The Increasing Cost of Red Hat Linux? 767
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a company with a large number of Linux servers in the data center. We're currently evaluating what distribution we want to use moving forward. Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise from 7.2 would cost ~$350k just for the systems we already have deployed. Due to the change in Red Hat's release policy, we either have to move to Enterprise, or change distributions. Also, we don't have Oracle on any of these systems, but we will need it in the future. This leaves us with rather limited options. I'm interested hearing what other Slashdot readers are running, and planning?"
Debian! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
With Debian, you don't get any support (IRC and google don't count when you've got to have a problem solved for your business in seconds. In these situations, "dial a tech-support number" == "support").
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Informative)
Now don't get me wrong, I like Debian, I use it on my personal servers. However I recall then whe last sendmail exploit came out it took a few days for the patch to be released. I tried to inquire when it would be coming out and was rudely told, "We don't comment on such things."
apt-get is a wonderful tool. But until patches are brought out in a more timely fashion I can't in good concience recommend it to any of my clients.
The other issue I've found, but I'll admit haven't put a lot of time into finding the solution for, is having a local mirror. When I build a server, if that server were to die, I want to be able to create the exact same version again of all packages. I have run into the situation with Debian of a package being upgraded and breaking things. Though as I said, this is something which is probably solved by now since I haven't looked into this issue in about 2 years.
Once these issues are resolved, go Debian go! I know we're facing the Redhat issue at the end of the year... upgrade all out RH7.3 machines to 9 by the end of the year... or risk not having security patches. I feel bad for the admin of the local 96 node beowulf. I'm glad I put RH9 on my new cluster....
There, my rant for the day.
Re:Debian! (Score:4, Insightful)
Regarding the security patches, I honestly don't know what problem you have with them: maybe Debian has really improved security support since then, but if you check Debian's page, you'll see that security.debian.org's response time is just as fast as any of the other major distros. There are several bugs for which Debian had a package that fixed the problem first (the SSH bug that required privsep comes to mind).
And honestly, I have NO idea what problem you had where a package broke something badly, unless you were running unstable. In my experience, Debian's packages are FAR less likely to break a system than some random less-0.4.3-mdk3-only-work-on-a-sunday.rpm. The few problems I've had were dumb problems that were immediately obvious (and in fact were stupid user errors, as I forced an upgrade of a package without forcing the upgrade of its neighbors).
I've never been happier since I converted my lab's PCs to all Debian. Yah, it's small, but I have to handle something like 7-10 PCs, and having them all in almost exactly the same state (which is far harder to do in Red Hat than in Debian) is SO nice.
I mean, the main reason Debian stable is farther behind than everyone else is because they take their time. When they mean stable, they really really mean stable - not just stable as in 'won't crash', but stable as in 'will do what it says it does'.
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
I can not STAND people that say "Oh, well, it won't run on anything but Red Hat". Give me a break. The operating system is called Linux, not Red Hat (OK, maybe GNU/Linux). Linux defines the API and the application interfaces (ditto GNUification), and quite simply, everything that runs on Red Hat will run on Debian.
Period. Wackos who tell you "oh, maybe it's a problem with Debian" simply don't understand the way computers work. That's why I can't stand that Oracle won't support anything except Red Hat. That's silly. More than silly. They wrote a program, that works under Linux, not under Red Hat. If it's kernel version dependent, state the kernel versions it was tested under - or better yet, give the source tree! (wow!) If it's library dependent, give the library versions. If it's library dependent, static link the damned thing. There is nothing that runs under Red Hat that can't run under Debian.
You know what someone really needs to do? Write a bunch of scripts that let one distribution 'play' as another one, so you can just reboot and launch as a Red Hat clone, Debian clone, etc. (if you don't need a new kernel version, you don't need to reboot). It can't be that hard. That way when someone asks you what type of Linux you're using, you can say "What type would you like it to be, so I can then prove to you that you're being an arrogant prick and it really IS your problem?"
"distro-mode redhat". That'd be cool.
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Both the host distro and the binary must be of the same architecture and must both be of the same binary format (e.g. two ELF-x86 distributions).
2. The binary may not use any system calls outside those required for the single UNIX spec. (This rules out things like ipchains/ipfilter/ipfw/ipfoo and various other kernel-version-dependent tools). This rule could probably be relaxed a lot before anything would break, but YMMV.
3. The kernel must be patched to fix any known bugs in SUS-compliant syscalls.
With the note that there may be other important directories needed in step 4, the basic procedure should go something like this:
Step 1: Install the distro. /rhbox ; cd /rhbox /usr /lib /bin /sbin /etc /var" | tar -xzf - /rhbox appname
Step 2: Install RedHat onto another machine and configure ssh and networking between the two machines.
