Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[Roger Heflin]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Roger Heflin wrote:
> 
>> And lets take RHEL5 initial release, it did not support file systems 
>> larger then 8TB (ext3 only, no XFS), it did not support Areca and 
>> 3ware PCIe controllers even though those drivers had been out for 6+ 
>> months at the time they shipped RHEL5, and those are most definitely 
>> enterprise boards.   And the second you add a driver and/or XFS on to 
>> RHEL5 you are now tainted and *UNSUPPORTED*.
> 
> This is not quite the whole picture. If a third party kernel module is 
> loaded, that module is specifically unsupported assuming a ISV is not 
> involved. If a problem occurs that is not related to the module and you 
> can demonstrate that by reproducing the problem after unloading it, 
> support must be provided.
> 
> Rahul
> 

Rahul,

Yes, only if you have a separate support contract, and even with those the 
support provide is utter crap.    Redhat (and Suse) don't seem to have an 
escalation procedure that actually works for anything serious, at the customer 
level you have to jump through more hoops that any of the kernel.org developers 
require, mainly because you have to spend days or weeks attempting to get past 
the stupid useless suggestions of the first line support people that have no 
clue that kernel deadlocks/crashes are almost impossible to cause with userspace 
mis-configurations, and keep suggesting new userspace related things to change 
to correct the issue, it is very clear that they are trained not to attempt to 
solve everything, and don't understand when to pass it up.

                        Roger