4 red hat 7.3 DNS servers. Have never required a reboot since installation.
1 red hat 6 machine that lasted 6 years without an OS related reboot (the hardware started to give and the box had to be decommissioned)
1 database/web server running SLES 8 has gone over a year and a half without a reboot.
1 webserver running debian stable no reboot since installation
1 proxy server running SLES 9 w/ squid that was set up in under a 1/2 hour under emergency conditions (old proxy hardware died unexpectedly) running 20 days under extremely heavy load until new server came in.
1 database server running SLES 8. A year since last reboot.
And those are all the ancient boxes. We've got many more linux boxen that are too new to have aquired a long uptime.
From the article: experiencing significant reliability issues resulting in higher total cost of ownership
*shrug* I've had none of these issues they speak of. All of our installs are quick, stable and long lasting. In fact, I've never had a production upgrade break anything, and never had an install take longer than a couple of hours in even the most complex of setups.
This whole "get the facts" campaign is just silly. I don't know why they keep on with it. I've been working with Linux for years and never run into any of the problems they have "documented".
Hey Balmer, want an anecdotal story of Windows breaking? Our mapping department had a Windows 2000 installation with their mapping software. One day it just breaks. 5 people standing around the box scratching our heads. No one had any clue why. Random reboots, blue screens, the whole works. We reinstall many times. Nothing. Do all the upgrades, patches and fixes. Nothing. Sounds like hardware, right? Nope. Upgraded to 2003 and worked fine since.
The fact that the box could have run 2 years without major issue then break out of nowhere with 5 very smart people trying to solve the issue and can't makes me wonder.
Much of the point of the blog was that open source accessability on open source (gnome in his example) works really well. His point is that Microsoft has terrible accessability API's. The only reason that decent software exists for the disabled is that hacks were created for Word. Custom scripts were created to suit word perfectly. Gnome on the other hand has a properly set up API. So as whole, open source has better accessability software. But for the specific case of Word on Windows that OpenOffice on Windows is behind. It would be equal if Microsoft and Various software makes would properly support the java accesability API, but they don't.
The idea of the hybrid isn't about directly saving money on gas. It's about changing attitiudes in the auto industry. Hybrids are the first of their kind to be mass produced by many car manufactors. It's gotten the ball rolling on mass producing hydrogen and natural gas powered vechiles as well. We've been stuck with basically the same power source for our cars for decades. By purchasing a hybrid you are telling the car makers that you _are_ interested in saving the environment and that you _are_ interested in getting away from foreign controlled oil. Purchasing a hybrid now isn't about saving money on gas today, it's about saving the earth and being self reliant in 30 years. The narrow mindedness of articles such as this show that the author's have little insight as to the long term goal of the hybrid.
Because a given subject is once discussed on slashdot, does that mean stories can NEVER be posted about it again? Only one Sony rootkit story allowed? Do they have to always post the "this was previously discussed here" everytime a story has anything to do with a previous story? There's a difference between posting the EXACT same article, and an article on a similiar subject.
The anti virus companies are pussies. They are too afriad of the legal recourse of removing said product. That's why we can have updated anti virus on every single one of our computers here and still have machines loaded with spyware. It's almost pointless. The modern day malware isn't the I love you virus, it's the sony rootkit's. And they are just too afraid to remove the Sony rootkit's of the world.
We don't _need_ ipv6 this very second. It's not cool or sexy. It doesn't really bring anything fun and/or critial to the table. It was developed to help catch future problems of ipv4 before they became critical. It's not going to be a hot button issue until we REALLY need ipv6. At that point the unprepared are going to be running around like bumbling idiots screaming that they did not get enough warning. The only thing that could really change that fact about human nature would be intervention from various governments. And we've seen how well that worked with HDTV.
It may seem to the public like they are one big entity, but in reality they are a huge company with many opinions within. This is really true of any organization. Even within our own department here there are huge disparities of attitudes. Sometimes a project will arise that only needs one programmer and they get free reign on how to do things. Invariably they will write it in their favorite language on their favorite platform. If an outside person were to see my programs they would think "wow, they really have a commitment to open source". Then later, "wow, a program in VB? This seems out of character for them".
Since Novell has taken over, they've open sourced a lot of suse. Yast is now open source. The basic suse linux distribution is now freely available immediatly (there used to be a wait time and ftp only installs). Maybe there have been massive internal changes that aren't aparent to the public, but it seems to me they've become more open lately. The quality of Suse offerings have become better as well. I tried suse a few years ago and wasn't terribly impressed. Lately however, I've been inclined to use it on my desktop and some servers.
going to members.lycos.co.uk/sugi brings up some other files that look like they are phishers too. I think rather than immediatly shut them down, it would be more effective to set up a sting. Lycos could retrieve the last ip address to log into that account. If it wasn't a compromised machine, they could contact the isp. When the next login is attempted, they could have the isp locate which customer it is, and bust down their door.
