[hrrsn]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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