Monday, August 20, 2007

Sunsolve needs a makeover

Sunsolve is an excellent resource. I don't have any issues with the content - it's great stuff.

Where I do have problems is with it's reliability and performance. I couldn't get through at all for a while over the weekend, and often have problems with my automated patch scripts - which can time out, report 500 errors, or tell me I'm unauthorized, all at random, and have been that way for a long time.

I even got the following gem off the website just now:


Come on Sun - show us how good your stuff really is by making your own sites work well!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen. This is really starting to annoy me, bad response times, errors every now and then and other various problems. Hopefully Sun will solve this soon.

Anonymous said...

That looks exactly the same as the error message I had today when I tried to download the recommended patch set. Another part that I seem to have constant problems with is the part where you file support cases. Sun really needs to get this in order.

Anonymous said...

Indeed, its happening again now. Sunsolve has had problems for a long time, it seems. Why is it that I can *always* get to the product pages (to buy stuff), but their support site is constantly broken or slow? haha

At least when it does work, its very useful. Hopefully somebody over there sees this and makes this problem a priority!

Anonymous said...

I agree. It's really outrageous that Sun is so atrocious at their own back end servers. It's not just Sunsolve, their internal sales education site is crappy too to pick another example. One part actually syncs usernames weekly towards another part, I kid you not. You make a change in your account and it takes effect one week later in the worst case scenario. I mean, come on.

I still get cranky when I remember entering a support case once; painstakingly entering all the info, cutting and pasting logs, etc etc for at least a quarter of an hour to find all the info... hit submit... and THEN get an error message that you can't currently submit cases on the web. Sheesh. That would have been good to know BEFORE I started, not when I was done.

It reflects badly on the entire company. I mean, how hard can it be to do, really - get a web service up and running reliably?

It's not like the load on the site is CNN-like, or even Windows Update like - and Microsoft seems to manage keeping their hugely loaded patch site up just fine. That Sun can't keep a far less busy site up is just completely unacceptable, really.

systemstate said...

I concur, sir. It's over a year since you posted this, and the same problems still persist with sunsolve.

I also agree that it reflects poorly on the company as a whole- Especially since their business is largely selling the servers and software that they use to run the sunsolve site.

If Sun can't even get it right with the products that they manufacture, how is Joe User going to do better?

Miriam Brace said...

Hi All,

I am the business owner for SunSolve at Sun.

I would like to let you know we are working on the back end systems which provide the patches to Sun including the delivery tool set.

The upgrade to the downloads will firstly address the technology, and the next release after that will address the end to end process. Finding, license agreements and downloads to address many of the reported issues.

Regards

Anonymous said...

Maybe it's about time Sun is acquired by Oracle although I was hoping they get sucked in by Microsoft.