Step 3: On the non-RedHat machine: mkdir
Step 4: ssh username@redhathostname.domain.top "tar -czf -
Step 5: alias appname chroot
Different operating system, my ass.
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
However, while Windows application vendors are happy to support every version from 95 to XP, most commercial Linux applications are extremely specific about not only the glibc and kernel (more or less equivalent to the base Windows build) versions they support, they usually tend to refuse to support users under distros other than Red Hat. It's understandable from a revenue-based POV, since Linux as a whole probably consists (even for the most hardcore scientific or engineering app vendors) of less than 10% of their business.
Realistically, though, the effort and cost required to support at least the last few versions of all the major Linux distros (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, etc.) is probably less than the support for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, and XP. It's not a tecnical issue so much as an economic one, but it does negatively affect the natural competition that exists in the Linux distribution market, since any new vendor has to either work towards 100% compatibility with recent versions of Red Hat, (and therefore use RPM, standard SysV init scripts, etc.) or accept an extremely marginal, source-package-only application support model.
Re:And also, (Score:4, Interesting)
Postgres is one of the oldest and best supported dbms around. It doesn't have a couple of features Oracle has, but it is a highly superior product compared to most others in it's class. That's in a business setting anyways. MySQL is easy to use, relatively fast at simple operations. DB2 is nice. Good for big computers with lots of ram. That's my observation, there probably is no rhyme or reason to it. I have lots of ram, and I like DB2. It's just fun! MSSQL sucks rocks. I developed a lot of websites using MSSQL as a backend and just couldn't make it feel right. Oracle is great for big iron.
They say it's good on x86. I say Ellison is full of shit.
Here's my personal dbms preference list:
Business
DB2
Oracle
Postgres
MSSQL
MySQL
Hobby/Pleasure
MySQL
Postgres
DB2
MSSQL
Oracle(unless you are masochistic)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Informative)
We manage consistant, reproducable server installs by NOT using the Debian installer. We install it once, and then make tarballs of the install, which we untar to install the server. We have it all scripted, so we can boot a machine off of a CD, run a script, answer 5 questions and have a server ready to go in about 10 minutes, and have the applications working (also script-installed) in another 10 minutes. We maintain our own OS release numbers (versions of our base tarball), and our own
For mirroring: We use debmirror. (It's a Debian package, of course.)
When upgrades fail: Go into aptitude, find the package that the upgrade broke, scroll down to the bottom, and highlight the old version, hit + to install it. It'll gracefully downgrade for your convenience. It's a hell of a lot easier than downgrading on, say, Solaris.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Debian! (Score:3, Informative)
ok, I have to call you on this. The last vulnerability that affected both RedHat and Debian's sendmail was fixed on the same day by both. (3/31)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing is really a much better option than hiring these people.
Re:Debian! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Debian! (Score:4, Insightful)
1) You don't need wait while being tossed between technicians.
2) You don't have to wait for a callback.
3) You already know the details of your problem. You know what you tried. You don't need to try and communicate these to person on the other end.
What types of problems have you come across that have been handled better by tech support people?
Some have mentioned needing to wait for an updated package to be released by your distro. Just grabbed the latest source/patch and compile it yourself. Can't get too much quicker than that.;)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, no. That *used* to be the case, but if that was the only thing, it wouldn't be that expensive.
What you're paying for is certification. Wanna run Oracle? Well, if you want to get Oracle's "unbreakable" support, you have to run it on a certified OS. Getting that certification costs $$$, and lots of 'em.
It's the same with a number of other production applications - if you want support from the vendor, you have to run an OS that they support. If you've got your own home-grown kernel and you start having problems, how are they to know that some crap you put in there isn't hosing things up? And it's certainly not feasible for them to support ever kernel-(user) release out there - so they pick the biggest fish (RedHat).
For your servers that don't run production systems, just use the regular Red Hat and buy support (if not from Red Hat, then somewhere else - the beauty of open source). Or run Debian/SuSe/Mandrake/whatever. Doesn't really matter, so long as your *production* machines are certified.
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Informative)
For everything else, CHANGE distributions. SUSE, Debian, Mandrake, ASP, Rawhide, pick one. Or ditch linux all together and use FreeBSD. If you guys are used to Solaris, FreeBSD will be a very simple transition. The other BSD's are good too, but Free is closer to Solaris, IMHO. I've found that my experience with Solaris has translated to it quite nicely. In addition, the documentation is fabulous.
