Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

194 points by wassenaar10 3 years ago | 210 comments

I was born in the late 90s so by the time I got involved in technology, my introduction to Unix and Unix-flavored systems was limited to Linux and MacOS. However, I've read about the history of Unix at Bell Labs, the BSD systems derived from research Unix, and the eventual commercial releases of Unix System V from AT&T themselves. I also see that HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris are apparently still maintained and get releases, which suggests that they are still being used in production in some places.

I'm curious if anyone here currently works (or has very recently worked) somewhere where proprietary Unix is still used for production. If so, can you tell me what they're used for and why those deployments haven't been moved to an appropriate Linux distribution?

Not suggesting Linux is necessarily better for all use cases, just wondering what keeps these small number of entities clinging to closed-source Unix with presumably pricey license costs.

PreInternet01 3 years ago |

Yup. SCO OpenServer 5.0.something, for some partner's accounting department. Neither the OS nor the application software have been updated since the late 1990s, but if it works, it works, I guess... (to be honest: the application software is only used to run reports in response to requests from the legal department, but apparently still can't be shut down -- I ask once a year, next upcoming 'query date' in my agenda is March 2023).

This used to run on a Compaq Proliant server (huge noisy Intel 486 tower) until the end of the millennium or so, then was converted into a VM. First on VMware, then on Hyper-V, where it has been running comfortably on various hardware (Intel Dell PowerEdge, AMD SuperServer) since.

Access is the biggest issue, as the OS only supports telnet, and serial access. So ever since this has been converted to a VM, it runs on a dedicated VLAN (666, just to make sure nobody ever misunderstands the true evil underneath...), with an AD-authenticating-HTTPS-to-Telnet bridge (coded up in Visual Basic.NET using some long-long-deprecated libraries) connecting it to the outside world.

That VB.NET kludge was recently upgraded to .NET 6, in order to get TLS 1.2 support. This was surprisingly uneventful, and I'm pretty sure this abomination gets to live another decade or so.

Ah, yes, a career in IT... Always on the forefront of cutting-edge tech...

(Later edit to, like, actually answer the question: licensing costs are nonexistent: SCO is gone anyway, and we don't require any support/updates. Migrating to Linux might be an option, but is most likely going to be hugely painful, and the existing VM scenario Just Works for everyone involved. Security and such is not a real issue: only a handful of internal users have highly-restricted access via a proxy)

kkielhofner 3 years ago | |

This takes me back! This was roughly 25 years ago so I’ll do my best to remember.

My first job in high school was at a company with the entire business running on SCO Unix. I want to say OpenServer 3, maybe? It was essentially a terminal server with dozens of Wyse 60 terminals attached.

Anyway, as a Linux enthusiast I promptly setup a RedHat 7 install on some old hardware they had lying around. IIRC correctly it was a low-end Pentium but it could handle a PCI 100mbit ethernet card just fine.

Anyway, the goal was to get data to/from the SCO system to something with a TCP/IP stack (RedHat machine) so it could go somewhere - samba shares on the rapidly growing ethernet network, maybe even the internet!

We ended up using UUCP over serial, scripting, and cron jobs to push/pull from directories on each side. The RedHat machine was promptly connected to a 56k modem to do dial on demand and IP masquerading for the ethernet network and uploads of specifically formatted files from the SCO system via FTP to vendors and partners.

Fun times!

jolmg 3 years ago | |

> Access is the biggest issue, as the OS only supports telnet, and serial access.

OpenSSH works on it. This page has links to precompiled packages:

https://scosales.com/knowledge-base/how-to-install-ssh-for-s...

links:

ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/openssh-3.4p1-VOLS.tar

ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/prngd-0.9.23-VOLS.tar

ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/zlib-1.1.4-VOLS.tar

Probably better to grab the sources and compile them yourself if you can, though.

> Migrating to Linux might be an option, but is most likely going to be hugely painful.

Probably. At least it sounds like you only have a few users for it, so getting them to adapt to a change of software might be easier.

silverwasthere 3 years ago | | |

Maintaining access to a 20 year old ssh server will not be trivial. A modern client would usually fail to agree on encryption protocols in my experience.

dcminter 3 years ago | |

Will it all blow up in 2038? Do you have a plan (to kill it, upgrade it, or retire) if so? :)

PreInternet01 3 years ago | | |

That is an excellent question, one I should investigate using a VM clone one of these days. The accounting data is frozen in time, so it should not be affected, but if the system starts refusing logons or just crashing, that would not be great (and I'm pretty sure the SCO licensing management thingy would fall over, as that was a previous source of, eh, entertainment).

The plan is definitely to retire the system Real Soon Now, but with the subjects of the underlying data springing new generations with new lawyers, ensuring some kind of Y2K38 compliance might be wise...

justsomehnguy 3 years ago | |

> with an AD-authenticating-HTTPS-to-Telnet bridge

Apache Guacamole supports AD auth and (surprisingly) telnet.

zozbot234 3 years ago | |

Looks like OpenServer 5 is still being marketed by UnXis/Xinuos, so you might be on the hook for any ongoing licensing costs. They released the latest update in 2018.

bitwize 3 years ago | |

Hey, you took the tools you had and combined them into something new to solve a problem. That's literally what technology is, even if it isn't sexy.

agumonkey 3 years ago | |

That's an interesting account of evolutionary biology.

SirLJ 3 years ago | |

Wow, I had the same setup with Compaq Proliant in another galaxy long time ago...

mgarfias 3 years ago | |

Man, that brings back memories. When I kept a tile store/distributor running on SCO with their whack ass Keymark darabase.

Good times

29athrowaway 3 years ago | |

Why?

PreInternet01 3 years ago | | |

Fair question, although the basic answer should be obvious: the users still need access to the data! So, the question becomes more like "why not upgrade", or more specifically "why not migrate the data to something that is not so shockingly obsolete", since it's probably clear that there is no real upgrade path here (both SCO and the vendor of the accounting system are long gone).

