Bill
Yes I have heard this but have not experienced
it myself, For the most part it seems that Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux support
is a bit better than Red Hat's support, but there are stories there too. I think
the Linux companies that are into Enterprise class OS's are feeling some of the
pain of supporting larger organizations, hopefully they will learn and provide
better support.
Rich
Richard A Sharpe
(DBA) Sqlserver/DB2
Amherst Technologies
40 Continental Blvd
Merrimack, NH 03054
PHONE .......(603) 579-6180 / (800)
431-8031
Cell phone ..(603) 320-7785
FAX ...........(603)
578-1072
EMAIL [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Tenemos que tener fe" ("We must have
faith")
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill McGonigle
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 2:29 AM
To: GNHLUG Discussion
Subject: RedHat/Other Support?I'm wondering if anybody has had good luck with Redhat's support department.
I've run a RedHat box for ten years but have never needed to call support. Since I've been buying RedHat Enterprise for my clients I figured when I had an up2date problem I'd call the support department, after all I paid for it.
They told me they don't support anything but a clean install of RedHat Enterprise on a machine. Despite this being an upgrade-specific problem they were nice enough to offer that if I wiped my disk and reinstalled they'd be happy to help me. I know that all my customers coming to RHEL are coming for the updates, as an upgrade, so this seems pretty unwise.
[In case anyone else runs into up2date trying to register the pre-upgrade version's channel, it turns out the installer is very bad about erasing old versions of packages. 'rpm --query redhat-release' and get rid of the old release tag then reregister. You can then run up2date and 'rpm --erase' any old versions of the packages it complains about in its dependency check.]
Anyway I complained that there's no documentation that upgrades aren't supported before buying and they write back, "I have been told that a warning will be posted in the Migration FAQ by the end of the week."
So, I finally get up2date working without their help and then I find out that they've dropped support for 1394 devices, which this customer uses for backup. You have to load the kernel-unsupported package to get the 1394 module and at that point Redhat won't talk to you about it either.
So, I've been selling RedHat on the basis that you're getting updates and support for the license fee, and customers have been willing, but it seems like I've been wasting their money. At this point I'm not sure why you'd want to use RedHat over Whitebox or a stable version of Fedora Core. It's not that my customers or I aren't willing to pay for good support, it just seems RedHat doesn't offer that.
Is anybody shocked by this story? Have you had better luck with other distros' vendors?
-Bill----Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668[EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Text: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
