RedHat/Other Support?

Bruce Dawson jbd at codemeta.com
Fri Sep 17 09:10:01 EDT 2004


Evidently, the Firewire (1394) driver introduces some instability in the
earlier 2.6 kernels (I haven't read anything about the latter kernels).
I'm not surprised Redhat is dropping it, but I thought this would have
shown up earlier in their testing processes.

Try submitting a story on Slashdot - or perhaps Ask Slashdot. I believe
RHEL should be made very uncomfortable that they aren't investigating
their own test results - because their main selling point over "plain
Linux" is their quality!

I would be interested in how SuSE/Novell supports it. Although I really
expect them to do the same thing Redhat is doing and pull the support
(but leave it in the distribution).

You may want to get a "small" system, dedicated to the task of running
the firewire driver, and see what happens. Otherwise, good luck getting
support. (Now, maybe someone will pay attention to the firewire driver.)

Another alternative: You have the source!

--Bruce

On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 02:28, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> 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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