Today, a not so surprising news showed up in my RSS feeds. It’s from PCA, an update tool I use for Solaris (because the tools from Sun are useless).
Attention: The patch policy has silently been changed by Oracle quite severely. The new strategy, which is also documented in Software Update Entitlement Policy for Solaris, enforces the requirement of a support contract to download any patch.
Unlike before, even security patches are not available for free anymore.
Recently I got a new job as a sysadmin in a company running Solaris 10 servers. I’m not really used to this OS, so I’ve ordered some books and read a ton of articles about it. As always, it’s quite a challenge to switch from one OS to another; you have to learn its way of doing things, its admin tools, its legacy…
Solaris 10 feels particularly old compared to modern Linux distros like Fedora or enterprise-class Linux distros like CentOS/RHEL, but there are also a couple of very cool technologies included. This blog post is probably the first of a series dedicated to Linux -> Solaris migrations, and how we can learn things from Solaris to improve Linux.