Until last year I worked for a financial services company which was so big it's owner ran for President. While I was there, they were doing a major project to move key, irreplaceable core components off of big iron Solaris and AIX machines, and onto Linux on private clouds or commodity machines. Hell, I even worked a (tiny) portion of the project. It might be finished by now? Maybe?
Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#82I 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 does sound like an absolute clusterfuck of software. But just in case it wasn't clear, I don't think that "custom *nix OS" is to blame at all. And as for text based UIs, they're still fantastic for things like data entry and lookup. It just seems that the actual software running on the OS, with the text UI, seems to be profoundly terrible in your case.
Yeah, the OS itself was passable. It had the absolute bare minimum required to work, so not much could go wrong.
The ancient software also wasn't bad. After a few months learning the hotkeys and menu structure, the speed with which you can enter and process data was absolutely incredible. It had problems, but usually minor and patched in a reasonable time for corporate IT.
The real problem was their database management. I don't have any information, so I'm assuming here, but my impression is that they're using some positively ancient database software. Doing a backup of the local cache took multiple days, though it didn't lock the DB. Requests to HQ were incredibly slow, about 30 seconds to pull an account record. Larger queries like neighboring store inventory took a minute or two. Running a report on local inventory would regularly take tens of minutes, and it only had to read the local cache.
The database was a few tens of GB on disk. Granted, I don't know much about databases, but if running something like "SELECT * FROM inventory WHERE sales There were a lot of problems we ran into on a daily basis, and almost all of them related to database functions. Particularly when a record failed to unlock, sometimes we'd have to reboot the local server, which caused all terminals in the store to reboot. That usually took a good 15 minutes.
Personally, I rather enjoyed not having Windows at work. For the most part, everything Just Works, and given the hardware, it ran ten times faster than windows would have.
My current job is a Windows development shop, and I don't have enough curses to describe the pure rage I feel every time windows does something stupid (which is approximately every three hours).
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have an AlphaServer in my collection, running OpenVMS. It's been a while since I've booted it up. It's very loud.
I know the problem. My AS/400e would also get much more powered on time if it wasn't so damn loud.
I'VE GOT A SUN BLADE WORKSTATION. YEAH IT'S RUNNING RIGHT NOW, HOW COULD YOU TELL?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#84This is running Solaris. https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/solutions/radiation-o... Last I heard they were desperately trying to get it on Linux. Why it isn't is because its a huge legacy application with some very horrible hacks specific to the OS.
The last time I got an MRI, the control room had one of those iconic purple SGI O2 workstations on the desk. I guess they were pretty popular with medical imaging products.
Yeah, Cyberknife ran on them too.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#85Towards 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 encountered a bug where /etc/filesystems (fstab equivalent) was parsed differently during boot than when using the mount command manually. The focus seemed to be on the use of the menu-driven smit utility as the primary admin tool, with automation of admin tasks an afterthought. The builtin commands are often not very practical, requiring multiple steps to do things that you're used to do in one on Linux. Installing some open-source tools is essential to sanity. Some of IBM's own tools are using expect on their own software (looking at you lpar_netboot).
SCO is clearly unmaintained stuff that looks like it dates from 30 years ago. At least it's simple to use.
Solaris had some nice features, like Zones or ZFS, but much to my dismay I couldn't play with them as I was made to install an old version of the OS as the newer version wasn't listed as supported by the version of Sybase that was to be installed on it.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#86Last I used a Xerox digital printing press I was greeted with a "SunOS" version string when opening a shell - being some version of a Solaris. It wasn't much impressed by my linux cli-fu. Looking at current brochures those still ship with it. Product is called "Freeflow Print Server" that GUI for the job queue looked java based as it also has Windows incarnations. It will do the raster imaging before printing. Good t…
90s to early 2000s, it was "fun" to accidentally use "killall" on the wrong machine. System V derived UNIXes really mean "kill all", not what Linux meant with it ("kill all with a certain name"), and what today is better represented by "pkill" anyway.
Also reboot, which is safe on Linux, but does an instant power cycle with no proper shutdown on others.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#87If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You are kind of combining two things though: legacy systems, and proprietary systems. There are modern proprietary systems as well. RHEL is a good example. I'd argue it's not a "small number of entities" though. You'd be shocked by what legacy systems are running in the most important places on the planet...maybe scared. Unfortunately/Fortunately, nuclear facilities aren't running Lin…
> 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)
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#88Active HP-UX admin here. the software being run is SAP R3/Oracle and there is plans to replace it, but that is not happening anytime soon due to the usual delays associated with ERP migrations. License cost is a red herring here especially when dealing with enterprise applications from the likes of like SAP, Oracle and IBM, heck were probably paying as much for our SAP on SUSE subscriptions as we do for our HPUX lice…
When we ran HP systems it was because they had PickBasic
Same! Refrigerator sized HP 9000's running HP/UX and Pick.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#89Yup. 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?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
#90Yup. 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…
This takes me back! This was roughly 25 years ago so I’ll do my best to remember. My first job in high school was at a company with the entire business running on SCO Unix. I want to say OpenServer 3, maybe? It was essentially a terminal server with dozens of Wyse 60 terminals attached. Anyway, as a Linux enthusiast I promptly setup a RedHat 7 install on some old hardware they had lying around. IIRC correctly it was…
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