Usually with systems of this vintage, "just dump all the data to Excel or PDF and get it over with" is a good option, but in this case both the volume (with the requirement to run queries on it) and the limited options available for export (the system can only print predefined reports, and they don't contain everything required for filtering) prohibit that.

So, next stop would usually be "reverse engineer the application data format and convert it", but the unholy collection of binary files used by the accounting software here has defied analysis: it's not Btrieve or MS-ISAM (popular semi-database formats for COBOL and BASIC apps of the time), and decompiling the binaries only yielded some generated-by-another-set-of-tools braindamage that didn't clarify anything either.

The choice then became spending huge amounts of money, or wallpapering over the tirefire and keeping it running. Unsurprisingly, the outcome was the latter, which is perfectly OK in this case, as the system is not exactly load-bearing, and actually sort of fun to maintain.

rolenthedeep 3 years ago |

I used to work for Sherwin-Williams. The in-store computers run some custom *nix OS. The software that company runs on is a text based ui that hasn't changed since it was introduced in the 90s.

They released a major update in 2020 that allowed you to move windows around the screen. It was groundbreaking.

But let me tell you, this system was absolutely terrible. All the machines were full x86 desktops with no hard drive, they netbooted from the manager's computer. Why not a thin client? A mystery.

The system stored a local cache of the database, which is only superficially useful. The cache is always several days, weeks, or months out of date, depending on what data you need. Most functions require querying the database hosted at corporate HQ in Cleveland. That link is up about 90% of the time, and when it's down, every store in the country is crippled.

It crashed frequently and is fundamentally incapable of concurrent access: if an order is open on the mixing station, you cannot access that order to bill the customer, and you can't access their account at all. Frequently, the system loses track of which records are open, requiring the manager manually override the DB lock just to bill an order.

If a store has been operating for more than a couple of years, the DB gets bloated or fragmented or something, and the entire system slows to a crawl. It takes minutes to open an order.

Which is all to say it's a bad system that cannot support their current scale of business.

jl6 3 years ago |

AIX on POWER hardware, because it runs SAP, and between IBM and SAP they provide all-encompassing certification and support. Swapping out the OS would invalidate those assurances. Yes, modern SAP runs on Linux. Yes, it would be a good idea to migrate off AIX. But the system has been in place for 20 years and it will be another 5 years at least before that migration happens.

There’s a bunch of enterprisey technology that is not yet dead, but dying very slowly.

grandiego 3 years ago | |

I have a client (banking sector) which "recently" (5 years ago) started with AIX since they already had POWER systems running IBM i (i.e. modern AS/400), and had to select a Unix for a new vendor's EFT system; it was reasonable to use the (almost) same hardware and provider.

Another similar client is using Solaris (Sparc) for an analogous application; they are using it since 1996, I think because Sun (Oracle) always provided an easy migration path, so the applications didn't need to be ported.

As in most medium/big enterprises, in both cases the hardware/software price is not the main decision driver, but (IMO) it is the support/SLA, compliance checklists, and overall risk management.

BTW, in these cases Linux is also used for more "internet oriented" applications.

Tor3 3 years ago | |

Here as well. Because of a customer using AIX, though it'll be phased out (as planned - they went with IBM/AIX because IBM could give them up to 20 years of guaranteed support and maintenance). In the not-so-far past there were also customers with all the well-known *nix platforms, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, but that was some years ago. AIX is still alive though. Definitely not a bad Unix, and it has some unique features for large scale systems. IBM added a lot of Linux compatibility to AIX over the years, after all they were one of the earlier supporters of Linux. Which means it's relatively easy to develop and test on Linux before moving to the main AIX system.

newman314 3 years ago | |

AIX on POWER here too but planning to move to Linux on POWER everywhere as part of the P10 refresh cycle.

HANA is already Linux on POWER so it will be nice not to have the AIX/SUSE split once we fully migrate over.

We tend to run pretty up to date config wise so it's helped quite a bit while planning upgrades. Only AIX 7.3 and SLES 15 SP3. Already moved from P7 => P8 => P9.

not_the_fda 3 years ago |

This is running Solaris.

https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/solutions/radiation-o...

Last I heard they were desperately trying to get it on Linux. Why it isn't is because its a huge legacy application with some very horrible hacks specific to the OS.

favorited 3 years ago | |

The last time I got an MRI, the control room had one of those iconic purple SGI O2 workstations on the desk. I guess they were pretty popular with medical imaging products.

seized 3 years ago | | |

Lots of MRIs and Cats still run Unix as well, even new ones. If it ain't broke etc etc, plus as a medical device it's a whole separate set of rules, testing, validation.

raverbashing 3 years ago | | |

Yes, because SGI could do the "3D stuff" before PCs

azalemeth 3 years ago | | |

Indeed. Irix on an sgi o2 was the standard recon box until about 2005.

iancmceachern 3 years ago | | |

Yeah, Cyberknife ran on them too.

Stranger43 3 years ago |

Active HP-UX admin here.

the software being run is SAP R3/Oracle and there is plans to replace it, but that is not happening anytime soon due to the usual delays associated with ERP migrations.

License cost is a red herring here especially when dealing with enterprise applications from the likes of like SAP, Oracle and IBM, heck were probably paying as much for our SAP on SUSE subscriptions as we do for our HPUX licenses, and the real license costs is with the applications and databases.

And it's not that long ago(say 2014) that there were niches where the only real cost effective way to get enough single box io performance was to bye an non x68 box that came with it's own unix, so there is a lot of systems out there where the hardware aren't actually old enough for an 1:1 migration to make commercial sense and rewrites/redesigns of ERP software is risky with most projects overrun both the time and budgets by an order of magnitude, if they don't outright fail to deliver an new system.

bluedino 3 years ago | |

When we ran HP systems it was because they had PickBasic

csixty4 3 years ago | | |

Same! Refrigerator sized HP 9000's running HP/UX and Pick.

