Tue Nov 28 2017 04:42:19 PM EST from LoanShark @ Uncensored
I don't think we're talking about the same thing. Amazon is committed to supporting what they call PVM-based AMIs, which as I understand it are Xen-based paravirt kernels that predate pv-ops and don't have the ability to boot as HVM, bare-metal, dom0 etc (all of which are supported by recent pv-ops) or else there would be no point to any distinction between PVM and HVM AMIs
They do, however, have step-by-step instructions on how to convert from PVM to HVM.
Sad.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication
And yet encouraging at the same time. Linux Journal was the dead tree publication of record for the Linux revolution. Now that Linux has, for all practical purposes, become the fabric of standard computing, the need for such a publication has come and gone.
This is not to say it won't be missed, but did any of us here have a subscription?
I was a subscriber for a couple of years but that was a long time ago.
In other news, Slashdot is still around, but its headlines are absolutely terrible.
Had they kept going with the printed material, it might seem a bit like trying to create paper from a long-dead horse by beating it.
They do, however, have step-by-step instructions on how to convert
from PVM to HVM.
Not that it's rocket science or anything, but different distributions have different selection of PVM vs HVM AMIs available, so you may find yourself in the middle of a weeks-long migration process before you know it
Icinga appears to be maintained by assholes:
https://github.com/Icinga/icinga2/issues/5471
"...we were aware that users won't read changelogs/blog posts/docs prior to upgrading and breaking their environment ... still, the new notification scripts make sense and were a whole lot of work, carefully considering what could possibly break."
Yeah, like my notifications, which lead to a critical problem that went unnoticed for about half a day because, although Icinga was trying to notify us that the service was dead, it couldn't send the e-mails.
This happened after I applied an 'apt update/apt upgrade', which is the normal procedure one does to maintain security updates. One isn't expected to read volumes of bullshit on how to get some byzantine pile of shit to work after an upgrade... you do an upgrade, and it just fucking works, applying whatever needs to be applied to make the upgrade work. If you have to break something, do it in the next release of the OS. Don't pile it onto the apt chain.
So, yeah. Assholes.
If there isn't anything significantly better than this pile of turd, there's an opportunity to make something.
"Closing this as a non-issue." Yeah, that's classy.
They are correct in that people don't bother to read ... my experience has been that people don't even bother to make backups/snapshots of production systems before performing an upgrade, and then they get their panties in a bunch when something goes wrong ... but you have to at least try to bring the existing installation cleanly forward, or at least stop and decline the install if it can't be done.
We've got a module in Citadel that steps through every in-place upgrade that is needed for almost 20 years worth of old versions. It's a pain in the neck but you have to do it.
anything delivered by apt-get in an ubuntu default config ("universe" possibly excepted?) should be critical-patch-only without major upgrade issues
LS: Debian OS, not Ubuntu.
And I'm sure their out on the matter is the fact that I had to add their repository, so they can dictate whatever dumb rules they want (in their feral brain), so caveat empty and shit like that.
The apt system is powerful enough from them to convert someone's old configuration files over to a new format, if they gave a damn about the folks using their crap. Too much work? Well, the work put into such a thing pales in comparison to the number of people they likely fucked with their updates, and the work *those* guys had to do to unfuck their systems.
All of this said, I've learned way more about Icinga than I ever expected or wanted.
It might be entertaining to start contributing code to them, to the point that you become indispensible, then fix all the ways they're nasty to their users. Starting with the abortion of a GUI they call 'Director'.
The real reason why Solaris (and AIX, HP/UX) will be phased out soon is that you do not get any skilled nerds to support it anymore.
Reason no 1 for this: Computers have become too easy in general. I recently moved a hard drive with win10 on it from a broken pc into a far newer one (two generations at least) and it just fucking booted and the os simply worked! This was pure luck, I accidentally booted the machine. Originally I intended to install on a fresh M2 disk and copy over the data from the old hd.
Reason no 2: Solaris upped the cost for support when Larry laid his dirty fingers on it. So the universities in germany quit using it. This means, students never get in touch with solaris today.
Reason no 3: MS shoved its OS up the asses of universities, so every computer pool room now is rather Windows instead of Linux. When I started studying in 2001, there were two exceptional pool rooms with windows, for the architecture students and people needing MS compatible software.
Also, when I started studying, people were actually interested in Linux as an alternative. When I finished studying last year (don't ask, just don't ask) almost every CS student used windows laptops. A few used Macs. Maybe one out of 50 had a linux installed.
So people having studied CS that leave the university today have grown up in a MS world where computers are so easy, almost nobody is able to trace and fix non-trivial problems. Hell, they barely can attach to and leave a screen session. They probably would need to be hospitalized when they see someone using a screen inside a screen...
Oh and yes, the big northern german car manufacturer where I work at the moment is phasing out Solaris, too. Our Oracle (11g...) DBs are still on Solaris and we are afraid of moving it to linux based virtualization. Our application servers are moved to kvm machines early next year.
The main reason is that the one knowledgeable person will retire at the end of next year. After that, there will be no one left that has in-depth knowledge of Solaris.
AIX and HPUX is long gone.
And of course, our new linux servers will probably be too small for the application we are supporting. But the new vm's were created with a one-size fits all approach...
