#connections hashtag - TheLayoff.com

To the guy who was talking about the Sun “warts”: Are you suggesting that instead of the “legend” that Sun fanbois are wedded to, instead Sun is, was, and always has been a POS?

Not exactly. As a business that existed in order to make $ they did that well for awhile. However, that was largely based on being in the right place at the right time (internet growth) rather than tech excellence. That's the thing, that someone else just rightly pointed out, that these fans of "the good old days at Sun" absolutely don't understand. And the love for solaris is because for most of these starry-eyed folks, SunOS/Solaris was the first unix OS they learned. That coupled with the lucky timing in the market, make them think solaris was awesome, when in fact it wasn't.

The servers w/ ECC did not come until sometime long after the Cray acquisition. The sun fans also seem to forget that the E10K was not invented at Sun. And sure, sun eventually shipped servers with ECC memory, but not until thousands were on line at customers running with the parity c-ap. Sun had no answer for these irate customers, because the servers were fundamentally flawed. I can't imagine how many brand-new CPU boards we had to give away - I especially recall countless of those trashy "deskside servers", where we would have to swap boards out and eat the cost, not that it did any good - there was no fix for that parity issue. And frankly, I don't give a rat's *** about which architecture was which - none of them were all that great.

Then, as far as SunOS/Solaris "goodness" and the statements I made about mediocre hardware, I remember another example when the web-server market was taking off, where Sun was struggling with TCP/IP connection performance (their IO was always poor relative to competitors). There would be these bake-offs with other vendors where performance was measured using loadrunner. I don't remember the exact TCP/IP spec, but there's one where the stack is supposed to throw an error if the same port # is re-used too soon after a previous request from that server - reason being that you need to allow a time window for re-transmission of packets, and any new request with the old port # risks trampling over data that is being retransmitted somewhere on the net. Anyway, loadrunner was out of spec and would re-use the port #s willy/nilly. Sun, instead of throwing TCP errors would ignore these, because it made their #connections/second look higher. Then, when customers would put these servers into production they would be disappointed because the performance was so bad.

And the "greymarket" argument - as if that was Sun's undoing. BS. Sun's undoing was stubborn refusal to develop scalable x86 iron. That would have been a total differentiator that would have extended Sun's life way past the internet boom, but the execs were too spineless to make that bet-the-company decision, and paid dearly for the blunder.

But again- all this is too ugly for the "fanbois" to stomach. Sun was probably their first job, sparc was probably their first hardware experience, and the company was their first real experience with unix. The artificially fueled growth makes them think that they had something to do with the success, along with their great hardware and software, and their lack of experience with technology keeps them believing that hype even to this day.

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