KMag 3 years ago | |

Itanium or PA-RISC?

Stranger43 3 years ago | | |

Itanium blades.

mhd 3 years ago |

It's rather hard to get rid of some old CAD systems in the automobile industry. I was part of a bigger migration almost 20 years ago, when a rather big org moved from CATIA V4, basically running on all the Unices, to the new V5 version, which also ran quite well on Windows. I know that some SGI systems still had a slight advantage when there was a lot of stuff loaded (unified memory?), but they were on their last days.

Or so they thought. Now it looks like most of the engineers moved on to the slate green pastures of Wintel, but occasionally an old format or workflow tends to pop up. I know of some software still being updated for those old V4 machines 5 years ago, but I've been out of the loop since.

Same software is used in aerospace, too. Where you're not switching to totally new models as fast, so I wonder how legacy-laden their software infrastructure is. "Who here knows both French and early 00 SGI admin?"

spc476 3 years ago |

My last job (I left in October) still uses Solaris on the SPARC-64 architecture. It was selected because the customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, required NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) compliance (it wouldn't surprise me if it's Federally mandated) and SPARC had said support. The hardware reminds me of a freight train---slow to start, slow to stop, but once going, it keeps going and can handle a frightening amount of load. But all of the development is done on Linux and Mac OS---we just stick to POSIX and it all works out.

bb88 3 years ago |

> I also see that HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris are apparently still maintained and get releases, which suggests that they are still being used in production in some places.

When I worked for $(LargeDefenseContractor) we used Solaris for a defense system we were developing. Over time the older units (based on older hardware) would be passed down to the national guard. I would not be surprised if Solaris was still being used in obscure places in the military.

Solaris 7 was a pretty awesome OS as I recall, but pretty soon Intel and AMD started supporting linux as a workable OS option for their server chips. Then linux on the cloud took off and the rest is history.

bsagdiyev 3 years ago | |

Dated info (2001/2002?) but there was Solaris use at the NSA around that time too. Seems like the military and associated organs like to use it.

fffrantz 3 years ago |

Yep, still running Solaris 11 on a Sun server for SDH/SONET network management. I mean it fits the bill, since both technologies are now ancient.

I can't say bad things about the whole Sun/Solaris combo though. It's rock solid and requires practically no maintenance whatsoever.

Also, since it's completely off the internet, it's not like it could be compromised in any way.

spydum 3 years ago | |

Yeah internal networks never get breached /s

qwezxcrty 3 years ago |

I'm working with (although rather superficially) a ASML PAS5500 KrF DUV stepper. Its control workstation is based on some kind of unix (I guess Solaris).

The stepper is a tool that is too expensive to retire, and if routinely maintained, can remain operational and happily expose wafers for more than twenty years[1]. No surprise to see it contains some ancient (by consumer electronics standards) software.

[1] https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2021/three-decades-of-p...

Also, I used a HP 86142B optical spectrum analyzer last year, which runs HPUX.

pieterr 3 years ago | |

Solaris indeed. More recent scanner products use Linux.

lamontcg 3 years ago |

I worked at Chef Software up until last year and we maintained binary distributions of the software (including ruby and lots of lower level libraries) that were built on Solaris, AIX and Windows in addition to Ubuntu, RHEL and FreeBSD.

Most customers were on Ubuntu/RHEL/Windows. There was very little on FreeBSD, AIX or Solaris. We had zero interest for HP-UX, I think that is dead enough to be ignoreable. Banks and financial services have a tendency towards AIX, while Solaris I think was primarily one customer that had a lot of legacy. AIX and Windows were the biggest pain in the ass, but every time we tried to kill support for it, people discovered sizable contracts that had been signed with us (yeah, our tracking in salesforce was bad).

My background is that I learned C and Unix on a Tandy 6000 back in 1989/1990, then in college used and worked on a wide variety of O/Sen (Dynix, BSD4.3, Digital Unix 4.0, SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.4+, Irix 5.x/6.x (i think), something that ran on a VAX, NetBSD and later Linux). I ported NMAP to a bunch of those and did the original GNU autoconf work on it. I've been mostly Linux since 2001 (Amazon from 2001-2006).

divbzero 3 years ago | |

Is AIX functionally superior for banks and financial services? Or is it a matter of legacy software requiring AIX?

lamontcg 3 years ago | | |

I can't really answer that, but my general impression is that they actually like it and it isn't just legacy (or at least some of them).

mootzville 3 years ago |

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

You are kind of combining two things though: legacy systems, and proprietary systems.

There are modern proprietary systems as well. RHEL is a good example.

I'd argue it's not a "small number of entities" though. You'd be shocked by what legacy systems are running in the most important places on the planet...maybe scared. Unfortunately/Fortunately, nuclear facilities aren't running Linux Kernel 6.X

The fact is, a lot (probably most) problems solved with a computer don't need further updates. As long as the hardware continues to function, all is well.

Something you may have not considered is that when the time does come, and the hardware does fail, I'd guess most organizations will opt -- and even go out of their way -- to source those same legacy components they had before to keep things running exactly the same instead of upgrading to a more modern solution.

I've had to do this a number of times for clients. Not long ago, I had to source an old mainboard for a system that was 20+ years old...in doing so I did realize there is some good money to be made if you can source parts for systems about 20 years in the past because the board was like $300 (this was 2017, and the board had a 33mhz processor and like 8MB RAM)

If you don't have to touch these systems, count yourself lucky.

If you do touch these systems, thank you for your service.\

In regards to the modern proprietary systems, there are many, but if you consider RHEL for instance, there is a lot of value for large organizations. They can reduce the number on on-hand personnel whom probably would be less efficient at solving an OS issue than a RHEL engineer. As an example, the Federal Reserve runs modern RHEL...but I'd guess if you dig deep, they have some really old stuff too...

jraph 3 years ago | |

> There are modern proprietary systems as well. RHEL is a good example.

