[NTLUG:Discuss] OT: RedHat support [was Redhat Offerings -- theRed Hat bashing tour isback!]

[Cameron, Thomas]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org]On
> Behalf Of Lance Simmons
> Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 8:51 AM
> To: NTLUG Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] OT: RedHat support [was Redhat 
> Offerings --
> theRed Hat bashing tour isback!]
> 
> 
> Thanks for the answer.  I didn't make clear enough in my post 
> that I was
> asking about RH support for the corporate world (which I'm 
> not part of),
> so thanks for addressing that.

No sweat!

> I know it's apples and oranges, but could you compare (1) the 
> web-based
> issue tracker that BoA pays for and (2) community-based 
> support such as
> the debian-user list, IRC, and BTS?  My experience has been 
> that when I
> have a _question_, the debian mailing list or IRC gets it 
> answered in a
> matter of minutes or hours, though sometimes a day or two.  If I'm
> having a _problem_, the debian BTS usually contains 
> information to work
> around it, and if I need to file a new bug report, I (usually) get a
> timely response from the developer, though the issue does not 
> always get
> resolved immediately.  (Most often it gets solved pretty quickly, but
> sometimes not; it depends on the individual developer and the 
> nature of
> the project the bug is in.)

First let me make crystal clear - I find that community support is typically *better* than most commercial support I've dealt with (Sun and Microsoft specifically).  BUT - in my case, I've got a lot of years of enterprise system administration experience and I'm pretty good at drilling down to the root cause and asking the right questions.  Way too often I see newby questions posted to the community like "I can't get Samba to work, why not?"  People like that are often times disappointed by the response (or lack thereof).  Plus, when you post a question to the community you are taking a chance (albeit small) that you won't get a response or that the proposed solution is wrong.

In our case, we have systems that lose us *lots* of money when they are down, so we can't take those chances.  So we pay a fair chunk of money to have the RH tech staff available any time we have a serious "uh-oh."

> Does the support RH offers high-end corporate customers go beyond that
> to include Red Hat scrambling programmers to fix specific bugs that
> might not otherwise get fixed?  Or would you say the RH corporate
> support is more like a shiny, user-friendly version of what 
> debian users
> get from a mailing list, IRC and BTS?  I can understand why a
> corporation would want to have the nice front-end instead of 
> the looser,
> community-based support, but I'm interested in whether, for high-end
> clients, RH support goes beyond that.

For us it's risk mitigation.  In many cases we need that instant access to support.  As a "for instance," I submitted a request to add functionality to the useradd command so that it would work better with a tool we use for user administration.  My request was actually implimented, and will be incorporated into RHEL in a future release.  I think that's moderately neat-o.  :-)  Other OS vendors are not likely to do that.

Regards,
--
Thomas Cameron, RHCE, CNE, MCSE, MCT
Assistant Vice President
Linux Design and Engineering
Bank of America
(972) 997-9641

The opinions expressed in this message are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, Bank of America.