On Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:56:44 +0100, sean@??? said:
> Now I'm certainly not putting that forward as a good thing or advocating
> any position as correct or incorrect really - I'm just thinking aloud
You're right, but so's Paul - he said, "I don't really consider Red Hat as
a Linux vendor anymore - or at least not for any customer that isn't
looking for an enterprise level support agreement". The situation you
describe is someone who IS looking for that level of support.
My experience - as someone who makes a living providing Linux consultancy
- is that the vast majority of Red Hat customers bought RH because it was
a name they'd heard of, not for any other reason. They come unstuck when
they want to, for example, implement a VPN connection to the server from a
home Windows system. As of RHEL3 (haven't checked since), RH didn't
include any VPN software. Of course you can download RPMs for OpenVPN,
etc, or you can build from source, but now you're off base as far as RH are
concerned. A few of those RH customers have been converted to Debian
(cheaper, bigger range of packages, but no enterprise support); others
stay with RH plus extras.
As for RH support, I've had generally poor experiences. Their website is
simply awful, and the support ranges from outright wrong answers to
competent. I haven't experienced anything with a wow factor, but to be
fair I've only used RH support three or four times.
To sum it up, I'd say, "Make an informed decision". RedHat may be right,
Debian may be right, XYZ distro may be right, but it's worth understanding
the differences before a company invests time and money in one particular
distro.
Keith
--
Keith Edmunds
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tiger Computing Ltd | Helping businesses make the most of Linux |
| "The Linux Company" | http://www.tiger-computing.co.uk |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