RHEL is free software, isn't it?

(it's just that if you decide to fully use the rights given by the licenses, bye bye support and updates from Red Hat IIRC)

mootzville 3 years ago | | |

RHEL is not free, but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world. RHEL is open source, yet it is also proprietary. Yes, if you wanted to build from source you can, for free, but you get no access to the repos or service and you have to strip out all references to Red Hat (trademark / copyright infringement) if you want to use it commercially. So, ya if you want to use it at home or to learn, it's free.

flas9sd 3 years ago |

Last I used a Xerox digital printing press I was greeted with a "SunOS" version string when opening a shell - being some version of a Solaris. It wasn't much impressed by my linux cli-fu. Looking at current brochures those still ship with it. Product is called "Freeflow Print Server" that GUI for the job queue looked java based as it also has Windows incarnations. It will do the raster imaging before printing. Good times

anyfoo 3 years ago | |

90s to early 2000s, it was "fun" to accidentally use "killall" on the wrong machine. System V derived UNIXes really mean "kill all", not what Linux meant with it ("kill all with a certain name"), and what today is better represented by "pkill" anyway.

jle17 3 years ago | | |

Also reboot, which is safe on Linux, but does an instant power cycle with no proper shutdown on others.

humanistbot 3 years ago |

I'd argue Mac OS X is proprietary UNIX, but I'll admit to that being a bit pedantic.

pavlov 3 years ago | |

In the spirit of pedantry, I’ll point out it’s actually called macOS these days.

The ‘X’ and capitalization went away when they finally bumped the version number to 11.

agsnu 3 years ago | | |

Actually, it was changed to macOS in 2016 for 10.12 Sierra, to align the branding across Apple's various platforms (iOS/macOS/tvOS/watchOS).

Bondi_Blue 3 years ago | |

It's definitely partially proprietary, and it is definitely a Unix operating system.

yokoprime 3 years ago | |

It's certified, so I would say it counts as proprietary Unix

mrweasel 3 years ago | | |

Interestingly enough Solaris isn't certified.

At a previous employer we would run a large number of Oracle installations on Solaris, on Oracle hardware (SPARC64). I don't think that uncommon.

nibbleshifter 3 years ago |

I occasionally work with a bunch of 'em. AIX, Solaris/SunOS, HP-UX, SCO, and a couple of others at various customers sites.

They usually are just running some closed source service that is too expensive/impractical to replace, and aren't causing enough pain and suffering to anyone so there is no business case for replacing them.

I like having them around. Sure, projects could be created to replace them with some modern webshit on Linux, but it would probably run into the tens of millions of euros, take years, and work less reliably than the shit that's been chugging along just fine for longer than I've worked in tech.

icedchai 3 years ago |

The last "proprietary Unix" I worked with was AIX, way back in 2006. And that was only because their primary customer was an AIX shop. The code itself would actually run on Linux.

Previous to that (late 90's, early 2000's) it was mainly Solaris. One place was fairly heterogeneous, and had Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix (aka OSF/1, Tru64), and a couple others.

anyfoo 3 years ago | |

I think that last bit might have been somewhat common at the time. I had a small job as one of the unix-y guys at a software company dealing with a very similar collection of OSs. In their case, it was simply because the software they made ran on a lot of popular (and some not so popular) OSes, so the boxes running them (and, in most cases, building the software) had to be there.

bstpierre 3 years ago | |

As an intern in the mid 90s I babysat a similar mix. We also had some older SunOS boxes and some Irix, but mostly Solaris. I remember the HP as being the worst to work with of the bunch - for whatever reason if one of the tests was going to be broken it was on the HP.

piyh 3 years ago | |

We had AIX at my last job in 2021 and it was the least actively terrible part of our tech stack.

nibbleshifter 3 years ago | | |

There is genuinely nothing wrong with a lot of the old stuff, in many cases its simply better than the latest and greatest React/Mongo/Whatever webshit stack that modern devs seem to emit.

BrandoElFollito 3 years ago |

Yes, mostly IBM's AIX and a few ... ah the name escapes me now ... the top notch graphical design workstations of the time.

The reason are maintenance contracts for very long-term systems that never upgrade (they are ultimately completely replaced by something else).

They are similar to that old bulb in a fire station[1]: it is strictly forbidden to breathe when around these systems, if you sneeze you are fired on the spot :)

We had to move them twice between data centers. I had some popcorn with me when they were powered off, transported as if it was Mona Lisa and then restarted with the sysadmins not watching and asking for the flashing numbers. Good memories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

proaralyst 3 years ago | |

Silicon graphics workstations?

BrandoElFollito 3 years ago | | |

Exactly - thanks for reminding me !

NikolaNovak 3 years ago |

I work in Enterprise resource planning (erp) space. Mostly peoplesoft. I'm around things like sap, jd edwards, oracle ebusiness / hcm cloud, rtc.

Proprietary Unixes are frequent and have probably made up 75% of my career including current massive project. Note these are modern and up to date, usually purchased brand new for implementation project hardware and software, not inherited legacy stuff (which seems to set me apart from most respondents here)

Several reasons but note I have very bottoms up perspective.

1. Support. I think this is the major thing. Having a reliable long term vendor with pricey well written steady support model is important to companies who use erp.

2. Related is perception and reality of stability. Aix on power is as proprietary as it gets. These things get rebooted once or twice a decade. Hardware upgrade to another frame is live migration through firmware. It is not fancy or pretty but God dammit baby it works. Perception is there too - that Linux scales well out but not up, that it's vendor support is not at same level, that it moves too fast and breaks things, etc.

3. Deals and contracts. There may be legacy hardware footprint or client may get package deal with application middleware database and hardware.

