Wandering Thoughts archives

We killed off our SunSolve email contact address yesterday

Back in the days when Sun was Sun, Sun's patch access and support system was imaginatively called Sunsolve. If you had a support contract with Sun (which often was only about the ability to get patches and file bug reports), you had a SunSolve account. We had one, of course (we have been using Solaris for longer than it's been Solaris). In the very beginning we made a classical mistake and had it in the name and email of a specific sysadmin (who then moved on), but in the early days of our Solaris 10 fileservers we switched this to a generic email address, cleverly named sunsolve.

Yesterday, we removed that address.

Our Solaris machines have all been out of commission for a while now, but we left the address in place mostly because of inertia. What pushed me to remove it is the usual reason; we just couldn't get Oracle to stop mailing things to it. I don't think Oracle spammed it (unlike some people), but they did keep sending us information about patch clusters and quarterly updates and this and that, all of which is irrelevant to us these days.

(I managed to get Oracle to mostly knock it off, but the other day they decided that they had an update that was so urgent that they just had to mail it to us. Never mind that we don't have any of the software at issue, that Oracle had our email address was good enough for them.)

At one level this is an unimportant little bit of cleanup that we should have done long ago. With our Solaris machines gone and our grandfathered support contract let run down, the email address had no point; it was just another lingering bit of clutter, and we should get rid of that kind of thing while we remember what it is and why we can remove it.

(If you wait long enough on this sort of thing, you can easily forget whether or not there's some special, inobvious reason that you're keeping these old oddities around. So it's best to strike while everything is fresh in your mind.)

At another level, the sunsolve email address was one of the last lingering traces of what was (after all) a very long association with Sun and Solaris. Just as with other things, letting it go is yet another line drawn under all of that history, even if SunSolve itself stopped existing years ago.

(Oracle decommissioned SunSolve and folded the functionality into their own support system not long after they bought Sun. The conversion was not entirely pleasant for support customers.)

PS: Since I just looked, it warms my heart a little bit that PCA is still trucking along. Oracle may have killed some very useful customer-done things but at least they left PCA alone. If we still had to deal with the mess that is Solaris patches, we'd be very thankful for that.