Sun Microsystems Inc.
The Computing Service has a single, large maintenance contract with Sun for the whole University and its related institutions. Maintenance bought through this contract gains a bulk discount in addition to the academic discount.
For financial details of signing up to this deal, please contact
the CS Sales
Group at
sales@ucs.cam.ac.uk.
Furthermore, the CS funds an EduSoft licence. As a result any Sun (except those in admin.cam.ac.uk) is entitled to licence the Sun compiler suite and some other software at no additional charge.
Sun makes its recommended patches and security patches freely available and Unix Support mirrors these locally for ease of access. You do not need to have maintenance on your system to access or to apply these patches. (You do need maintenance on a system to access or to install the other patches.)
See the pages on Keeping A Sun Up To Date for details of accessing and applying these patches.
Unix Support makes available copies of all the operating system, documentation and compiler CDs together with any CDs copackaged with the above. Currently these are exported by NFS to the entire university, although *.admin.cam.ac.uk are not covered by our licence.
It is not possible to perform a network installation or upgrade of the operating system without some extra infrastructure (called "Jumpstart"). If you need to install or upgrade you can borrow the CDs from us or take the ISO images and write your own copies of the CDs. If you need to borrow the CDs please e-mail us for these. We can leave the CDs for you to be collected at the CS Reception.
Application software (including the compilers) and individual operating system packages can be installed over the network from the NFS server. See the pages on Installing a System Package and Installing the Sun Compilers for technical details on installing this software.