Why redhat will never get another dime of my money.

[Scalone, Galen]

Man.... that was GREAT!!!




-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Kozakoff [mailto:kozaksj at shands.ufl.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 5:05 PM
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: Why redhat will never get another dime of my money.


Disk space: ~ $1 per gig

RH Support: $10,000

RH Satellite Server: $50,000

Having "enableRollbacks=1" in your /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date file:
PRICELESS!!!

You can also use the --repackage flag when you manually install rpms.

-Steve

>>> michael.halligan at mypointscorp.com 3/30/2005 12:36 >>>
Over the past 8 years, I've deployed about 1800 redhat servers, 1/2 of
them being in turnkey beowulf clusters,
the other half at various companies I've worked at. I have in plans,
over the next year, to deploy anotherr
300 linux servers. RedHat will not be involved in any of my future
deployments.

Why?

On March 15th, RedHat released a new version of rhncfg. This new
version, typical with redhat, was not properly
qa'd, and it brought our current development project to a grinding
halt, making 100 servers that were due to
be deployed wednesday of last week unusable.  

I called up tech support, but it was 20 minutes to shift change so I
was shrugged off, and told to call the australians. The
error I was getting was somewhat cryptic, and was obviously a bug in
some part of the satellite server.. Calling up Australia
is like trying to get a newborn infant to perform amazing acts of
tensor calculus.  It's always the same script :

Customer : I have a serious problem with my satellite server.
Australian : "Let me go find our satellite guy, please hold"
- Bad hold music ensues -
- 15 minutes later - 
Australian : Hello?
Customer : You thought I'd let you off that easy? I'm still herre
Australian : Right. Our satellite guy is, uhh, busy right now, can he
call you back?
Customer : Sure, you can reach me at these 3 numbers, or in an
emergency you can page my wife and she'll drag me out of bed, I need
this fixed.
Australian: You'll be called within the hour.

16 hours pass, time to call tech support and get the americans.

Usually at this stage, there's a satellite "expert" who fixed your
problem. Not this time. This time I'm given the shrug off again and
again,
until, FIVE DAYS LATER, I call up my account rep and inform him of the
unacceptable level of support that I have paid 10s of thousands of
dollars
for.  He assures me he's talking to the head of GSS and it will be
fixed blah blah blah.. Hearded this with 4 of the last 10 tech support
issues
I've had with satellite server.

Now it's been a week. I've been given a fix that would work if I were
to manually rebuild 100+ servers. Thanks guys. I stayed up until 3am
last night
working with the morons in australia, trying to get a working fix
together.. I was promised that there would be one no later than 24 hours
after that
call, but no earlier than 8 hours. I figured it is what it is.

I wake up, all happy and bubbly that my problem might be fixed, and the
10 senior developers I'm supporting might actually be able to deploy
their software, and that the company who is all anxiously waiting the
next release phase of the product that we're devoting so much capital
into, will finally happen, is all knocking on my door, 40 door knocks
this morning already, saying "Are we good to go?"

I check my e-mail. Sorry. We have to put this fix through regression
testing, maybe on april 4th it will work.

I believe we paid $50k for satellite server, a server to run satellite
server, and all of our provisioning entiltements & OS licenses. The
irony here, is microsoft would have been cheaper. The other irony here,
is if this one little package were open-sourced, instead of proprietary
to redhat, I could have changed the ONE BROKEN LINE OF CODE in the
software, rebuild the package myself, and install it.

Thanks redhat, you have assured that I am moving my infrastructure to
SuSE & Zenworks, and that our future plans, as well as mine as a
consultant, will not include a software distribution with the word HAT
in it.








-------------------
Michael T. Halligan
MyPoints Beta
Infrastructure Engineer
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