We have two new kits available for beta testing by interested parties:

1. A 64-bit Solaris 10 kit (should also work on Solaris 9) using Sun's LDAP library. This makes it a lot easier to use LDAP over SSL. You could enable SSL with the old kits, but you had to register your certificates in an unusual way instead of the cert8.db method that is standard on Solaris. This kit will NOT work on Solaris 8 as it requires the LDAP library that comes with Solaris 9 and 10 (it may be possible to copy that library to a Solaris 8 system, but that may not be legal so we have not tried). A separate "legacy" kit is available for Solaris 8, but it will not support LDAP over SSL as the Solaris 8 LDAP library does not support SSL. These two kits will replace the previous "generic" Solaris kit that did not provide the functionality our Solaris 9-10 customers wanted.

2. A VMS kit with LDAP support based on the 7.3 library (should work on 8.x but will only use 7.x functionality, no SSL as far as I could tell).

I also wonder how much interest there would be for Solaris/x86 support. Many years ago, we added support for Solaris/x86 after a convincing pitch from Sun and some customers, and the sales reports looked good until we realized that almost every x86 sale was a SPARC sale incorrectly booked as x86 ;-) Sales reps had hard evidence that most of these customers had asked for x86, but then tried to install on a SPARC, perhaps because they changed their mind about which server to use. Since actual x86 sales were low and the booking errors were a problem for all parties involved, we just discontinued Solaris/x86 support. Several SPARC customers commented (back then) that while Solaris/x86 sounded good on paper, in practice it was not as stable as the SPARC version and it was cheaper to buy a SPARC than to pay someone to fix problems on x86. But my understanding is that it is now the same code, and I have seen comments on Sun's sites about people who successfully migrated huge databases from a big SPARC server (a model "available from $241,490") to a single x86 server. I tend to believe these comments given the large percentage of negative user comments on Sun's site ;-) I don't think Sun are censoring the comment function, and I also don't see how they would benefit from entering bogus comments about successful migrations from $250k servers to $25k servers. Maybe I should test it by entering a comment about my happiness with the recent purchase of a V215 with a RAID and 2 drives, and the time I spent (so far for nothing) trying to figure out how I am supposed to mirror the drives even if I were willing to lose all my data, which of course I am not. It seems that I will need to buy an overpriced Sun-brand DVD I otherwise have no need for and some kind of local backup unit, so that I can boot off the DVD, save everything, create the mirror and lose all my data (which can only be done from a booted system, provided it did not boot of the disk you want to mirror), recreate and restore the system, reboot, and pray.

Anyway, there is a cost for every new system we support, and for Solaris/x86 there is the additional cost of order booking confusion, but if there is enough interest, we will provide it. You can reply to me privately if you prefer.

  Eric