A tremendously useful site for Solaris/OpenSolaris/Solaris 11 operators, users and developers have been bugs.opensolaris.org. I don't know how many problems I have solved by using this site and I am sad to report that it has now been down for a well over a month. Now even I have given up hope that Oracle will restore the service, all information available is the message on the site: "This service is temporarily unavailable.". It no longer seems like a temporary outage and I would not be surprised if Oracle have cut this source of information too and is trying to do it quietly without any announcement. If that is not the case I love to be proven wrong.
This is another change that will make it harder for me to promote future Solaris releases and write about interesting technical details.
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Let's be honest here... we all know Oracle doesn't like to release information ahead of the schedule and we also know that the bug database has been historically used to document new features, right?
What you've done here is of immense help to people trying to understand the Solaris direction since Oracle doesn't help much in the small technical details (eg. will driver 'x' support device 'y' soon?)... but that is essentially giving people the information that Oracle doesn't want to, at least not until the product is released.
So I guess the problem is not so much that bugs per se are gone (they're not, if you go to MOS and get any article with a bug report and tweak the URL you can see them)... but that you won't be able to derive that information.
Sorry if I'm being too direct here but I'm asssuming the "future features in Solaris 11" have drawn a lot of deserved attention and they won't be possible anymore I guess.
It is sad. I too had to convert 8 servers from Solaris to Red Hat Linux this week, after running on Solaris 10 a decade and a half.
But, new stuff can be fun too. Though I didn't want to convert, I do find booting, installing, and other common tasks are faster and easier than ever using Linux.
Not completely convinced yet, I might end up saying "I should of converted a long time ago".
I agree with you.
My day to day work became much more harder.
I don't know as for you, but for me MOS isn't really good alternative since in most cases there is no detailed description, stacks and history.Yes, its understood that Oracle would like make money. But I couldn't understand how exclusive access to bug database and source will help Oracle make money?
If you have Oracle server you must buy support contrast to access patches. I think this is sufficient cause to have support contract.
Public bug database will even reduce number of support requests and so reduce costs for Oracle.
I hope that bugs.opensolaris.org will be available in one form or another.
You're more than welcome to promote OpenIndiana and Illumos, and we'll happily share our future plans with you and the wider community.
Our bug databases are also publicly available.
If you don't like what Oracle is doing, there are alternatives that don't involve penguins. :-)
I noticed it was down ages ago as well. I threw the question out to the opensolaris group on irc and the general thought seemed to be that it wouldn't be coming back.
I always thought this was a great resource for finding solutions and workarounds to problems.
If you have a support contract with Oracle all this information is available at the support.oracle.com site.
I think a better solution would have been to have a filter that removed all bugs filed against builds not publicly available, or tagged against projects that they did not want public.
But I guess I'm stuck in the old OpenSolaris mindset, Solaris is now again closed source so I guess no one without a support identifier have any have any reason to file or search for bugs.
But it will make my life harder with this blog, even if I don't write about unreleased features it is not possible to link against bugs of interest.
I know that Solaris 11 will be a excellent operating systems, in several areas it has little or no competition (observability, storage and scalability for example) but there are problems for a wide acceptance of Solaris 11 outside the larger enterprises with all information tied to support contracts. illumos and OpenIndiana are very promising projects but they still needs wider acceptance and they will be lagging features from Solaris 11 for a while. I hope illumos will gain more engineers so that the code base will not stall feature wise in the long run.
Im for all free ON alternatives to Solaris 11, especially when it comes to ZFS storage.
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