Reading through the backlog: OpenRC is hot shit in my opinion. It did all the things the other init replacements tried to (fast boot, parallelization, etc.) and that before system was even conceived. And it still does. I am using it on my gentoo installs with joy. It feels natural, it can be called like old init scripts, etc. One of the reasons why I love gentoo.
The real reason why Solaris (and AIX, HP/UX) will be phased out soon is that you do not get any skilled nerds to support it anymore.
Reason no 1 for this: Computers have become too easy in general. I recently moved a hard drive with win10 on it from a broken pc into a far newer one (two generations at least) and it just fucking booted and the os simply worked! This was pure luck, I accidentally booted the machine. Originally I intended to install on a fresh M2 disk and copy over the data from the old hd.
To a certain extent ... perhaps. But as I have been pointing out in other forums ... Windows successfully defended its desktop hegemony against the challenge from Linux but has utterly fallen to the assault everywhere else. Windows 10 is probably already the second most widely deployed client-side Linux distribution now (second to Android of course). As previously noted, it works really well, and you basically get the best of both worlds without having to run a virtual machine.
Solaris hasn't been viable as a client-side operating system for the last 20 years. In a university setting in the 1990's you might have been lucky to have access to a Sun workstation, but more likely the computer pool room was full of dumb terminals connected to a single Sun machine. (I wasn't that lucky ... I studied in Pennsylvania so we only had access to Unisys technology: the descendents of Burroughs and Sperry host systems.)
It seems to me that the reason Solaris and other proprietary unices are becoming extinct is the most simple reason: no one wants to purchase and maintain the expensive computers they run on ... plus those computers don't virtualize on anything other than themselves. Sun was tepid on x86 even before they became part of Oracle. And once customers go x86, they inevitably go Linux, where the pool of available ISV software plus the pool of available open source software is gigantic.
A more real-world description of what the_mgt is seeing: understandably, no one wants to deploy on a platform that doesn't have a talent pool to support it, and universities aren't anxious to teach platforms that aren't being deployed in the real world (except for LISP, they just can't let go of fucking LISP).
last 20 years. In a university setting in the 1990's you might have
been lucky to have access to a Sun workstation, but more likely the
computer pool room was full of dumb terminals connected to a single
Sun machine. (I wasn't that lucky ... I studied in Pennsylvania so
In the case of my university, it was dumb X-terminals connected to a small number (1 or 2 or 3?) of Alpha machines. And a random Linux box or two on the side. All connected to an NFS server.
anything delivered by apt-get in an ubuntu default config ("universe"
possibly excepted?) should be critical-patch-only without major upgrade
issues
I've recently experienced the adventure of living through a major Debian upgrade from an upstream developer's point of view. They went to OpenSSL 1.1, which breaks all of the deprecated API's from OpenSSL 1.0. These folks do a lot of hard work. I only had to make some upstream changes. These folks have to do hundreds, or even thousands, of packages.
Not sure where I'm going with this other than that it's a lot of work and it's impressive, even with its faults.
Heh... nobody mentions FreeBSD, although it still seems to have a following. My home firewall uses that OS, for example.
Solaris... I have a VM with the OS on it because I wanted to figure out how to port our product to it, but couldn't quite get the code to compile properly.
I feel like it forces you to jump through innumerable hoops of despair to do the most trivial things on it because of its frankly bizarre (to my untrained eye) folder scheme where you need to know the names of various vendors to do anything... or so it appears to me.
It feels like you have to bash your brains against the thing to learn all the arbitrary details that help you twist your noodle cock-eyed in just the right way to accomplish all the tasks you'd want on the thing. After mastering the OS, and achieving Solaris-nirvana, you become rewarded with the realization that nobody cares anymore, and everyone else is promoting fucking Ubuntu or some shit.
Fucking Ubuntu is, incidentally, not a great idea. Firstly, it reproduces on its own without fucking. Secondly, it isn't warm and cuddly... no OS is.
So... the next time you're tempted, try to avoid it. Grab a wife or husband or some warm body with all the parts you like, and fuck that instead.
I agree about the upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.x That was an amazing accomplishment, for how smoothly it went.
The general consensus seems to be that Solaris and SPARC are, for all practical purposes, on the chopping block. Thousands of Oracle employees have been laid off (including a member of my wife's family, from whom I heard the news) , and the vast majority of them seem to be in the Solaris and SPARC product lines. They have support obligations that extend out to 2034, but they've canceled all plans for Solaris 12, instead offering something they call "Solaris 11.next" which is basically Solaris 11 with rolling release updates.
As noted elsewhere, I'm a fan of rolling releases, but that model doesn't pair well with software vendors who need to sell major upgrades at big-ticket prices.
Oracle is, I think, a company in trouble. There will always be a need for high-end databases, but not enough to sustain Oracle as an industry titan. It's common news by now that customers like Salesforce are moving away from Oracle, and people running smaller workloads are preferring MariaDB or even Microsoft SQL Server.
I don't see Oracle going out of business, though. They'll pass into that same underworld with companies like Unisys and Xerox (IBM is heading there too) where they're still huge, but no one really knows what they do, and 100% of the employees are suicidally miserable.