201–210 of 221 posts
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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.
ORCL HW business increased YoY by 11% in the last earnings release.
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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…
From the highly obsolete format, to a stepping stone in-between which can be converted to a modern format.
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> 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.
If there's any optional part of POSIX, it's not in there. You only get the 'MUST' parts of the base spec. No optional extensions, etc. When you're porting over C code to z/OS USS, you are often surprised when things you assumed were just part of every POSIX implementation aren't there. Fun times for all!
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Is AIX functionally superior for banks and financial services? Or is it a matter of legacy software requiring AIX?
I can't really answer that, but my general impression is that they actually like it and it isn't just legacy (or at least some of them).
AIX is a complete package OS with some nice enterprise features, and it is modern and similar enough to make porting from Linux not too terribly difficult. Even something like RHEL is still very much more in the Linux tradition of lots of pieces of independently developed software kinda thrown together and called an OS, at times haphazardly.
That being said, we of course run RHEL as well, but mostly for cost reasons for less important applications, as opposed to any particular dislike for AIX.
USS on zOS is a much more difficult IBM UNIX to work with in my opinion, and tends to generate stronger opinions from both sides of the proprietary/OSS fence. They are making progress, but the compiler and compatibility situation is not as good as POWER/AIX.
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…
Turns out most of the wet plant (a fancy way to say something is submerged under the water) were HP/UX systems.
Submarine cables must last for 20 years minimum to be financially viable... So in 2035 they will still running.
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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.
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Likely wasn't a RDBMS at all, but flat files with maybe one key index (or perhaps none).
I really doubt that a schema like that would survive at the kind of scale SW operates at. I'm about 80% sure I saw mention of database operations in the startup/shutdown logs, but I could be misremembering. My guess is that they bought whatever database software was popular in the early 90s and never changed. I do know they've been slowly changing the schema over the years, increasing the number of digits in the acco…
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Technially, the Darwin Kernel it uses is OSS https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
Can you actually recompile your kernel on Mac? And its functional? I'll bet this isn't even the source code Apple uses, but rather they have a private fork with extra patches (similar to how Microsoft publishes OSS VS Code, but then uses their own proprietary version for releases).