Friday, September 20, 2019

Solaris 10: Extended Support to 2024

Solaris 10: Extended Support to 2024

Solaris 10: Introduction

Oracle Solaris 10 has been an amazing OS update, including ground breaking features like Zones (Solaris Containers), ZFS, Services, Dynamic Tracing (against live production operating systems without impact), and Logical Domains. These features have been emulated by the market (imitation is the finest form of flattery!)

Solaris 10: End of Life

As with all good things, they must come to an end. Sun Microsystems was purchased by Oracle and eventually, the greatest OS known to the industry needed to be updated. Oracle set a retirement date of January 2021. Oracle had indicated an uplift in support costs would be needed, for Solaris 10 systems.

Solaris 10: Extended Support to 2024

No migration tools were ever provided by Oracle to facilitate migration from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11, so migration to Solaris has been slow. Oracle had decided in September 2019 that Extended Support for Solaris 10, without additional financial penalty, would be delayed to 2024!

Saturday, September 7, 2019

Creating an SFTP Server

Creating an SFTP Server

Abstract

In the early days of the internet, the file transfer mode of choice was FTP. This had remained the internet standard for many years, until the need for encryption  had become so prevalent. SFTP happens to be one option for delivering files.

Example

A good reference on creating an SFTP server can be see on this web site. This is not isolated to Linux, but can be used under SVR4 & POSIX systems like Solaris, or other Open Sourced based operating systems based upon OpenSolaris or Illumos.

Caveats

Usually if SFTP is all that is desired to be granted, one should not allow standard TTY based logins. One option is to set up a shell using the "nologin" binary. A quick reference on using "nologin" vs other binaries like "false". In early UNIX days, "sync" was sometimes used!