RedHat/Other Support?

[Bill McGonigle]

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: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
bill at bfccomputing.com           Cell: 603.252.2606
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Text: bill+text at bfccomputing.com
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