HTH,
Queen B
Jimi
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
Orr.. Geee.. run Solaris (x86)
Re:Debian! (Score:3, Insightful)
Had a nasty NFS bug with it. Had an open ticket for a YEAR and no fix. Upgraded to linux and the problem was solved (and performance was better too.)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debian! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Debian! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in a mid-size enterprise, and we're using Debian with great success, for most of our unix needs.
The right distribution is highly dependant on what your specific needs are, though. Here are some things to consider:
1) Debian doesn't provide direct commercial support. Tech support is available from third parties, but by the time you get a support contract that will equal the quality of support you get from Red Hat, it'll probably cost as much as Red Hat (or Solaris, or Windows, or anything for that matter). Saving money is a priority for us, so we simply self-support. We maintain our own baseline install, and take care of certifying our own apps against Debian as needed. It's worked very well for us, but if you need CYA, Debian may not be a good choice.
2) Debian's release cycle is too fast. Yes, I know you hear it from people on
3) Oracle doesn't support Debian. Sure, it installs, sure, it runs fine, but that doesn't mean it's officially supported. This means that when you call their tech support, they will laugh at you the moment they think it's an OS problem. And, despite being head over heels in love with Debian, I think Oracle made the right choice - Enterprise customers who are going to install an application that needs to be in use for several years need to evaluate several other factors than just how easy an OS is to install and even how good the quality of the software is on the OS. I firmly believe that Debian builds a better mouse trap, but for Oracle, I want an OS that has official commercial support and a long life cycle - Red hat Enterprise.
Despite all this, don't think I'm trying to say that Debian is a bad choice. As I said at the beginning, we use it extensively for many functions throughout our enterprise, with tremendous success. Regardless, you need to evaluate your needs against ANY distribution, to see if it's a good match.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm Running Windows XP (Score:5, Funny)
I may need to reboot 3-6 hours from now, but I've never had to learn how to edit a configuration file.
(Disclaimer: That's not really true, but you get the point.)
Re:I'm Running Windows XP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm Running Windows XP (Score:5, Funny)
I agree. Having all the configuration information, for all applications, bundled up with lots of other stuff in that registry makes editing so much simpler snd safer.
Enterprise != Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Enterprise != Free (Of Course Not) (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuzzy_The_Quantum_Duck
=0)
==================
Damn Slashdot cut the last 2 Chars from my name!!!
Re:Enterprise != Free (Of Course Not) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Enterprise != Free (but you can negotiate) (Score:5, Insightful)
Favorite really dumb support question: do I have to plug it into the electricity?
Re:Enterprise != Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Suse ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Suse ? (Score:5, Informative)
Now we wanted to upgrade for various reasons and we really dont want to have to do the upgrade manually each time so we looked at RH. Damn its expencive. It's way to expencive when you have to pay a license pr. server, so we switched to SuSE Enterprise server (Oracle Certisfied)
Now we do automatic upgrade/patch of all servers using only one License. Also everything seems to be running much more stable. We have a FC connection to an external diskarray RH crashed several times using this array, also the webserver made some strange hicups from time to time (Also with RH9), but after changing to SuSE we're moved away from these problems.
Also.. when talking about support. RH is difficult since they only reply to web support, slow and it's very very hard to describe the problems for them. SuSE on the other hand replies to mails, are fast and very helpful and service minded.
Re:Suse ? (Score:5, Informative)
Next, what you said about email support only isn't true for the Enterprise version. You get to call them, and their support is good.
I am in the exact same boat as the guy who posted this, and considered SuSE and RedHat. Here is how it broke down for me. I also need to run Oracle...
RedHat
$350 / server without phone support or upgrade protection, but you get up2date for a year, and some basic (email) install support. In my opinion it makes no sense to buy this version, given that 3.x of their product will be out this year, and that version will offer things like LVM install built in (and a lot of other things), and you would be forced to buy that version for $350.
$800 / server with "Normal business hours support" and upgrade protection for one year. This version is limited to 2 processors and 4 GIG of memory.
RedHat had more expensive options but these two covered my company needs.
SuSE
$700 / server per processor. Support included. Also Opteron support.
With both products the cost seems to be for support and you will need to pay them EVERY year some amount of money. I would put that amount down, but my belief is that it will change given market demand. Also it must be noted that neither one allows you to load a copy of it on a "test" or "development" box! You must plunk down the $350-$800 again!
What I wish RedHat would do is allow you to download the Enterprise edition and install it on as many machines as you want for a nominal price. Say like $300 / processor. (NOTE don't limit processors/RAM ect) but pay for Up2date and then offer a support packs. Specifically they need to offer like 10 calls to them for $5,000. Novell and Microsoft currently offer agreements like this and it works well. They could then offer a pack of 50 for a discount and so on...
