[Gllug] Fedora 11 gets it wrong

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Peter Corlett<abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 02:48:24PM +0100, Jon Fautley wrote:
> [...]
>> Please do not spread FUD. There's no need to leave the graphical stuff
>> installed. There are a *few* packages that are pulled in as dependencies,
>> and of course removing these with "rpm -e --nodeps" may invalidate your
>> support. It's also a really, really stupid thing to do.
>
> I gather that Red Hat support is not worth the paper it's written on unless
> you require trivial Unix hand-holding, and it mainly serves as a security
> blanket for management. Anybody doing sufficiently-advanced things with
> their systems will quickly fall outside the scope of Red Hat support.


Er, uhm, no.

I am a former Red Hat costumer and they did much more than hand
holding for us, and our setups where far from trivial or common.

In one occasion one of our application teams was screwing things up
with one script, and we could not find the reason (mostly lack of time
to do a proper debugging). The Red Hat chaps debugged the script,
found the problem and suggested a solution. In principle they didn't
have to, but I suppose you can find assholes and guys more interested
in doing a good job everywhere, Red Hat is no exception on that
regard.


>
> In particular, I recently read a jaw-dropping story of somebody who tried to
> get Red Hat to support something, and the response was basically "fix it
> yourself". But with even more chutzpah than that. I shall ask if I may
> repost it here as the tale deserves a wider audience.

I have no reason to doubt that, but I would stick to my personal
experience instead of hearsay, and even if evidence is provided, you
can't paint the full reputation of a company based solely on the
evidence of one person alone.

We all have bad days (and golly, this list is a shinning example of
that :-P ) so I prefer to base my opinion about a company (any
company) on a wider sampling rather than on the unfortunate experience
of a single individual.


>
> [...]
>> It sounds like you've not had much exposure to RHEL lately. Perhaps you
>> might like to look into one of our training courses? :)
>
> That depends. How much would you pay me to attend, and will I have to drink
> any Kool-Aid?

That is really unfair.

 I have attended lots of training sessions for different products and
companies, and Red Hat's was one of the best (no Kool Aid was offered
btw). I just finished training with another well known company and got
certified, the quality of the training  does not come even close to
Red Hat's, the exams didn't include any practical bits unlike Red
Hat's, and I am not supposed to talk about it because you have to sign
a NDA (which is why I can't name the company in question), I don't
remember that being the case with RH (stand to be corrected),
considering that vast swathes of the training were promotion of their
wares and services, I would say Red Hat fares quite well in
comparison.
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