My personal perspective? Proprietary Unix is ahead on internals, behind on shiny,boring and reliable. There's a lot to be said for distributed cheap boxes over proprietary big boxes. But I don't think modern SREs fully grok how much I never had to deal with hardware or OS issue or outage on these things. Anecdata sample size =1 + gossip, but it's just a very different mindset and, here's the trick, there's nothing inherently wrong with that mindset, even if it's not currently in vogue.

I prefer to work with Linux for a few reasons, including shiny and resume-helpful, but honestly, from business / management perspective, a grouchy experienced aix sysadmin on Power stack makes my job a lot easier.

Edit / p.s. Again these are modern os'es and support Gui and tunnelling.... But I don't think anybody ever uses them. The application stack running on top is certainly modern and gui/Web, but installing and supporting OS, database, middleware and apps is all cli, very obscure, very efficient, very powerful.

jle17 3 years ago |

Towards 2014 or 2015 my previous work (some hosting company) had some AIX, Solaris and SCO, as well as some IBM i (aka OS 400) which isn't a Unix. AFAIK they were used because of choices of slow-moving/risk-averse big corps, mostly to run some java software or oracle/postgres/sybase databases that could just as well run on Linux.

My take on each of the OSes was:

AIX and the associated IBM stuff is kind of a mess. I encountered a bug where /etc/filesystems (fstab equivalent) was parsed differently during boot than when using the mount command manually. The focus seemed to be on the use of the menu-driven smit utility as the primary admin tool, with automation of admin tasks an afterthought. The builtin commands are often not very practical, requiring multiple steps to do things that you're used to do in one on Linux. Installing some open-source tools is essential to sanity. Some of IBM's own tools are using expect on their own software (looking at you lpar_netboot).

SCO is clearly unmaintained stuff that looks like it dates from 30 years ago. At least it's simple to use.

Solaris had some nice features, like Zones or ZFS, but much to my dismay I couldn't play with them as I was made to install an old version of the OS as the newer version wasn't listed as supported by the version of Sybase that was to be installed on it.

spc476 3 years ago | |

The thing I loved about AIX is SMIT (System Managment Interface Tool). Available both from the command line and GUI, you could completely manage the AIX system from it, but at any point, you could also have it print out what commands it was going to run (yes, it built a shell script as you navigated through the system). I've never seen a system like it anywhere else.

laurentoget 3 years ago | | |

i had totally forgotten about smit - good times

roywashere 3 years ago |

In around 2004 I worked for a big five company. They were using some AIX, Solaris and HP-UX next to Linux which was still seen as that new thing. I remember having a training on some software where HP UX workstations where wheeled in. But those were really getting old at that point.

I worked at an ISP in 2007 which was running mostly on Sun hardware and Solaris. This was because of huge discounts provided by Sun. Most devs ran Linux on their workstations. In 2014 I got to work with some guy whose previous project had been at that ISP, who was at that point desperately trying to move off Solaris because they had to start paying list price for the OS and it was much too expensive.

orangesite 3 years ago |

Not since 2002. Irix, HP/UX, Solaris.

Correction: It has been pointed out to me that I'm currently using macOS which, Darwin non-withstanding, is technically a proprietary UNIX.

hestefisk 3 years ago |

Heaps! My main clients use AIX on Power for most database workloads (DB2). I had a client that used HPUX for everything (SAP). One could Telnet into their core accounting system from the corporate network.

hrrsn 3 years ago |

I work at a telco. We have many museum-grade Unices in production, mostly AIX and Solaris - we even have a Wang still running in one of our datacenters. It's largely a case of there isn't a business case to migrate it to modern hardware - one day we'll no longer operate a legacy copper PSTN network, but until that day comes, we still need it all. We still have maintenance contracts on some hardware, like our Sun Fires. It's very clear that replacement parts are scavenged from whatever they can find second hand.

I recently rewrote the system we use to push user accounts and passwords to systems that don't support LDAP. It was amusing to write an app using a current-day stack on RHEL 8 that purely exists to handle these very legacy systems.

One of my favourite systems I've had to work on is running Solaris 2.5.1. Users are added to the program by editing the source code and recompiling it. How times have changed.

nibbleshifter 3 years ago | |

I love when we get telcos as customers for security assessments, because it means I get to see what weird old shit they have on their networks.

I find the sysadmins at telcos come in three flavours: the ones who will work with me to secure their cool old shit, the ones who want to get rid of it, and the ones who have fucking meltdowns if I consider to touch their weird old shit.

What's neat is the weird old shit usually gets support forever, whereas support for modern shit tends to be short.

eb0la 3 years ago | | |

I worker for a telcon for 15 years. When I left, the company was starting to add load to a new undersea cable.

Turns out most of the wet plant (a fancy way to say something is submerged under the water) were HP/UX systems.

Submarine cables must last for 20 years minimum to be financially viable... So in 2035 they will still running.

cwillu 3 years ago | | |

Replacing something that has worked for 25 years is a good way to end up with something that doesn't last another 25 years.

zinekeller 3 years ago | |

That makes sense, paying for maintenance would be cheaper than rewriting everything then dumping it out five years (or even 10 years) later. Just make sure that everything can be pulled out before 2038 or else you'll need to rewrite everything.

hrrsn 3 years ago | | |

It's most definitely already on it's way out - but it's a slow process :) Most of the switching hardware is significantly older than I am!

umeshunni 3 years ago | |

Who does the maintenance? Sun/Oracle or some third party?

mepian 3 years ago |

Allied Irish Banks is still using Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX at the same time, according to a job posting I've seen.

mandevil 3 years ago |

Until last year I worked for a financial services company which was so big it's owner ran for President. While I was there, they were doing a major project to move key, irreplaceable core components off of big iron Solaris and AIX machines, and onto Linux on private clouds or commodity machines. Hell, I even worked a (tiny) portion of the project. It might be finished by now? Maybe?

readonthegoapp 3 years ago |

Haven't used any non-Linux stuff in forever, but i have generally fond memories of working on SGI (perl and c/cgi/nsapi at weather channel), Solaris (oracle db and java web apps at riaa), and SCO (java/servlets -- and javascript/netscape/livewire -- at startup confluence software, not atlassian), aix at small energy company, etc. -- the shit was just all over the place.

and it was kind of great. kept things interesting, at a minimum.

once linux and red hat starting gaining real traction in industry, i felt like losing all these high-priced unix distributions was kind of... lame.

i always had this idea, for instance, that working on/with Solaris -- i was driving this high performance _machine_ that was capable of doing almost anything, as long as i was up to the task - the Mercedes of OSs.

losing all those -- i would kind of compare it to how the English language - like the Linux OS - is taking over the world. at the same time that is happening, either as a direct result or something less than that, we're losing all these other languages. ditto biodiversity loss. ditto city gentrification / sameness / sterility. it feels wrong / unhealthy.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-languag...

what i'm saying is i miss the days of BeOS. :)

csours 3 years ago |

I've used AIX, HP-UX, OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) and RHEL. Probably some other distros. We use it because there's a support contract and that sort of thinking is surprisingly durable. Also because it costs money to migrate.

Nursie 3 years ago |

Last time I got near any sort of proprietary unix was probably AIX at IBM. It is still actively developed for their p-series POWER servers. But that was probably 7 years ago now.

Back in the 00s it was common to have to work on multiple proprietary platforms. I did a lot of platform engineering work for one product that ran across Solaris (Sparc and x86), AIX (POWER), HPUX (PA-RISC and Itanium), Linux (x86 and System Z) and Windows.

Now ... if I'm lucky I don't have to care about the platform at all, I just write lambdas in my language of choice and throw them at AWS. It's a very different world!

pushedx 3 years ago |

In 2010-2011 I worked for (major American semiconductor firm), which had some test and validation teams on Sparc workstations running Solaris, and some design, test, and validation teams on Windows workstations with remote desktop clients for virtualized RedHat.

There was a common set of cshell based tools used between those two environments, among other 90s style Unix tools, like software written againt the SunOS Open Look widgets, and tools written in Tcl/Tk.

I wonder if those machines are still in use!

stcroixx 3 years ago |

I worked on a system deployed on AIX for a few years. We used it to distribute batch workloads in parallel across a cluster of machines - no other software and OS did such a thing, maybe still doesn't. The machines themselves were PowerPC RS6000's which only ran AIX. The company already had a close relationship with IBM because they'd been running mainframes for decades. They made tons of money so saving money on licence costs was not important.

kjs3 3 years ago |

We have a number of financial services apps running on Solaris. The cost of the licenses and hardware is insignificant compared to the cost of porting those apps to something else. You'll find that as the reason most folks stay on these platforms.

We also apparently still have some AIX, but I'm not sure what it supports. AIX is still somewhat popular in financial services; probably others as well.

I know of a couple large HP/UX shops left.

Kon-Peki 3 years ago | |

> The cost of the licenses and hardware is insignificant compared to the cost of porting those apps to something else

That’s an understatement!

Earlier this year I helped our final Solaris SPARC customer move over to X86/Linux. Every year for the last 5+ years they’ve asked us to extend support for just one more year; they were almost done with the migration! In the end, we had to compile them a few pieces of software with weird configurations because they took the standard AWS Linux and, well, I have no idea what on earth they did to it.

not2b 3 years ago |

I work in electronic design automation. When I started, Solaris on Sparcs was dominant and we supported a number of Unix flavors, but all that died long ago, Linux killed it off. The Solaris port was the last to die, and we were very happy when it went so we no longer had to support their crappy proprietary C++ compiler that, at the time, still was missing important C++98 features.

tiffanyh 3 years ago |

Isn’t https://oxide.computer/ continuing development of SmartOS (which is based on OpenSolaris)

znpy 3 years ago | |

Yes, and it’s unix, but it’s not proprietary.

sayrer 3 years ago |

Usually it's because there's a database license or something that costs even more than the OS. No one wants to be there, but it possible to get trapped.

neilv 3 years ago |

I heard that Boeing archived an Apollo Domain network, because some engineering documentation was developed on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain

cf100clunk 3 years ago | |

Former Apollo/Domain sysadmin here, which I became at one company because I was already doing their Unix sysadmin job. I hope Boeing had somebody periodically resetting the system clocks on those, unless that Apollo/Domain bug had finally been patched after the HP takeover:

https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/date-bug

neilv 3 years ago | | |

Hopefully. (I heard this in the early 2000s, from someone who'd worked at Apollo.)

For awhile after then, I could imagine some HP account manager for Boeing being able to pull some strings to get the patch, even if it was from another division. And since HP got DomainOS onto an HP 9000/4xx post-Apollo-acquisition, I'd guess that HP probably retained the code and know-how for awhile.

(Though I couldn't guess how long they kept their Domain lab systems around, especially if there were business reasons to push customers to HP-UX on HP-PA, rather than gouge a handful of people who'd still pay support contracts for Domain. I've seen companies run sustaining engineering labs for a while, but then eventually discard key tooling, like the test rigs for a product, which irreversibly marks the end of that, even if the engineers are still on-staff.)

I wonder whether HPE now has the Apollo/Domain IP, or who has it?

tonto 3 years ago | |

offtopic but didn't know wiki allowed slashes in article titles

tomsmeding 3 years ago | | |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki///

bdavis__ 3 years ago |

How about proprietary "non unix's"?

Anyone running VMS? RSTS/E ? Or on rare hardware, OS-32 on a PE 8/32, or MPX on any SEL 32 family? MPE on Harris ?