When I approched RedHat about this they seem to believe that their competition is Sun and even with this pricing they are still cheaper than Sun, so it makes sense to them. I don't agree with this! They may take away 10% of Suns business, but they WERE taking away more than 1% of Microsofts business, and the fact is that 1% of Microsoft's share is a heck of a lot more than 10% of Suns.
Now one last point in favor of RedHat. Oracle DB Standard Edition charges $15k/cpu + support + maintanence. That comes to around $22k/processor then you have to pay support + maintanence EVERY year. That comes to around $5k EVERY year to Oracle. If your company can handle that, then throwing RedHat a bone every year shouldn't be too bad. It just seems extra bad because it use to be near free.
Also, DB2, Websphere and other IBM apps have the same requirements as Oracle in regards to Linux distros, so it appears that the "big business" has kinda dictated what RedHat and SuSE will do.
the real question is... (Score:4, Funny)
oh come on, thats not flamebait!
We run red hat (Score:3, Interesting)
AND
you support open source / free software.
Re:We run red hat (Score:4, Interesting)
Yea. Try explaining to the brass that it's going to cost you $350,000 and it's free software.
Changing distros? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, if you find you don't need support, then why use the "enterprise" editions at all?
Finally, what'd be the total cost of moving to Windows? Probably a lot more than $350k, I'd wager. It sucks, but it's probably just time to pay the piper, or deal with supporting yourself... that's just how the market is. RH have to make a profit somehow.
What do you need it to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What do you need it to do? (Score:3, Funny)
He said the data center is moving forward, not dying!
What are your goals? (Score:5, Interesting)
We run oracle (both 8 and 9) on Debian, as well as most of our internet infrastructure (with the exception of proprietary programs that are stuck on Win2K for the time being). Most of the vendors of Linux based apps that we have worked with are willing to provide support even with Debian being the distro we chose (and then the ones that have complained, I've just called for another technician that was more distro-agnostic and gotten right through).
Recommendation (Score:5, Funny)
And MySQL for the database.
Redhat too expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Redhat too expensive? (Score:3, Informative)
You dont have to buy it (Score:4, Insightful)
Get em, compile em and install em. Of course, the nice gui installer is not free, nor is the support. But updates and the OS itself is free and will always be free. Its GPL'd. What you pay for is support and peace of mind. Thats typically what data centers prefer these days. I know that the managers see only free as in beer, so they look like heroes for saving on the budget, but what really counts is uptime and reliability. TCO stuff. So it costs 350K... How much would Windows cost you, and how much functionality would get from it? How about the equivilant PA-RISC machines or big AIX boxes? E15k's?
It turns out to be quite a deal! The support you get is worth it, and compare the price of that to a support contract with Sun!
Re:You dont have to buy it (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it is. It's called Anaconda, and everything you need to make your own customized version is included in the anaconda package in Red Hat, licensed under the GPL.
You're probably thinking of SuSE's installer.
Is there anything to stop you copying RHEL? (Score:5, Insightful)
The license [redhat.com] seems to refer to the services that come bundled with the software, not the software itself. I believe that the JVM cannot be copied from the standard distribution but removing is trivial.
Interesting notes: [linuxmafia.com] to summarise, it's probably perfectly legal for you to copy me RHEL ES, however you would probably also have to provide me all the updates if I wanted them (which may violate your license to receive them). The big dollars is with regard to the updates, and I believe they are made publically available by SRPM - and even then, its probably also technically allowable for you to mirror all the update RPMs somewhere.
I installed Lotus Domino recently on a Debian server because I didn't trust the machine with a consumer Red Hat and it wasn't cost effective enough to get RHEL. I'd be very interested to hear if you can or can't just copy/mirror RHEL.
What is the software worth to you? (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally use FreeBSD. No, I'm not suggesting you switch, but since I use it I'll detail it as another point of view. I download the software, for free, and pay no licenses. I also don't get a pretty box, support, and I've done nothing to fund development. The pretty box is available, for a fee. Support is available from a number of companies, for a fee. You can fund development as much or as little as you like with donations.
Without telling us what you need, we're not going to be able to make a recomendation. Maybe you use some Red Hat "feature" a lot that's worth $350k/yar, maybe you don't. What I can tell you is there are more expensive (price Microsoft!), and less expensive (eg, FreeBSD) options. There are also many, many, many options in the middle.
I suggest... (Score:5, Funny)
$300,000 worth of support contracts. (Score:3, Informative)
1. Do you need that level of support.
2. Is there a cheaper way to achive the level of support you do need.
3. Dose 1 or 2 requiere switching vendors.
For the cluless. It has nothing to do with the software itself. I.e. You can download RedHat and install it on as many PCs as you like virtualy free.
