Re: Low/No Cost Unix

[cmconwa@sandia.gov (Christopher M. Conway)]

=  On Mon, Feb 23, 1998 at 04:08:20PM -0600, Scott Williams wrote:
=  > 
=  > I'm just saying that the level of trust is not there to put my shop's OS on a 
=  > version of Unix like that. I never implied that you were purchasing Linux from 
=  > Red Hat, just questioning their ability to provide effective support at the 
=  > levels of Sun, HP, Digital, etc...
=  
=  Probably, but they surely can provide effective support at a higher level
=  than Microsoft.

Working at a house that has Sun and HP support, I can say that I find tha
term ("support") laughable. I've yet to get anything useful out of them.
For that matter, I never got anything useful out of Digital support when
I was in a shop that had a contract for that. By and large, I've found that
I generally know more about the software than the support people do; the
kind of problems that I can't handle easily seem to be things they can't
handle at all.

The answer's I've gotten from Sun, HP, and Digital support tend to be the
same as you get from MicroSloth: "reboot." I've even gotten "reinstall
the software" occasionally.

Frankly, I don't think it's hard to provide better support than any of
the big companies. And, of course, a trained monkey could provide better
support than MicroSloth does.

I don't see any reason why you shouldn't run *BSD* or Linux in a production
environment. I've been running Linux with several-week uptimes at home (it
gets brought down so that something (largely games) can be run under
MS-DOG or Losedows, not because it has problems). Remember that *BSD* comes
from the same people who brought you BSD Unix, particularly the 4.x
varieties which are what SunOS 4 and ULTRIX 4 are.

I'd trust them a *lot* quicker than I'd trust MicroSloth crapware. And
it's *MUCH* cheaper (hardware costs: less (UNIX is much friendlier about
using your resources-- try running NT on a 486 with 8MB memory); OS costs:
infinitely less ($0 vs. $?100+ *per machine*)). And you get *free* support
from the net from people much more capable than any of those that work for
the big companies, because they're either the people that *wrote* the
software, or are sysadmins like us.

-- 
Christopher M. Conway		U*IX and C Guru		Don't Tread on Me
cmconwa@sandia.gov		wombat@prickly-wombat.com
We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.
I'll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy.