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Seeking Commerical Telephone Support for FreeBSD?
Dave H3 asks: " Does anyone know of any U.S. based firms that provide up to 24/7 telephone support for FreeBSD? I've been tasked with submitting a business proposal to list at least three potential, established, vendors. Other than Windriver I've not had much luck. I've checked several FreeBSD sites, including FreeBSD.org, to no avail."
Did you look here? I'd find it hard to believe that there aren't three there that would be willing to draft up something for phone support, especially that many of them consult network/server installations.
To ask for support, you must have to do something up-and beyond most situations? Typically the manual is the best source.... read it like its your new bible, as it really does touch most mainline issues. I even use the manual to teach linux newbies how to do their typical tasks, rather than wishing them luck searching for a good linux-howto style article.
Secondly, the phone support bussiness is not very profitable at this point in time due to the economic situation in the USA. The people qualified to handle the support phones cost more than your average tech support people do, as they need special experience, and trainning.
The best solution for you would be to read the manual, and if you have something really freakish, then you should get a consultant under contract. Typically you can setup phone support service for a fee, however, I duno if your gonna get 24x7. I guess it depends on how much your willing to spend. =)
Take a look here at the freebsd website. There are freebsd consultants floating around, you might say...... you might consider advertising in the mailling lsits for some of the more choice people willing to do the work... you never know.
good luck
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Well, what do most companies that use FreeBSD do with it?
Most of them are ISP's, since FreeBSD is, if anything, even a better bet than Linux for stable, cheap hosting. Many of the rest will probably be in some related field, such as web application development and rental, or large-scale web services. (Yahoo uses FreeBSD extensively)
Other popular uses for FreeBSD include firewalling and network storage.
So, learn (in this order):
1. Unix admin chores; how to install, customize, re-compile FreeBSD, and how to maintain it daily, weekly, monthly
2. Networking; TCP/IP, DNS, NAT Firewalling, NFS, FTP, Samba (for windows network storage)
3. Web server install/admin; how to set up Apache, usually with Perl/CGI or mod_perl, and often with PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL. How to do virtual domain hosting.
4. Shell scripting, in at least Bash and Perl, cron jobs, to automate administrative tasks
5. Webserver scripting; Perl and PHP both are best, Java/JSP is not as popular
6. Open source database setup (MySQL at least, Postgres a plus), SQL design and administration goes hand-in-hand with sebserver scripting
7. At least some HTML, so you can handle the output of webserver scripting tasks.
There is a LOT more that can be done with FreeBSD (I haven't even mentioned serious programming, clustering, data warehousing, etc...), but this seems to be the bulk of it. If you can handle at least a couple rows on that list, you can get a job. If you are good at more than 50% of that list, you should be in demand, and if you are profficient in 90% and more, you should be turning down employers, and worth at least $55,000 and UP.
Of course, most of this is not specific to FreeBSD, and can apply to Linux as well.
According to Greg Lehey, Linuxcare also provides FreeBSD support.