PS: Support for large numbers of critical solaris and/or Windows servers costs just as much or more. I should know since I work for a company that makes most of it's money off this sort of thing.
Cha-ching! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd consider this when getting the level of support you have priced from RH. Think about it: will there be many questions for which you are willing to pay $1000 a pop? Are there many questions to which you couldn't find an answer by Googling? Or is it more of a CYA action in case your team fouls up? I'd hate to think you'd be wasting over a quarter million dollars for an inept admin.
I still like RedHat... so here's what I do. (Score:5, Informative)
The advent of http://www.fedora.us bodes well for the future. I expect to see more 3rd party support for the RedHat standard package. That's the nice thing about RedHat finally opening up their devel process.
At worst, you could just take the standard distro that RedHat bases their advanced products on and use the security patches from the advanced on the standard distro. For example, install RedHat 7.2 and install any patches from the currently support advanced product. The only thing is that you'll have to rpmbuild --rebuild the src.rpm's as they are released.
I really like RedHat's way of doing things. I like their python based configuration programs. I like
And who'd 've thunk... RedHat is basicallly IPv6 ready out of the box. I didn't notice that until recently. Very easy to setup 6to4, radvd, etc. Even Mozilla is compiled with --enable-ipv6. Thanks RedHat!
Re:I still like RedHat... so here's what I do. (Score:5, Interesting)
One example, I set up a server/firewall for a small business as a contract job on the side. It runs all their stuff, web, email, etc. They really don't have a need for more than one server.
Last year when I set it up, I told them it would be good for at least three years. I don't like it that Red Hat made a liar out of me.
At my real job, we have more than a dozen Red Hat servers, and I'm stuck in the same dilemma. We can't afford to destabilize servers by putting essentially beta software on them, that the 12 month EOL requires. I used to let RH releases age about 3 or 4 months to get the major bugs out before I even considered using them in production.
So now I'm faced with either spending tons more time patching the servers by hand (even though we pay for RHN), or spending tons more money, buying RHEL which would cost at least 10 times more than the ~$1000 a year we spend on RHN now.
I really hope something gives on this situation. Red Hat better think twice before they alienate small to medium businesses. I don't need support. I do need updates. I do need more than 12 months before EOL.
Thats the point, idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
Want to put that together yourself? Go for it, nobody at Redhat is stopping you. All the stuff they integrate in their product is free, just go do it yourself.
But don't complain because you can't do it yourself and don't see why you should pay Redhat to provide you with a quality product.
Its not like you don't have a choice of vendors, or that your apps only run on a single vendor's platform.
Linux is never free - you either pay for it with money, or you pay for it with your commitment to the GPL and/or the time you invest into making it work for you.
We need people like you in the Linux community i.e. 'waah waah linux is too expensive, even when i can download it for free' like we need a frickin hole in the head.
What do you want? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the Free Software movement, not the Free Support movement. You can still download the software for free, and pay some kids $20 an hour to support it if that's what you want. Quit complaining that the world doesn't give you everything you want for free.
The value of Red Hat for an enterprise is not that the software is free of charge. The value of Red Hat is that the source is free from restrictions. Other than that, they're just like any other enterprise Unix vendor.
Re:What do you want? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is homogeniety a requirement? (Score:3, Informative)
However, you can safely run other servers on GPL Red Hat, or Debian, or SuSe, or....
We moved to BSD for most of our Unix needs.
an explination to this seemes merited (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone please explain this claim. I have no experience with buying anything from Red Hat, but I was certainly under the understanding that the software was freely copyable. Further, if you bought one copy you should be able to install it on as many systems as you wanted. Sure, support is an issue. And if you want Red Hat to give lots of support for a lot of systems you should expect to pay for it. But couldn't AC and his company hire more people and support the systems themselves with that $350k? Don't they need support staff anyway to work with Red Hat? They would have to have support staff if they moved to Debain or other distros, so is there really a reason to move rather than stay with Red Hat and support yourself? Is there something about using Red Hat that I'm unaware of? Where is this $350k cost coming from?
Re:an explination to this seemes merited (Score:3, Interesting)
Ike
p.s. I am sure that others with more specific facts will post the details soon
Re:an explination to this seemes merited (Score:4, Insightful)
If they would simply put the offensive language in the SUPPORT CONTRACT where it belongs and not in the OS license where even the leaders of Open Source and linux find it offensive.
Basically, they have added things that make it look like a microsoft product license..
Please read it, it's online for a free read. It will upset and enrage you.
and It's the reason I have migrated my company away from redhat on it's servers to Mandrake.
I'm all for paying for support, I have subscribed to redhat support in the past, hell I owned stock!
But redhat is pissing on those of us that made them what they are today with their insulting license.... and that is something that doesnt sit well with me.
Offering support is one thing. Forcing me to buy it is another.
Unless someone else can tell me how to get my hands on Redhat AS without paying for the support, it's not a viable option for any enterprise that has skilled staff.
Re:an explination to this seemes merited (Score:4, Informative)
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1
How exactly does the license prohibit free copying or redistribution of their product? As far as I understand, if you don't want support, you can just buy one copy and use it on all your computers. Or use somebody else's copy on your computers. You can even redistribute it if you remove redhat's trademarks. This is way, way, way better than what SuSE offers.
BTW, Mandrake uses a practically identical license for their server products.
Re:an explination to this seemes merited (Score:3, Informative)
Redhat's support sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
They aren't much worse than anyone else's support so far as I have experienced. But still somehow I was shocked at just how completely worthless they are.
Moving forward? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, you could install just about any distribution on a laptop and hook it up to one of those Evolution Robotics laptop robots [evolution.com]. Those go forward (and backward, and sideways) quite easily. Oh, you meant in the future? Well, why didn't you say so?
Pointy-Haired Boss: "We need to do this on a going-forward basis!"
Dilbert: "Thanks for ruling out time travel. You're usually not that helpful."
Cheers,
IT
Independent Linux providers may be of service (Score:5, Informative)
Its kind of expensive and may not work for everyone, but its worth a look:
http://www.pantek.com/linux.php?subsect=rhupdates [pantek.com]
In this economy when the "big" Linux players are worried about the "big" issues, I prefer working with a smaller company like these guys because they work harder to make their mark.
We left RedHat... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not saying it's the answer to your problem, I don't know, you'll have to decide.
Now, before we move on I'm going to tell you how Debian sucks. This is not to say that other distributions do not suck, or that Debian sucks more or less than the others - this is just something that you might run in to and should be aware of.
Debian sucks because:
Yet, we chose Debian because it rocks (and RH sucks) in these areas:
For a server you put in a data center and don't want to touch again unless absolutely necessary, I think Debian is great. It is extremely easy to stay up to date with security, and that is pretty much all there is to it. I still have nightmares from the days where I was mirroring entire RedHat distribution trees (or at least their massive update directories) in order to keep those systems up.
But really - in the end - it is not a few hundred bucks per server that should make the difference. It is my impression that if you pay for your RedHat, you can have a nice update service as well.
You'll be shelling out thousands of dollars per server for the hardware, an order of magnitude more (over the years) for support (eg. your time), so a RedHat subscription fee really shouldn't stop you from going RH.
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far.
Re:We left RedHat... (Score:3, Insightful)
For those unfamiliar with Debian, the parent poster is (presumably) referring to Debian's "stable" distribution, which is as close to "guaranteed to work, even after upgrades" as you're likely to get anywhere, Linux or otherwise.
Debian does really suffer from an archaic installer. I'm not referring to "lack of GUI" here -- I actually prefer a text-based installer -- but the installer's lack of ReiserFS or 2.4 support is irritating.
RedHat... (Score:3, Informative)
Debian is an obvious choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Support, you say? Debian has a nice directory of qualified Debian consultants [debian.org], and in general, it makes sense to have a few Linux experts inhouse to deal with emergencies.
Re:Debian is an obvious choice (Score:3)
Stable == several years old.
Unstable == test it yourself and freeze your own distribution -- DON'T automatically update it!
The debian "testing" distribution is what most people should be interested in.
What's really funny about all this, is that a business environment should have IT staff that understand that there isn't that much to a
How much support do you need? (Score:5, Insightful)
Use any savings for training. As your in-house expertise increases, your support costs will decrease. The nice thing about Linux is you only have to pay for the support you need. Too many companies forget that.
Learn to use Google effectively too; 99.9% of all Linux questions I get in a year have already been answered, and are just a quick inquiry away.
SuSe. (Score:4, Interesting)
They also offer priced to fit support, and now have the backing of IBM and Sun, and they support oracle.
and this is coming from a Gentoo zealot.
Call sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Why exactly do you need RH AS or the equivalent? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion (not so humbly, though), the only thing you're getting from big, expensive RH is the guarantee that Oracle will support whatever f-ed up configuration you come up with. It's still GNU/Linux at heart (there, RMS, ya happy now?) Sure, RH promises not to change it as often, but honestly I just upgraded an old RH server running 6.2. It's been running and stable for something like four years. It worked, so aside from patching and security, I left it the hell alone. This is something that large companies can't understand. Once it works, don't upgrade every damn chance you get - keep the old solid configuration running until you have the time and the need to do an upgrade.
