[rescue] Recommended patches for old versions (why)

Kevin Loch kloch at gurunet.net
Thu Feb 6 11:24:08 CST 2003


"Loomis, Rip" wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm all for continuing to run *good* older versions of operating
> systems--but I've never met anyone who actually can defend Solaris
> 2.x where x<5 -- and it's not really until about Solaris 7
> (SunOS 5.7) that there are enough fixes and Good Things to make
> me happy with running it in production.
> 

Don't anyone to think I'm doing this in *production* ROFL.
This is the rescue group right?

Just like I collect old Sun hardware, I collect old Sun software.
Sometimes it's fun to load up an old release just to see what
it was like (or how bad it was in some cases).  For the sake
of completeness, I'd also like the best patches for each release.

Another reason for running old releases could be nostalgic
(i.e. to recreate an old environment or configuration).  I hope
I'm not the only one who does this :)

As for "production" environments, there might still be
more 2.6 instances still in use than all other versions
combined (I think that was true 2 years ago). Sun4 machines
 can only run up to 2.4 (or sunos4 or netbsd...).  2.4 was
actually pretty good.

Here's my foggy memory on the "suitablilty" of early solaris
releases:

2.0 Nope
2.1 Very buggy, many drivers missing
2.2 First viable production release (though still many problems)
2.3 Many improvements, wide-spread adoption
2.4 Solid stable release
2.5 Added features (CDE on supplement disk)
2.5.1 added support for U1
2.6 Performance imporvements, UE support, rock solid reliablilty
probably the most widely deployed release ever.

and so on.

Am I even close?

KL


More information about the rescue mailing list