On 08.07.2010 13:00, Erik Trimble wrote: > I *did* like the DEC field circus folks. Watching them swap out > components (well, that didn't work, let's try this one!) was always a > blast...
The response when IBM messed up their OEM-firmware for the adaptec
78xx/79xx chip in their netfinity range (sometime mid 2001) had high
entertainment value as well.
Their OEM team had assumed an MBR disk layout. Our ISP were running
FreeBSD (in the "dangerously dedicated" disk layout), and had ordered
... a three digit number of these servers to upgrade our farm.
Let's just say that IBM flew in the OEM engineers to "sit onsite" to
work out their mess, even if FreeBSD wasn't listed as "supported" on the
Server. They ... didn't like the prospect of their server not being able
to run it (or they didn't like the prospect of us canceling a rather
large contract).
It should be mentioned that some of my love for FreeBSD may be related
to having had several of the core members (including those with access
to the security-officer pgp keys) as colleagues, and the resulting
ability to contact the person responsible for a particular part of the
OS when "stuff doesn't work". That "contact the guy/gal that wrote this
particular line of code" does make life easier when stuff breaks down,
and can in many ways be compared to those support contracts. And the
response times I've seen inside the FreeBSD camp (when they get proper
problem reports, that is), beats a lot of commercial solutions I've
seen. Including those from Sun. I cannot comment on Oracle, because we
never saw them being willing to acknowledge any problems, let alone fix
them. Their attitude at the time made the job a lot easier for the IBM
salespeople. ;)
//Svein
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