Personally, since I believe that having three truly hard-core linux geeks that know their shit onsite is better than any professional support line you could ever call, I'd go with standard RH and order me some geeks instead. For $350k, you should be able to get a very nice set of them, and they'll be right there to save your ass if anything goes wrong.
This is why I have no future management prospects. I just can't think that way - I worked in small shops too long to think that throwing money at stuff fixes anything. We found ways to keep stuff running on a mix-and-match room full of old hardware - no support contracts, no officially supported configurations, just guys (and one lady) that knew what the hell they were doing. Once I moved into the big corporate world, I had to give myself a lobotomy to even understand their mindset towards problem-solving.
Re:Why exactly do you need RH AS or the equivalent (Score:3, Insightful)
This is required at most corperations for accepting a management position.
Re:Why exactly do you need RH AS or the equivalent (Score:3, Insightful)
After 12 months, you either upgrade, to the new buggy unstable version, or you stare at bugtraq all day and hope that nothing you are running comes up with a new security hole.
That's really not an option. RH is screwing up big time.
Red Hat Sales is the worst I've ever dealt with!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I WAS TOTALLY WRONG!
I recently tried phoning Red Hat Sales to try and buy support, and it has been more than 1 week, and I have been unable to get them to respond! My first 3 attempts to contact Sales were ignored, and finally I got someone on the phone. They directed me to someone else, and after an initial e-mail, they have yet to contact me after I sent them 2 follow-up e-mails. It is absolutely ridiculous.
You would in this day-and-age that Red Hat would be salivating over someone who is willing to pay them money for support, but they seem competely disinterested in helping me give them money. I have already complained to my superiors that we should consider supporting a different flavor of Linux, because if this is how responsive Red Hat's Sales unit is, imagine how unresponsive their Support unit it.
Re:Red Hat Sales is the worst I've ever dealt with (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I have never dealt with any sales organization as unresponsive and unmotivated as Redhat's.
Is this a sales quote or just his calculation? (Score:3, Insightful)
But this sound like someone who is quick with the calculator and just as quick to react.
Dissatisfied with Red Hat? Try Gentoo. (Score:3, Interesting)
Fast forward to end of 2002, and we had become disgusted with Red Hat's road map for its' Advanced Server license. It seemed as though we had lost all of the benefits of the GPL.
There was no way we were going back to M$, but there was a movement from higher up top to change distributions. To make a long story short, we passed on SuSe and chose the often corporately overlooked Gentoo.
The benefits of this move are stunning. We have been able to hire 16 additional employees to handle our own fork of Portage, and 22 additional employees to provide support. Not only to we do a "ghost compile" for each box (many different Pentium and Athlon systems), we also take a minimalist approach. The combination of those two choices have enabled us to increase performance per box to something like 26% faster on average.
With the obvious help of the Gentoo open source community, we have created a low cost, self-sustained IT department that can function well into the next decade. Thanks Gentoo!
Do you really need support? (Score:5, Funny)
Here's what you do:
1. Hire 1-5 high school Linux geeks part-time.
2. Pay them 15-20k a year. They will rejoice! Sweeten the deal with an unlimited supply of Twinkies, Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets.
3. Sit back.
4. In your next conference with the big cheese, tell him how smart you are for solving the company's IT problems.
FreeBSD (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo and Microsoft's own hotmail run on FreeBSD. Also the apache team uses FreeBSD as their os choice on their servers. FreeBSD handles large amounts of i/o and tcp/ip traffic and that is its strength's. SMP support and threading are its weaknesses.
Just my two cents.
Also you can run Oracle if you install the Linux abi package on FreeBSD.
depends upon budget needs (Score:3, Insightful)
You have already mention the need to use Oracle which is $5k per cpu..
If you switch distros you want to make sure you are not placed in the saem decision 6 months or 2 years down the road again..
Thus I recommend looking into using debian instead of SuSE..
As you know SuSE is partnering with vendors such as Sun and thus wil be in the same bussiness model as Red Hat in wanting to charge for enterprise versions either through support or etc..
Do not forget to factor in training costs of employees of going from distro to the next...
Also do the idiot checks, take a demo/dev version of Oracle and do test installs on the distro your considering..
Is Redhat is missing their target market?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I have 70 Linux servers around the country, and a steady stream of new customers. I've been installing Redhat 8.0 on new deployments because 9.0 doesn't work well with our application. So, we've everything from 7.0 through 8.0 in the field. Over the past few months, Redhat dropped up2date support and patches for Redhat 7 and 7.1. I feel guilty installing 8.0 on new boxes because I know support for it will be dropped at the end of the year.
