Anyone else been noticing that the volume of posts in the sun related
newsgroups has decreased significantly? Where is everyone getting there
info now? Just seems like 10 years ago there were nearly 10 times as
much traffic then today. (at least based on my experience running
usenet servers back in the day)

Is usenet dying? =p

In article <1106752296.148888.259220@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups .com>,
Rhugga <rhugga@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone else been noticing that the volume of posts in the sun related
> newsgroups has decreased significantly? Where is everyone getting there
> info now? Just seems like 10 years ago there were nearly 10 times as
> much traffic then today. (at least based on my experience running
> usenet servers back in the day)
>
> Is usenet dying? =p

I suspect that there are lots of factors:

Usenet isn't dying, but usage of Usenet for technical discussion is
probably declining. In the early 90s, usenet and mailing lists were
the primary information resource on the Internet for people with
technical queries. These days anyone with half a clue can find much of
what they need to know by googling the web. And a new generation of
net users are growing up using inferior but pointy-clicky /
shallow-learning-curve alternatives to usenet for discussion (such as
web-based discussion forums and instant messenger clients).

The volume of usage of Sun systems overall (in terms of the number of
individual sysadmins and software developers who want to talk
specifically about Sun machines) is probably not what it once was -
much of what used to be the desktop workstation market has headed off
in the direction of Linux-on-commodity-PC-hardware.

Perhaps there is just less in the way of burning issues in the Sun
world that need talking about these days? Ten years ago there were
still a lot of people going through processes like SunOS 4 - > Solaris
2.x transitions who needed advice, there were still people struggling
to keep aging Sun 3 hardware in production who were largely reliant on
community support, there were fundamental shifts going on in the Sun
hardware line up (first UltraSPARC hardware launches were 9 or 10
years ago, I think?). The pace of change doesn't seem so radical these
days. Many of us that have been admining Solaris have been doing it
for quite a while. If you could cope with Solaris 2.6 then the chances
are that you'll have a fair idea of what you're doing most of the time
on Solaris 9.

Perhaps things will liven up somewhat when customer shipments of
Solaris 10 start to happen. People that haven't been trying out betas
will see a bunch of highly visible changes (stuff like GNOME instead
of CDE) and get a bunch of new toys to play with. It helps discussion
if there is actually something to talk about ... :-)

Regards,
--
Neil Hoggarth Departmental Computing Manager
<neil.hoggarth@physiol.ox.ac.uk> Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/ University of Oxford, UK

"Rhugga" <rhugga@yahoo.com> writes:

> Anyone else been noticing that the volume of posts in the sun related
> newsgroups has decreased significantly? Where is everyone getting there
> info now? Just seems like 10 years ago there were nearly 10 times as
> much traffic then today. (at least based on my experience running
> usenet servers back in the day)
>
> Is usenet dying? =p

They've moved on, to Linux or Windows; that's the reason Sun's stock
has been going down the toilet and these groups are much more dead
than they used to be. Dell, IBM, and HP are selling tons of servers
to businesses compared to Sun.

Here's a little example for you of what's wrong with Sun: I just
replaced my old Sparcstation 5 with a Sun Blade 150, purchased new
from Sun. I had an unused 250 gig IDE drive that I installed in it.
Imagine my amazement when I discoverd that my new Sun couldn't work
with this drive because it's using the old IDE interface that can only
handle drives up to 130 gigs or so. You can't even buy a new PC that
uses that old IDE interface; even the cheapest PCs from Dell work with
a 250 gig drive.

Or try getting a server with hardware raid; you can get ones from Dell
for a few grand that do raid 5 in hardware. From Sun you have to
spend so much that for the same amount of money you could instead get
several of the Dell servers. And our Dell servers are rock solid.

It's not usenet, it's Sun.

Yea, I agree, Sun is digging their own grave. I have been a devout Sun
follower for over 10 years but recent decisions regarding Support costs
and now the ridiculous support costs for Solaris 10 have forced us to
migrate everything to SLES 9 on compaq hardware. By Q3 of this year all
systems but our core NFS servers will be running SLES 9 on AMD64 chips.
It sucks, because hands down Sun makes the best gear in the industry,
but polical moves and decisions have made Sun gear too hard to place in
the data center. Between Veritas and Sun (both of which we are no
longer purchasing new products from) we have a bad taste in our mouth
and we finally just asked ourselves, "Why pay more for less?" (and I'm
at a company that isn't really budget crimped either, it basically
boils down to plain principle)

Sun costs more up front. Employees to manage Sun gear cost more. Sun
support costs more. (hell for the price of 4-way AMD64 systems we can
keep entire spare systems online) With SLES 9 you don't need another
100k of buggy veritas software and then pay another yearly cost for
them to fix their own bugs or speak to some level 1 tech that is just
wasting 2 hours of your time.

It doesn't take a Phd from Stanford to determine that your better off
using something else.

I agree totally. I'm in So-Cal, normally a big Sun shop area and have a
lot of colleagues in the same industry that are all also struglling to
move critical systems to Linux. I think a lot of shops were waiting for
the 2.6 kernel to mature and driver support to come full circle but I
think Sun is gonna be very shocked when they look at sales reports 12
months from now. Like most of us here we don't wanna see it play out
like this but we have to do what's best for our companies.

Rhugga wrote:
> Anyone else been noticing that the volume of posts in the sun related
> newsgroups has decreased significantly? Where is everyone getting there
> info now? Just seems like 10 years ago there were nearly 10 times as
> much traffic then today. (at least based on my experience running
> usenet servers back in the day)
>
> Is usenet dying? =p
>

You've been reading the wrong groups. Most activity is in c.u.solaris.
Many moved to e-mail groups - have you checked solaris_x86 at yahoogroups?

Trolls also keep driving people away from usenet.

"Rhugga" <rhugga@yahoo.com> writes:

> Yea, I agree, Sun is digging their own grave. I have been a devout Sun
> follower for over 10 years but recent decisions regarding Support costs
> and now the ridiculous support costs for Solaris 10 have forced us to
> migrate everything to SLES 9 on compaq hardware.

LOL.

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ssbmodel.html

Bye, Dragan

--
Dragan Cvetkovic,

To be or not to be is true. G. Boole No it isn't. L. E. J. Brouwer

!!! Sender/From address is bogus. Use reply-to one !!!

???
$360 PER cpu. Much more than we are currently paying. Much much more.

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Rhugga wrote:

> ???
> $360 PER cpu. Much more than we are currently paying. Much much more.

What are you currently paying, and how does it compare to SUn's
offerings? For example, Sun's "Basic" support is $120/socket.

--
Rich Teer, SCNA, SCSA, author of "Solaris Systems Programming"

President,
Rite Online Inc.

Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638
URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich