>> While I am sure that star is technically a fine utility, the problem is that
>> it is effectively an unsupported product.
>From this viewpoint, you may call most of Solaris "unsupported".
From the perspective of the business, the contract with Sun provides that
support.
>> If our customers find a bug in their backup that is caused by a failure in a
>> Sun supplied utility, then they have a legal course of action. The
>> >>customer's system administrators are covered because they were using tools
>> provided by the vendor. The wrath of the customer would be upon >>Sun, not
>> the supplier (us) or the supplier's technical lead (me).
>Do you really believe that Sun will help such a customer?
>There are many bugs in Solaris (I remember e.g. some showstopper
>bugs in the multimedia area) that are not fixed although they are known
>since a very long time (more than a year).
>There is a bug in ACL handling in Sun's tar (reported by me in 2004 or even
>before) that is not fixed. As a result in many cases ACLs are not restored.
If Sun don't fix a critical bug that is affecting the availability of
server that is under support, then it becomes a problem for the legal
department. In the ACL example, it's possible the effected users didn't have a
support contract.
>Note that bugs in star are fixed much faster and looking back at the 28 years
>of history with star, I know of not a single bug that took more than 3 months
>to get a fix. Typically, bugs are fixed withing less than a week - many bugs
>even within a few hours. This is a support quality that Sun does not offer.
Possibly, but there is no guarantee that it will be fixed, no-one to call when
there is a problem, no-one to escalate the problem to if it is ignored, and no
company to sue if it all goes wrong.
>So please explain us where you see a problem with star......
Hopefully my above comments explain sufficiently. It's not a technical issue
with star, it's a business issue. The rules there are very different and not
based on merit (this is also why many companies prefer running their mission
critical apps on Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of CentOS, even though
technically they are almost identical).
JR
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