Re: Long-term Stability Distros (was Re: [tlug] Flash and Firexfox 2)

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

2009/3/13 Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>:

> Do you tell them this when you are calling RHEL support ;)

I wouldn't install a CENTOS yum for a system package, but if it is
something like Subversion or XEmacs, I'm happy to do so. I don't
*announce* this to Red Hat support, but neither do I hide it.

I've actually found the humans on the Red Hat support line to be
awesome. They are technically savvy, and they will actually get an
engineer on the phone whilst you hold the line if you a) call during
America/Boston daytime, b) have a serious problem that requires an
engineer to troubleshoot it, and c) work for a company like Amazon,
who I have to assume is one of Red Hat's biggest customers.

I don't even know if (c) is a hard requirement, because I made one
support call to Red Hat for RHAS at my last job, and we held all of
three RHAS licences at the time. The issue was with a nasty POSIX
threads deadlock, and they got an engineer with deep knowledge of
glibc to call me back within an hour of my initial call. The bug
turned out to be in my userland code (of course), but the engineer
helped me troubleshoot the issue for at least 20 minutes, and when it
turned out to be my bug, he was totally not a dick about it. I think
his words were, "this is my job, and your problem was an interesting
one that I haven't seen before".

Hating on Red Hat has always been a popular sport, but as a Gentooist
who has to admin RHEL/RHAS at my day job, I am a *very* satisfied
customer of Red Hat's, and I consider the money we pay them money well
spent (our kernel team probably has access to Alan Cox, natch).

Up the Red! :)

-- 
Cheers,
Josh