[rescue] Need Build Help

[Stephen Conley]

Solaris 10 is actually still used by a number of enterprises, for
better or worse.  Haven't seen anything older than Solaris 10 in
awhile.  Sort of looking for least common denominator.

We'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for a shell account we'll be
using a couple times a month maybe :)  We have an auto-builder that
downloads the code and does the build ... I suppose a trojan's
possible, but it would be a lot of work to be a jerk to a small number
of machines.  We'd know exactly who was responsible for it, so sort of
a high risk to low reward ratio IMO.

I've been on the list for a long time, even if I'm not an active
poster (though I've given out a few freebies, including an AIX machine
that I could never get to work), and it seems like this isn't a
breeding ground for evil folks so I would take most folks here at
their word.  Call me naive / foolish / dumb if you like :D

Solaris I'm really less worried about -- various posters are right,
you can get a Solaris machine really cheaply and I'm personally
qualified to run a Solaris machine.  However, they're also common, and
I figured someone here must have one kicking around that they wouldn't
mind.

AIX is more of an issue.  The machines are more expensive and nobody
here really knows anything about it -- I had a massively hard time
getting a POWER5+ machine to work in the past (to the point where I up
and gave up), so I'd rather use someone else's if it were available.

The problem is also, we're not expecting to make any money off these
ports.  Our software has a free version, and it's someone who wants to
use the free version that wants the ports.  Just to be completely
honest here, if we were going to make money off this, we'd buy the
machines -- but for a startup, it's kind of a big outlay.

But if there's no takers, there's no takers.  Can't hurt to ask, right?



Thanks guys,

Steve


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 9:40 AM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
>>> Sorry if this is the wrong forum to ask for this :)  But I'm the CTO
>>> of a small company, and we have a need to build some C++ on Sun
>>> Solaris SPARC and AIX.
>
>>> We're targeting Solaris 10 and AIX 6.1 on POWER if possible.
>
> Does "Sun Solaris" even _exist_ any longer?  (Well, I'm sure the blobs
> of bits still exist somewhere.  But I don't know the licensing; it may
> be you'd have to buy right-to-run Oracle Solaris in order to be allowed
> to run it.)
>
>>> The expense of purchasing hardware just to build is kind of steep,
>>> so I was wondering if anyone out there might volunteer their
>>> machine?
>
> Well, at least you're being honest. :-/  While you're at it, do you
> perchance want to volunteer to pay me to do nothing in particular?
>
> Personally, I'd suggest emulation.  IIRC there are pretty good SPARC
> emulators out there; it would surprise me if there weren't good POWER
> emulators too.
>
>>> We'd be willing to pay some fee for continued access as well ...
>>> it's not so much that we don't want to pay, it's more we don't want
>>> to pay several hundred bucks for a couple machines and then have to
>>> set them up and maintain them just for this.
>
> Well, what's building this code worth to the company?  With a
> volunteer's build machine you'll get volunteer-quality sysadmin and a
> volunteer-quality SLA, don't forget.  (With the right volunteer, the
> sysadmin can be better than paying someone, but you can't count on
> that.  And even if it _is_ good it generally will be distinctly second
> to the rest of the volunteer's life, including paying work - that's
> where the SLA comes in.)
>
> And to what extent can you trust the result?  This would be a perfect
> opportunity to trojan the resulting binaries, after all.
>
> No, I'm not volunteering.  To get me to run a binary-only OS on my own
> hardware, you'd have to pay me more than it would cost you to run it
> yourself.
>
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