I don't wish to buy into Redhat AS or ES because I don't understand what I'm paying for. *I'm* the Redhat support. I just need something that will receive patches and support for more than one year. The 5 year lifespan of the ES versions is nice, but I've NEVER called Redhat for support. I don't plan to.
I build the kernels for each of the servers. I use vanilla kernel.org source with XFS. We sell 2, 4 and 8-way servers. Am I missing out on anything from the "optimized" Redhat Advanced Server kernels? What are other people in this situation doing?
I think it's confusing because we initially chose Redhat for the accountability aspect of having a corporation behind the distro. Now, I'm not sure who they're targeting. I would imagine that most firms that select Redhat Advanced server and are willing to pay the price (>$1000/license) would have a staff talented enough to support it. So why the mandatory support costs from Redhat?
I don't understand the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dragged kicking & screaming (Score:5, Interesting)
The catch; using a commercial piece of software in the mix. In our case, a certain database. Being closed-source and totally non-self-servicable in case of serious problems or bugs, it is imperative to have a support contract for the commercial software. Almost all the RDBMS vendors have now altered/clarified their support policy: they will *not* honor a paid support agreement if you are running the free version of Red Hat underneath their software.
Why this policy exists is a question I will let somebody else speculate about...
There is exactly one major RDBMS vendor I could find that will officially support its software running on the free version of Red Hat (as of April 2003, at least), and that vendor is IBM with their DB/2 product.
Unfortunately, we were too time-constrained to port our system to DB/2, so in the end we caved and paid for Red Hat Enterprise so we could get RDBMS support on our existing platform. To this day we have not called Red Hat tech support once and don't expect to do so, ever. The thousands of dollars we paid covered the 3 minutes of effort the sales guy put in over the phone. Not a bad deal for Red Hat. If I were starting from scratch, knowing about the new support policies from the RDBMS vendors, I would have done the project using DB/2. PostgreSQL would have been an even better choice, except our project required real-time database replication, and PostgreSQL is just now getting to the point where that works well enough.
Buy support from your hardware vendor (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than buy the OS for every server, buy the support, and just copy the OS. It's my understanding that this is permitted with RH AW/ES/AS. If you don't need the enterprise version, then don't use it.
-Mark
Debian is the one I picked... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe this is the place (Score:5, Insightful)
another voice in the crowd (Score:4, Informative)
It has some nice features like remote auto install and YaST for a very nice system installer and maintainer.
SuSE Enterprise also supports x86, IBM mainframe, I/P series IBM servers, Itanium2 and AMD Opteron processors. This gives you a lot of flexability to add new hardware to the network to improve performance and the knowledge that the new machines will run perfectly with exsisting servers.
SuSE also has great tech support services at a much lower rate than redhat. You can feel confident that your server software is also run by the German Government and praised! by them.
SuSE's max turnaround time for support is just 2 hours!
SuSE is also United Linux Compatible and LSB compliant.
Suse Prices are not too bad either:
x86 single server 749USD$
Itanium Single server 448USD$
Opteron Single CPU 448USD$
Opteron Dual CPU 767USD$
Opteron Quad CPU 1405USD$
Opteron 8 CPU 2585USD$
These include 1 Year Maintainance and Service.
Make a deal (Score:4, Informative)
For us, it was worth it because we are guaranteed a supply of patches & support for a minimum of five years. Red Hat public releases churn every 18 months or so, which is too much work to maintain.
Re:Do you really need RH Enterprise Server (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do you really need RH Enterprise Server (Score:5, Informative)
RedHat continues to develop a public release
the beta for the next release (redhat 10) is available right now for public consumption. The simply aren't providing shrink wrap at compusa anymore, I think what the original story is referring to is the fact that each public release is only supported for 1 year, which is unacceptable in a corporate environment, to have to upgrade the OS of production boxes every year is not acceptable, and therefore requires that people move to ES, because it has 5 years of support.
Re:Cost explanation (Score:5, Funny)
But this puts you in violation of your support license, resulting in its termination and therefore not being supported if they catch you.
However, this will result in the same level of support as if you still had a support license.
My recommendation... (Score:5, Funny)
Laugh stupid, it's a joke.
Re:My reccomendation? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Let's wear out this quote! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You can't make copies if you are a customer (Score:4, Informative)
Others offer Linux without this problem.
E.g. SuSE allows you to install their enterprise version on as many machines you like. You buy as many licenses as you like. The only limitation is that you get support only for the number of machines that you licensed.
So when you want to save money you just buy licenses for a couple of the most important servers, or for each server of a certain kind.
(e.g. you run 50 fileservers, you license less than that, and when there is a "problem with fileservers" you let them support one of the licensed servers and you apply the fix they supply to all 50 of them.