Postosuchus 3 years ago | |

Part of our business-critical financial analytics software was running on VAX/VMS, then AlphaVMS decades ago. Written in DEC Pascal (let's just say - not really compatible with any other Pascal dialects I am aware of). We managed to port the whole system to Linux (before Linux became fashionable) by a godawful contraption made of Scheme, Perl, shell and elisp - it "translated" the Pascal code into a dialect understood by p2c, which in turn translated it to C. That was mucho fun!

icedchai 3 years ago | |

I have an AlphaServer in my collection, running OpenVMS. It's been a while since I've booted it up. It's very loud.

bdavis__ 3 years ago | | |

ssh'd to a live alpha server at work last year. there were some files on there I wanted to look at.

the machine has to be at least 20 years old at this point. but it feels fast. bash. find. xargs grep. command line stuff very responsive.

it felt fast back then. i do remember that.

anyfoo 3 years ago | | |

I know the problem. My AS/400e would also get much more powered on time if it wasn't so damn loud.

znpy 3 years ago | |

Unironically this question could deserve its own thread.

FireBeyond 3 years ago |

A lot of the gas industry (wholesale fuel distributors) are still using AIX and OpenVMS. A lot of proprietary integrations, I presume, as well as ties to very very low powered chips and devices (have you seen how slow a gas pump computer is sometimes?)

colechristensen 3 years ago |

In ‘05-10 timeframe we had a selection of Sun machines around the engineering department running various software and were even evaluating new Sun hardware for file servers when ZFS was new.

Later on in eh, 2015 or so I worked at a company providing backup software that was tested and worked with every niche unix hardware under the sun. Usually to support large legacy industrial companies, think defense, materials, etc. who still used the hardware.

Banks will also use these things mostly for legacy reasons. The software got written once and has been working and validated for decades, no reason to rewrite it for a different OS just because.

Price is usually not a major factor when compared to the size of the business and number of employees.

lormayna 3 years ago |

In my very first job experience, at the end of '00, we had a couple of SCO Unix systems that needed to remain active to keep developing software for legacy customers. They were running on Olivetti M24 back from the 80s; it was a nightmare to find spare parts on Ebay when something broke. There was also a couple of x86 workstations running OS2 Warp for other customers. The colleagues told me that the SCO Unix are still there and OS2 workstations were virtualized 3 years ago.

sys_64738 3 years ago |

macOS is the most widely used UNIX on the planet.

__d 3 years ago | |

Well, Android is Linux, does that count as "Unix"? I think there's a lot more Android world-wide than iOS/macOS/iPadOS/watchOS/tvOS/etcOS combined?

athrun 3 years ago | | |

It depends on the definition of UNIX, but typically Linux doesn’t count as UNIX.

You can draw a continuous—if very torturous—line between Bell Labs’ UNIX original codebase and modern macOS/iOS.

pjmlp 3 years ago | | |

No, because the userspace is based on Java and the NDK uses Android specific APIs, only ISO C and ISO C++ standard libraries are officially supported, anything POSIX related is not part of NDK official APIs.

In rooted devices everything goes, on random Android device you application might get killed for trying to access private APIs, meaning anything that isn't documented as official NDK API.

andylynch 3 years ago | | |

Strictly, no - the only vendor whose systems are currently certified to meet the UNIX trademark and Apple (MacOS), IBM, HP, and SCO. And on practice the user interface and APIs are so different it’s much more accurate to say if has some UNIX-like parts, but isn’t UNIX. - ditto the iOS family.

marssaxman 3 years ago | |

Proprietary, isn't it?

sarahdellysse 3 years ago |

Back when I worked at OmniTI (from like 2015 to 2017), we had an in-house Illumos neé Solaris distro for cloud servers named OmniOS. I didn't use it too much myself as it was somewhat legacy but all the other devs who used it for prod debugging loved all the dtrace/zfs stuffs on it.

volkadav 3 years ago | |

LOL, small world. I was at OmniTI from '10-'13; I was around for the transition from Solaris 10 to OmniOS. It was an interesting system and I do wish the rest of the freenix world would learn some of the lessons that could be learned from it. (I guess in fairness they're starting to re: openzfs, ebpf, some of the smarter service management tools, et al.) That was the last time I touched proprietary unix at work, though. Even working at Oracle's AWS competitor later, everything internally was Oracle Enterprise Linux (which is to say, RHEL with the serial numbers filed off).

ilc 3 years ago | |

I wouldn't call that proprietary. It was freely available, and I worked with it for a bit, until switching that project to SmartOS, which is also... not proprietary.

Both were excellent systems to work on in dev and prod.

calvinmorrison 3 years ago | |

Pobox also had a few racks of hardware running Illumos/SmartOS as parts of their older stack. it was a pleasure to use once I wrapped my head around it, which was little enough because it was so reliable.

timc3 3 years ago | |

I use OmniOS - its actually not that rare to use if you want a good ZFS server. I am about to do a fresh install on new hardware of it as well. Its not legacy at all.

jantypas 3 years ago |

Believe it or not, UNIX isn't quite dead yet -- it's just resting. In certain embedded environments, we use things like what was once called BSD/386. WindRiver took a UNIX and worked to make it suitable for real-time requiremewnts.

zeruch 3 years ago |

I started in the industry when you were born, with IRIX, HPUX (horrible) and Solaris. I was on Linux by 97/98 and I haven't seen a *nix system in production use in a workplace that I've been in since about 2010.

shortlived 3 years ago |

Yes - Unix subsystem on z/OS (USS) and thanks to zowe.org there is finally some open source code as well [1] [2]

[1] https://github.com/zowe/zowe-common-c [2] https://github.com/zowe/zss

smm11 3 years ago |

I worked for the DOD, and we used hardened RH servers, accessed through jump boxes/Putty, and Windows machines, and at least one Solaris box, though I never had a handle on what that was for.

brozaman 3 years ago |

Not myself directly, but about 5 years ago I was doing some work for one space agency and there were some Solaris clusters which were older than me.

