The Sun Download Manager is evil

Well, following my rather unimpressed first attempt to download Open Solaris I registered a second account and this time it worked, go figure, there must be a “annoy MySQL ex employees feature there”.

The Sun Download manager kicks off with an Open .jnlp with Java Web Start (Screen 1), ok, whatever. You then get a SSL warning and well whatever as well (seems weird) (Screen 2), then the Download Manager kicks of downloads in this case 2.3GB (Screen 3).

So next day, I’m looking for the iso, can’t find in my ~/Downloads, and infact a search across my entire home directory does not find the .iso What the. You are telling me after all this I still don’t have the iso file.

Long story short, it’s been saved in the ‘root’ home directory i.e. ‘/’. Holy crap how can you do that, and any idiot knows you don’t put files there. The Options page, which you can get to after downloads (Screen 4) allows you to change the download directory, but the damage is already done. Scratching ones head to work out how without password access this was possible, you have to read the fine print as highlighted on screen 3. “Click Trust to use this application and allow it unrestricted access to your computer”. Well that’s just evil. Sun is now an evil company in my books.

Post note. So I move my files from ‘/’ obviously, and I don’t need ‘root’ permissions, just my normal user. This is really, really messed up.

macmarvin:~ rbradfor$ cd /
macmarvin:/ rbradfor$ ls -l
total 7616021
...
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root      wheel           1 Mar 13 10:27 net
drwxr-xr-x   6 rbradfor  staff         204 Nov 29 22:10 opt
drwxr-xr-x@  6 root      wheel         204 Oct 26 02:04 private
drwxr-xr-x@ 66 root      wheel        2244 Mar  5 19:38 sbin
-rw-r--r--   1 rbradfor  admin         341 Mar 26 02:55 sol-nv-b79b-md5sum-dvd-x86.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 rbradfor  admin  3878092800 Mar 26 13:12 sol-nv-b79b-x86-dvd.iso
-rw-r--r--   1 rbradfor  admin      205408 Mar 26 19:40 sol-nv-b79b-x86-dvd.iso.sdm




Tagged with: Sun

Why using production workloads over simulated workloads is critical

AI-Assisted SQL Tuning Last week in his keynote speech at Percona Live Bay Area 2026 , Andy Pavlo presented Databases: The Final Boss of Agents and provided some useful insights into query optimization of simulated workloads leveraging AI.

Improving your MySQL Security Posture Presentation

At the MySQL BR Conference 2025 I had the opportunity to speak about Improving Your MySQL Security Posture. You can find a copy of my slides on my Presentations , and a Portugese (Brazil) translation.

MySQL and Heatwave Summit Presentation

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the MySQL and Heatwave Summit in San Francisco. I discussed the impact of the new MySQL 8.0 default caching_sha2_password authentication, replacing the mysql_native_password authentication that was the default for approximately 20 of the 30 years that MySQL has existed.