Hello Everyone!
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but mrbill passed in August of 2019 after a long fight with cancer. Before his passing, he entrusted me (firestorm_v1) with his electronic accounts for sunhelp.org, sunmanagers.org, his domain registrar, and many other domains along with the physical server hardware that he was hosting them on. I was fortunate to have access to a colocation facility where the server has continued to run pretty much hands-off for almost the last two years. I have already migrated the domains to my registrar account and renewed them for several more years (and will continue to do so).

Unfortunately, life (read: COVID) has been way too busy for me to consider doing anything with the server outside of simply moving it to the colocation facility and ensuring that it remains online. Fortunately, the server has otherwise remained functional and operational and according to the most recent checks of the archives, is still running the mailing lists as if nothing had happened.

Recently, there was an issue with the site that caused the pages not to render properly (although the mailinglists continued to operate) and a deep dive into the system revealed multiple issues that indicated that the underlying software is simply too old to keep running. Fortunately, I just so happen to have a server that’s more than capable of hosting sunhelp, sunmanagers and many other domains that Bill was operating.

It is my intent to move the content, the mailing lists, and the domain over to the new server sometime within the next couple of months. It is also my intent to keep this site and the mailing lists operating as it has been since the site was originally provisioned. I’m not going to change the site in any way, shape, or form, except for those necessary changes to allow me to keep the site up to date (security updates, application updates, etc..). Y’all trusted mrbill to keep the site and lists online, and I’m hoping that y’all can trust me to do the same. I’ll post updates to the site as progress is made, but to avoid bombarding users with non-update updates, I’ll limit posts to the site to once in a seven day period and only if there are significant updates.

Thank you for your patience as we move forward.

FIRESTORM_v1

Courtesy of Khosla Ventures, here’s Sun’s original business plan from 1982.

Oracle has released Solaris 11.4 Open Beta.

Oracle has launched new SPARC M8 based servers.

There are rumors that the SPARC M8 will be the “end of the line” for the SPARC architecture (due to the recent mass layoffs of Solaris software and SPARC hardware developers at Oracle) but these rumors have yet to be confirmed.

“The Sudden Death and Eternal Life of Solaris” is a blog article by Bryan Cantrill with his thoughts on Oracle’s recent staff terminations.

This tweet by Simon Phipps claims that a large portion of Solaris technical staff were let go – as a “Silent EOL” of the product – in the recent Oracle layoffs on Friday, September 1st.

Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to my GoFundMe for kidney cancer treatment and medical expenses.
In six days, we’re just under the half-way point to the goal!

https://www.gofundme.com/misterbill

Donate now: https://www.gofundme.com/misterbill

Almost two months ago, I had an 8-day hospital stay wherein I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes… my body had been eating itself (diabetic ketoacidosis) for a couple of months and my discharge weight indicated I’d lost 100 lbs over the previous two months. I had thought I was just not getting over the flu very well.

The diabetes is (easily) now under control with metformin and diet changes. During the hospital stay, they found out a large mass on my left kidney and spots on my lungs – I have Stage 4 kidney cancer.

3-4 weeks from now, I’ll be having robotic laproscopic surgery to remove that left kidney and tumor, and a few weeks after that, will start immunotherapy to hopefully get rid of the spots in my lungs.

I’m recovered from the ketoacidosis and have most of my strengh and balance back, just in time to deal with this surgery. I’m looking at 4-5 days in the hospital,
then a couple of weeks at home to rest and heal before I go back to my (desk) job.

All of my paid time off and sick leave was used up during that hospital stay, and after insurance, I owe the hospital $4200 (my yearly out of pocket maximum of $5K has been met). Right now the only payment option I can afford is to send them a monthly payment for the next three years.

Work does not offer any short or long-term disability, but they’ve offered to “advance” me next year’s PTO/sick leave for this next hospital stay and being out of work.

However, that’s only three weeks of leave, total – and using all of it up would leave me with no vacation or time off at all for the next year. If there’s complications and I’m out for more than three weeks, I won’t get paid, and won’t be able to pay my bills.

I set the goal at $20K. This covers my existing hospital bill + doctor bills that I haven’t received yet, up to two months of my normal salary amount, and GoFundMe’s overhead/percentage. I’m usually the guy who goes out of his way to help others; I hate having to ask for charity from other people. Any amount you can contribute will help.

Thank you so much. If the goal is met and I don’t end up having to be out of work for long, I’ll use the extra funds to pay for ongoing treatment after the end of the year and to keep my decrepit car on the road so I have reliable transportation.

An article at Phoronix discusses more recent layoffs in Sun/SPARC-related teams at Oracle.

Today would have been Sun’s 35th anniversary as a company.

Larry Wake on Twitter shared this video from 2002 at the 20th Anniversary of Sun.

According to this Ars Technicha article, Oracle is officially cancelling any plans for Solaris 12, instead focusing on what they call “Solaris 11.next”, which is expected to be released in late 2018 and last through 2021.

According to this post at thelayoff.com, Solaris and any future SPARC hardware is being cancelled / discontinued.

According to this Debian Devel-Announce mailing list post, support for the SPARC architecture is being dropped from the Debian linux distribution. Debian SPARC has for years been a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland, and there are notes that it may return as fully 64-bit (both kernel and userland) in the future.

Oracle has released updated documentation covering up to current versions of the SPARC processor.

From this blog post comes the news that Solaris will soon be adopting the OpenBSD “pf” firewall / packet filter in Solaris 11.3, and Oracle hopes to make it the default in Solaris 12. I think this is a good thing, as current IPF in Solaris is ancient, and is what “pf” was designed to replace originally in OpenBSD.