to break the cycle.

This is half of the reason everyone who worked at my store walked out on the same day. The other half is that the only people who worked there were me and the manager, and it had been that way for six months.

My advice is to avoid SW these days and go to Lowe's. SW is contractually obligated to ensure that Lowe's always has inventory. But do spend a little extra money for their mid-teir product. The cheapest stuff is trash and you will regret it.

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

#199

Post by cf100clunk »

neilv wrote: post #109

I heard that Boeing archived an Apollo Domain network, because some engineering documentation was developed on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain

Former Apollo/Domain sysadmin here, which I became at one company because I was already doing their Unix sysadmin job. I hope Boeing had somebody periodically resetting the system clocks on those, unless that Apollo/Domain bug had finally been patched after the HP takeover:

https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/date-bug

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

#200

Post by neilv »

cf100clunk wrote: post #199
neilv wrote: post #109

I heard that Boeing archived an Apollo Domain network, because some engineering documentation was developed on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain

Former Apollo/Domain sysadmin here, which I became at one company because I was already doing their Unix sysadmin job. I hope Boeing had somebody periodically resetting the system clocks on those, unless that Apollo/Domain bug had finally been patched after the HP takeover: https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/date-bug

Hopefully. (I heard this in the early 2000s, from someone who'd worked at Apollo.)

For awhile after then, I could imagine some HP account manager for Boeing being able to pull some strings to get the patch, even if it was from another division. And since HP got DomainOS onto an HP 9000/4xx post-Apollo-acquisition, I'd guess that HP probably retained the code and know-how for awhile.

(Though I couldn't guess how long they kept their Domain lab systems around, especially if there were business reasons to push customers to HP-UX on HP-PA, rather than gouge a handful of people who'd still pay support contracts for Domain. I've seen companies run sustaining engineering labs for a while, but then eventually discard key tooling, like the test rigs for a product, which irreversibly marks the end of that, even if the engineers are still on-staff.)

I wonder whether HPE now has the Apollo/Domain IP, or who has it?

Post reply on HN