Dell Calls For Red Hat To Lower Prices

VaultX points to an article on CNET (linked below), writing "According to Dell, Red Hat needs to lower pricing. 'We believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers.' With Dell's strong presence in the Linux server market, Red Hat may want to listen."

Comments

Don't Write Home About RH Support

[bill_mcgonigle]

Speaking of Redhat support how is it? I've used Redhat Enterprise Server before, but never had a reason to call their tech support line. Only reason I reccomended it to the client was that he wanted something that had support. Which of course he never used either(Just called me).

That describes my situation six months ago exactly. Then I had a problem with up2date.

So I called RedHat for the first time in the decade I've been using it. I found out:

• They won't help you if this is an upgrade install. They offer to help you if you reformat your drive and install fresh. (note: their installer leaves multiple redhat-release RPM's installed. rpm -q, rpm --erase to get up2date working)
  
• If you have 3rd party RPM's installed that may be an unsupported configuration
  
• They won't help you if they don't like your hardware. In this case I was redoing a RedHat 8 server with a functional firewire disk array. Had to install the kernel-unsupported package to get that working

I challenged them that there was no indication on their website that RedHat Linux upgrades were unsupported (they always were in the past so it's not unreasonable to assume they still would be) and they conceded the point and offered to get a notice up within a week, but weren't any more helpful.

So, what kind of support are you getting for that money? It's alot like Microsoft support. Completely useless so a waste of money by definition.

It's too bad - I was 3 licenses into a 30+ server effort over multiple clients, and that's as far as I got. There's a huge base of installed RedHat Linux users they're completely ignoring. I want to help pay Alan Cox's salary, but they don't make it feasible for me.

Instead of throwing good money after bad, I ditched it and put Fedora Core 2 on. Yeah, I'm out $300 but yum will set you free. Plus firewire works perfectly in the current kernel releases.