It's really sad that the AV companies haven't tried to shut the site down via contacting Lycos. It really shows me their commitment to security for the sake of security.
I heard that a few years ago. The older I get, the truer it becomes. The more I learn about life in general gives me insight as to what's possible out there, and as to what I haven't accomplished!
I think they sat down and did the numbers and decided that the number of users they would actually have to support in practice would be enough to either break even, or be a slight loss (but a enough a gain in popularity that other Asian countries would want in and be good in the long term).
My opinion on what they should use? Create their own based on Debian or Asianux. Debian is by far the best building block distribution I've seen. Asianux has the lure of having the specific goal to localize to Asia as best possible. China's Red Flag linux is based off this. It becomes a source of national pride.
>On a more inflamatory note do we even want those VB programmers to develop for Linux?
Probably not. It may be a stereo type, but in general, VB code is sub-par. If a given VB programmer is of quality, they've probably jumped ship already to one of the many other RAD languages. Obviously some people still have to keep up with legacy applications; but maintaining software written for windows 98 becomes more of a problem with each release cycle. That can't go on forever!
The effort that would go into trying to support VB could be spent in improving one of the many awesome open source RAD environments. The community would spend all this time and effort, for what? To support a legacy piece of crap? In reality, VB was/is rarely used as the right tool for the job. There are a glut of VB applications that, when translated to the Unix world, would be much more effective as a shell script, ruby/phython/perl/etc script, Java/C/C++ program, etc etc. I'm all for supporting quality languages. But I don't see the point in trying to bring over a language that will create our own September that never ended.
>>Blue Gene/L and ASC Purple together are expected to consume 10 megawatts of the 45-megawatt capacity that LLNL's Terascale Simulation Facility can supply for computing and cooling.
Sadly, the mcfly computer won't get off the ground until it can get it's 1.21 gigawatts.
YEP~ I found that a little sketch too. These people were sophisticated enough to come up with a laser guided titty milker but have an uneeded hard drive? I've been using IDE-CF adapters myself with 256 mb CF cards. I would have thought they would want a system like that solid state. The only reason I could think of them not wanting to use flash would be if it does constant writes (which will kill most flash memory after awhile). Many CF's and the like are rated at 1,000,000 writes before beginning to fail. I'd think if they were just careful how often they wrote to it, it wouldn't be a problem. I also found the use of Red Hat 7.3 a little suspect as well. Wouldn't you want something like uclibc buildroot, damn small linux, or even just strip down debian stable? You are wasting precious cpu cycles by running something that heavy. Maybe for development it's ok, but it just seems like a really odd choice being an old OS but still really bulky.
I think consolidation would be good for Novell at this point. They offer A LOT of services and software. Not all of them being highly profitable. However, though not seeing the numbers, I can't imagine groupwise being a loser for them. In fact, I consider it to be one of their stronger products. Instead of dumping certain services all together, I think certain products should be dropped and their engineers refocused. For example, they used to (still might?) have a radius server. Currently they put resources into freeradius to help it interact with e-directory. Bam. A full fledged radius server better than their own with minimal of effort.
They could dump their printing services and integrate with cups rather easily I think. Also, border manager should be dumped in favor of iptables and squid. They should phase out their current myriad of configuration tools in favor of yast. Give it an online component that is fully compatable with yast modules. Hell, don't tell anyone and just revamp iManager to do this. Groupwise really has no open source analog imo. It provides pop,imap,smtp,news, and client reader abilities all in one. These are all available as individual open source projects. However, none are as integrated as groupwise. If anything, revamp it and make it use edirectory natively.
Ideally it would be nice for Novell to develop a few of their key services and attempt to integrate with other open source projects on others. This way they have a few really kickass services that integrate really well with some kick ass open source projects. We're doing Freeradius + edirectory for Wifi and it's working really well for us. I'd like to see more of this!
Ummmm, I read through that link provided. Starter edition is going to be software controlled at being able to use only 256 megabytes of ram? Are you kidding me? It's meant for first time PC users. I can't imagine even getting an OEM first time PC with less than 512 megabytes of ram.
J2EE based web services are 900 pound gorillas. Sure, amazon etc use it, but I don't spend my day making amazon.com's. I spend it getting requests from various departments for single purpose programs that are web based (so we don't have to maintain yet another fat client on the desktop). These simplier frameworks make it possible to make quality web applications quickly. Most of these programs are just a varation on a theme. 2 or 3 tables with maybe a foreign key and 3 or 4 web pages. These frameworks make it possible for me to give them a finished application in a couple of hours so I can spend my time doing more important stuff.
A lot of companies pull shit like this. At any given time it's more a question of who's getting raped and who's doing the raping. I agree it's not Dell's fault in this case, but it doesn't mean that at any given time Dell wouldn't be ready to screw MS at any given chance.
