Oracle exhumes ‘Older, Still Useful Content’ penned by Solaris and SPARC veterans

Posts look to have evaporated along with employee privileges

Oracle has done something a little odd: exhuming ancient blog posts about Solaris and SPARC by former Sun luminaries that have moved on to other things.

The company released one batch in December 2020 when it announced the restoration of 13 articles, dating back to 2006, by former Senior Principal Software Engineer Darryl Gove.

This week the company announced the release of more old articles, in a post with the odd headline “More Older, Still Useful Content Made Available”. The post says the new batch of articles, and the first lot, “got accidentally deleted” when the author left Oracle. The author of the newly exhumed posts is former Oracle Principal Software Engineer James McPherson.

Which sounds like once Oracle staff leave the building and lose logon privileges, anything they’ve left behind in a CMS might be automatically deep-sixed. Which is good for security, but clearly not good for those who need SPARC or Solaris reference material.

And there are probably plenty who need such documents because Oracle gutted its Solaris and SPARC teams in 2017.

The company has pledged to keep the OS alive until the year 2034.

That ongoing support is reflected in the fact that Oracle on Thursday issued a Solaris patch for the Sudo bug identified by Qualys this week.

If your Solaris hassles relate to other issues, Oracle now has 16 old articles online, among them a handy primer on the wonders of endianness and the forgotten 2006 classic “On misaligned memory accesses”. ®