I’m pretty certain most if not all are still running.

ralphc 3 years ago |

Not lately, at a previous job we worked with Linuxes, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX and Linux on 390 mainframes.

The reason I'm chiming in is to give my advice to those still dealing with these; learn vi, at least enough to edit config files. It's the only editor you can find on all of these, and you often can't install your own software.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3 years ago |

Tangentially related since there has been a lot of talk about working with ancient systems: does anyone working with TXDOT know if they are still using mainframe systems to drive their core database and services? I worked with a quasi governmental agency about a decade ago and became pretty intimately familiar with their mainframe setup. Didn’t look like it was going away anytime soon when I was there.

soitgoes511 3 years ago |

I worked in a semiconductor probe and test group and we had many older Teradynes connected to Sun computers running Solaris.. There were also old mainframes running Solaris (these were slowly being sunset but from my understanding, it was challenging due to many many cronjobs, etc..). We were tasked with keeping all systems up year round, which made any type of migration slow.

garbagecoder 3 years ago |

Not for almost 20 years. HIGP/SOEST used SunOS.

slotrans 3 years ago |

Not since 2012. Company ran on a big Oracle DB on very expensive Solaris machines. They started in 98 or 99 so this was a vaguely defensible choice.

Several times we looked at moving the DB to Linux/x86 but Oracle's pricing made it non-economical, or so I was told. All the app-tier servers (Java) ran Linux.

Haven't used a non-Linux system in production since leaving that company.

laurentoget 3 years ago |

i had a solaris workstation on my desk from 2000 to 2005 and we had an industrial fridge size IBM pseries running AIX to run big linear programming problems on. You could not run linux or BSD on those machines and you could not get close to the performance of those machines with intel CPUs. We also had an itanium HP box for a while, running Digital UNIX.

blacklion 3 years ago |

We've used Solaris on x86_64 for very long, until Oracle effectively shut it down, as it was best platform to run high performance JVM jobs. Much more predictable and observable than on Linux.

But later Oracle shell out JVM/Solaris integration/QA team, and shortly after that discontinued Solaris for new hardware completely.

Linux it is now.

unixhero 3 years ago |

AIX

Luckily it had bash, so it felt like a Linux system for my scripts. There is a Command to enumerate all the hardware running on it, I remember running that command to see what was assigned to the LPAR the Aix instance was running on. It took 3 minutes to run and complete :)

So yeah, a mainframe. Twlco. IBM obviously. It was used as a massive Oracle database.

racingmars 3 years ago | |

> AIX > So yeah, a mainframe.

If it was AIX, it wasn't a mainframe. AIX runs on IBM's POWER systems, which are their "midrange" line. (There was, for a brief time, AIX for S/370 I believe... but that disappeared long ago.)

Mainframe would be a System z (the S/360->S/370->S/390->z/Arch lineage), typically running z/OS (or Linux for z!)

dillab2 3 years ago | | |

Which folks haven't mentioned yet, but z/OS is also a proprietary UNIX, albeit in a very strange way given that it is sorta like a subsystem/different way of looking at the same things, but is also in implemented in the base control program (kernel), so it isn't really a subsystem.

And it isn't the same as AIX. IBM has two alive commercial UNIXs, which is kinda wild.

hxugufjfjf 3 years ago |

I've seen huge AIX installations maintained on contract by IAM at financial institutions.

mrweasel 3 years ago |

Oracle database are still heavily deployed Oracle servers, with SPARC processors, running Solaris. While Oracle database run very well on RedHat, or Oracle Linux, Solaris really is the default platform.

cafard 3 years ago |

A friend has his own computer business, and some of his work involves tending to AIX systems. I don't remember now what his AIX customers use their machines for, but one might have been a biology lab.

lxgr 3 years ago |

IRIX, at my first student job at my university.

Most servers were already Linux/x86 based at the time (2012), but I vividly remember SSHing to that one machine where things felt just... different.

2000UltraDeluxe 3 years ago |

HP Unix over serial terminals in the late 90's and early 00's. A few Solaris environments en the early 10's. After that, just Linux and FreeBSD.

sys_64738 3 years ago |

ORCL HW business increased YoY by 11% in the last earnings release.

semicoln 3 years ago | |

The most shocking thing in this thread

f1shy 3 years ago |

QNX. Technically they are not unices…

dmd 3 years ago |

In my previous job (mid-2010s) I encountered a ton of AIX and Solaris, mostly at very large banks.

rqmedes 3 years ago |

Yep, SCO Unix that hasn't been up dated in forever for a 1990's text based ERP system

danhau 3 years ago |

Yup. HP-UX on Itanium hardware. Legacy software is the reason.

AmericanChopper 3 years ago |

At my work we’ve got a bunch of PlayStations around the office.

johnthescott 3 years ago |

yep, legacy tru64, aix, solaris. big issue is ssh encryption.

matt3210 3 years ago |

I use mac which is a proprietary unix.

TGRush 3 years ago | |

Technially, the Darwin Kernel it uses is OSS

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

EnigmaCurry 3 years ago | | |

Can you actually recompile your kernel on Mac? And its functional?

I'll bet this isn't even the source code Apple uses, but rather they have a private fork with extra patches (similar to how Microsoft publishes OSS VS Code, but then uses their own proprietary version for releases).

brundolf 3 years ago |

Not proprietary, but Oxide Computer uses a niche (open source) Unix called illumos: https://illumos.org/

kjs3 3 years ago | |

Illumos is open source Solaris.

bcantrill 3 years ago | | |

illumos has a Solaris heritage, certainly -- but has evolved quite a bit in the last ~12 years. For details of the history, see my LISA 2011 talk.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

Annatar 3 years ago |

Solaris is used in life-critical environments, like for example medical systems or energetics. Anything that's absolutely life critical and must run for thousands of days without rebooting. And it's really nice for running software because of its advanced features like the runtime linker, zones containerization and fault management architecure features like SMF. It's awesome software on awesome hardware.