SNORACLE: Sun and Oracle (soapbox)

I'm going to digress for a minute and get on my soapbox.


Now, when mergers or buyouts happen, you really don't expect much to change initially. When HP acquired Compaq, there wasn't much that changed in the look and feel of the web site. In fact, when you go to Compaq's web site, it still looks like Compaq--not the old compaq, but a new, better-looking compaq. This is what I really expected from the Oracle-Sun buyout: a few months of everything being the same then gradual changes. I quickly realized this was not the case as I increased my work load.

At first, I noticed that all the Sun logos were gone and everything was now "Oracle." Not only did they do this to the web pages, but all the PDFs were re-written to take out any Sun references, up to and including the OS. And the pages were they weren't taken out, everything is owned by Oracle. For example, the PDF on the Sun Blade T6340 (I'm surprised they kept the "Sun" portion) was re-written to say "Oracle's Sun Blade T6340," "Oracle's Solaris 10 Operating System," and "T2 Plus processor from Oracle." This is a minor inconvenience which easily goes unnoticed. But you really start to notice when they remove content that you used to be able to find.

In our industry, we test things like Opensolaris. We have one Opensolaris machine that has difficulty upgrading, so I thought, why not just downloaded the updated CD from Sun? They used to have the Developer's and Community Editions available for download. It took me an hour and discussion with an online "expert" to find out that it was removed. Couldn't it at least have been cached or archived?
Now, my final straw, which has ultimately led me into posting this here, is Sun's ASR. We have acquired more servers and as we get more servers, we haven't acquired any more admins. I don't like having to handle more than I can manage, which is where ASR can come in handy. ASR can make service calls that I don't have to. If the ASR system detects a fault, it can send a service request, a part can be ordered, and we're back and running the next day. Sun was really good about supporting and pushing ASR and they even had a bundle that would help you analyze and set up ASR.

Now, with this new Oracle page (and its search engine), I can no longer find the 'asrassetbundle', nor can I get the version of ASR that worked for me. This new version uses Java 6, of which it doesn't say specifically if it needs the JRE or the JDK. Trial and error found that I needed to download the JDK version 1.6 non-sparcv9 version, but I shouldn't have to go through all that trial and error. Even after I got it running, there are still problems with it, as it tells me it can't communicate with its database!


I'm getting off my soapbox now and getting back to finding out why ASR isn't working properly.