[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[pechter@gmail.com (William Pechter)]

Brad Spencer wrote:
> Nevin Liber <nevin at eviloverlord.com> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
>> The release was (or was supposed to be, and I remember it as) "SunOS 4.1.3
>> u1" because we were told on no uncertain terms that there would be no
>> release called "SunOS 4.1.4" but it was OK to send out an update release
>> rolling up patches previously sent. I was *never* told why, which only made
>> me (and my management chain) push harder. There were enough changes to
>> warrant U1, U2, and U3 releases; I know U1 went out the door, and I know
>> that U3 was ready for release when I departed, I don't recall whether U2
>> made it out the door or not. I do not recall the method we used to triage
>> the changes into three releases.
> [snip]
>
> A small addition..  there was a 4.1.4, a.k.a. Solaris 1.1.2 [I think]
> that made it out the door [Google around for references].  I remember
> having the cd and installing it.  I also remember 4.1.3_U1, but not U2
> or U3, but I wouldn't be suprised that they existed.  I was at AT&T at
> the time and the group I was in resisted going to Solaris 2.x for as
> long as we could.  We were mostly interested in desktop and small server
> stuff, so SMP need not apply and Solaris 2.x where x <= 4 was painful.
> I remember the Sparc 5 Model 170 with SunOS 4.x which ran, for us, just
> as well as the Ultra 1.  Fun times....

I was keeping a group at Lucent running on some creaky Sparcstation2's
used as the department servers (we probably had the worst collection of
hardware in Lucent, but it was paid for and fully depreciated...) I had
to do the Y2k patches on the boxes and the corporate types were pushing
us to do weekly updates.  Patches dribbled out over a couple of months
requiring repeated passes over the hardware in a maintenance window.  Ugh.

I wrote a patch script and update cd and tape and applied the tar to all
the Sun machines the night before y2k -- avoiding the repeated patching
they (corporate IT) were requiring.  Of course most departments just
dumped the old hardware and  updated to  non-antiques.
The windows boxes were another nightmare.

After doing all of this I heard from an AT&T Manager that Lucent had a
product update tape they sold to AT&T that did all
the Y2k patches for one of their Sparcstation2 products.  Too bad this
wasn't available in-house.

Anyone archive the y2k patches for SunOS 4.1.3_U1 and 4.1.4.  I lost my
fixes in a move and I'd like to bring a couple of the
Sparcstations up again for fun.  I really liked that OS and hated
patching the libc for the resolver+ fixes. 

I think the main patches were for the date command, ms macros and some
stuff like diag reporting.  Realistically the Unix boxes
were the easiest to deal with.  Most y2k stuff was in application
programs.  If I still have the Sparc2 booting in 2038 it will be
interesting.

Bill