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Progeny To Offer Support For Red Hat 8.0 and 9
zerocool^ writes "In a previous story it was noted that Progeny would offer support to Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 customers facing an End of Life deadline of 31 December 2003. Progeny has updated their 'transitional software' offerings to include support for Red Hat 8.0 and 9 for $5 per month, per machine. This is great news for IT folks who are faced with the choice of a new OS or abandoned 1-year-old software."
MS has stopped support for their old stuff and nobody can help. When Redhat stops, other companies can step forward and help (hopefully, even profit).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
there's more than a shred of truth to that quip about Google....
Let's say you spend $30,000/year for unlimited patch access and you have a 4000 node linux server farm that has an expected usable life of no more than 3 years.
That's $90,000 for "lifetime" patching of 4000 machines or a $22.50 uplift on purchase price of each individual machine for lifetime patching.
Redcarpet licenses cost a whole lot more than that!
I can't wait for Progeny to offer their patching services for Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0... oh wait... isn't Redhat Planning on making all of their money from Support?!?
Poor Redhat...
Since all heavy-duty nerds (that could handle mostly every kind of problem) have moved from RedHat (newbie distro) to Debian (zealot distro) it's pretty hard to get decent help on harder RedHat problems.
That's completely false.
Meanwhile, who would pay for user support when all you need is /join #debian on irc.debian.org, ask your question and at worst get redirected to the right RTFM.
This support is more about updated packages than someone at the other end of the phone. RedHat's planning to stop releasing security fixes, errata, or new feature (like new hardware support) RPMs for these distributions. You absolutely need those to run it well, whether you buy them from someone or build them yourself. Building them yourself would be a lot of work. Progeny feels there's enough people who want to buy them from someone to make a profitable service out of it. So they're offering one.
Actually, RedHat's CEO said in a recent interview that this was profitable. They just want to focus on the enterprise market, which is where the big bucks are. Progeny's picking up their scraps, I guess.
I have a heavy commitment to Redhat, without it I don't have to upgrade a server, I have to upgrade many of them. I am not going to spend thousands on Enterprise Redhat, that would be the very reason I went for the "free" OS in the first place. I tried the switch to Debian on one of them and after some mucking around got it going adequately. As someone who's lived their entire linux life in Redhat land, Debian's a nasty shock. The install process is a nightmare and all the conf files are in different places. BUT you live and learn and it's not that hard... after all, that's what google's for! :)
On the other hand, i stuck the Severn disks into my one of my redhat 9 servers and said 'upgrade'. I know this will get rebuked but it worked perfectly. So i put it in a few more. Now i've got about 4 Redhat-9 boxes, 1 Debian box and 3 Severn boxes. All work fine and to be honest, which do i prefer? Severn...
My point? Give it a shot - it's free and it's basically identical to Redhat 9 (with Apt + Yum built in).