14.10 Apparently Not Supported on Solaris 10

IDS 14.10.FC1 Solaris 10 1/13 I learned something that completely surprised me, today. During the last few days, I installed IDS 14.10.FC1 on a Solaris 10 (Jan/13) platform. It had a prior instance of 12.10 installed, so I was trying an in-place upgrade. At first, 'oninit' failed, and I (too hastily) opened a tech support case. While they were researching the problem, I did some troubleshooting of my own, and concluded that the problem was that a couple of the required libraries were in an insecure directory. Thus, even though on the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, Solaris disregarded those directories, and it oninit lacked some needed libraries. After I figured out what the problem was, I used 'crle' to add the existing directory containing those needed libraries the list of secure directories. Immediately, oninit worked, and the 12.10 databases got automatically (and successfully) converted to 14.10. All appears to be just fine. Meanwhile, I got a response from tech support, and they told me that 14.10 is not supported for Solaris 10, and, if I want support, I need to upgrade to Solaris 11. (That is on our list of stuff we plan to do before our next Solaris renewal, but, still a few months out.) I really was surprised because the machine notes explicitly and specifically state that Solaris 10 IS SUPPORTED. I copied and pasted a quote from the machine notes (Point #3 of System Requirements) into the tech support case running dialog. Their response was that the machine notes were in error, and Solaris 10 is simply not a supported O/S. I had always thought (probably do to this being emphasized in more than one Informix class, back when I took them, and they were given by in-house IBM resources) that the machine notes were the latest, greatest, and most authoritative source for technical, machine-specific Informix teechnical information. So, the machine notes remain what they are; and, I have a (sort of) verbal, voice-on-the-phone that alleges that the machine notes are erroneous. Makes me wonder how to know what is really the technical truth, or from where to get authoritative and accountable technical information for Informix. So far, there doesn't seem to be any problem with 14.10 on Solaris 10. But, tech support has warned us that, if we have any problem in the future, they won't be able to help. Also, I wonder if IBM/HCL similarly supports ONLY the very latest releases of Windows, Linux, etc. I bet there is at least one version behind the latest that is also supported. DG

Hi David, Yes, HCL has updated the requirements for many operating systems and dropped support for some. The most accurate document is: https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27013343 I do not know why the machine notes are not up to date. I believe HCL's reasons are: - some platforms are not very popular and they are not considered worth supporting. - to use modern compilers and more up to date libraries. I think the second reason is sound, the first is a commercial decision for them. I know that on Linux, Informix v12 is compiled on RHEL 5, and v14 on RHEL 7. Without having tested it, it's unlikely v14 will work on RHEL 5 or 6 and it definitely isn't supported. I would /guess/ that on Solaris SPARC, compilation is done on v11 now and it can be made to work on v10. Ben.

So far, we have found 14.10 to work on Solaris 10 with no issues at all (other than ensuring that all the existing libraries are in secure directories). We just had to add two "C" libraries (from the Gnu C compiler at opencsw.org) to the secure list. No failures, glitches, or modifications required, that we can tell. Yet. I did raise the point about the machine notes being in direct contradiction to what tech support was saying. Just for information, here is a copy-and-paste from the machine notes: 3. IBM Informix Database Server is supported to work with and without Zones on Solaris 10. Their response was that they agreed that the machine notes were a problem. Still, there seems to be no problems at all. Of course, you can never "prove" that there is no problem, can you. I mean, all you can say is nothing has gone wrong, yet. But, then, short of provably correct code, that's true of all software, isn't it. (Sidebar: I wondered whatever happened to all that attention and excitement about "provably correct code" a couple decades back. It was quite the rage for about 5 minutes, or so.) Anyway, no problems that we have found using 14.10 on Solaris 10 (1/13-- the last version). DG

Since the bbs doesn't preserve formatting, to avoid ambiguity, I should have put quotes around my copy-and-paste from the machine notes. Here is the quote (in quotation marks): "3. IBM Informix Database Server is supported to work with and without Zones on Solaris 10." (You can see how one might expect that that sentence means that IDS IS supported on Solaris 10.) DG