It's like MS breaking off negotiations with the RIAA. They are both evil, just turns out RIAA tried to greed the greester and got pwnd.
Ok, I wouldn't be pissed off if it was just internet speculation that they were going to release a web office. But it wasn't. It was some jackass at Sun making this out to be the next internet revolution. All it did was make him look like a jackass, Sun look like a jackass, and make google look like a jackass by association. If I were google I would have cut my losses there and backed out as carefully as possible. Google is very quiet and humble about their releases. They don't talk about the next big thing and revolutions. The deal is next to pointless. It's not worth a shitty distribution deal to have your company made to look a fool...
What leads you to believe this? What online application does google currently have that is slow, poorly designed, and ad-ridden (google ads aren't really intrusive)?
I think there are a few factors that are making this the right time for office apps on the web.
For one, I agree that wider bandwidth combined with low latency has made it more practical to send data back and forth between browser and server seemlessly.
Another is the modern browser. It isn't just netscape and IE anymore each trying to do things their own way. There's Opera, khtml based, and gecko based browsers out there trying to be standards compliant. IE is still a pain in the ass to work with. However, in general my code works with khtml, gecko, and opera if I code for standards. A modern standards compliant browser can do a lot of cool shit.
Teaching an old dog new tricks. For the most part, not a lot has changed in the past 2 or 3 years as far as the technology behind this goes. However, a lot of people are taking a second look at stuff that's been there a long time and saying "I think there's more that can be done with this technology". And they are pulling off some amazing things.
Sadly, because google is working with Sun, the whole thing will probably be in Java. Which really isn't anything revolutionary. It'll probably be an openoffice port completely in java that'll run on the desktop anyway. I have yet to see Sun not push java on every project in the past 5 years. Maybe they will suprise me and do the whole thing in css, javascript, xml, and html. Not holding my breath though.
It seems like the admin never really wanted to be on Linux in the first place and his knowledge of Linux is highly lacking. The fact that he knew nothing more to describe his problem than "blue screen of death" shows which OS he wanted in the begining.
I've had ongoing issues like that before of random crashes spaced weeks apart (userland software problem, not OS problem). I worked with the vendor very hard and we got the issue resolved over the period of a few months. Some suggested we switch to windows. Myself and my contact at the software vendor didn't think it was a good idea. In fact, it wouldn't have been a good idea, because there was a corruption in the data itself that was crashing it. An OS switch would have been loads of time and effort, just to have the problem still be there.
The fact that he never even returned Red Hat's calls leads me to believe he really didn't want the problem fixed. He wanted to make Linux look as bad as possible to his superiors so he could switch to what he really wanted. I doubt the whole operating system crashed. A misconfigured SAP was probably crashing and he was too incompetant to be able to tell the difference.
Also, what lameass autopatches on a mission critical server? That's such an incredibly bad idea. I'm sure all Red Hat's patches are of the highest quality, but if downtime could be a problem at all, take 20 minutes out of your day to look over the patches and make sure none will conflict with your particular setup. There's no replacement for human intervention if it's that important.
Ultimately I highly doubt the problems are rooted in Red Hat or SAP. They are rooted in a stubborn admin who didn't know what he's doing on Linux and found it easier to blame everyone else.
Another admin and I were trying to figure out good passwords for 4 users for sensitive data. We spent a good 20 minutes figuring out memorable passwords that were secure and had meaning. They very easy to remember because they all had meaning to that individual person.
Well... a few weeks later I'm in that dept. helping pull cable. Sure enough on a monitor is a yellow post-it with site address, username, and password. Right there on the monitor. We could have just as well made it gobbly-goo because they are gonna stick it on the monitor regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
4 red hat 7.3 DNS servers. Have never required a reboot since installation.
1 red hat 6 machine that lasted 6 years without an OS related reboot (the hardware started to give and the box had to be decommissioned)
1 database/web server running SLES 8 has gone over a year and a half without a reboot.
1 webserver running debian stable no reboot since installation
1 proxy server running SLES 9 w/ squid that was set up in under a 1/2 hour under emergency conditions (old proxy hardware died unexpectedly) running 20 days under extremely heavy load until new server came in.
1 database server running SLES 8. A year since last reboot.
And those are all the ancient boxes. We've got many more linux boxen that are too new to have aquired a long uptime.
From the article:
experiencing significant reliability issues resulting in higher total cost of ownership
*shrug* I've had none of these issues they speak of. All of our installs are quick, stable and long lasting. In fact, I've never had a production upgrade break anything, and never had an install take longer than a couple of hours in even the most complex of setups.
This whole "get the facts" campaign is just silly. I don't know why they keep on with it. I've been working with Linux for years and never run into any of the problems they have "documented".
Hey Balmer, want an anecdotal story of Windows breaking? Our mapping department had a Windows 2000 installation with their mapping software. One day it just breaks. 5 people standing around the box scratching our heads. No one had any clue why. Random reboots, blue screens, the whole works. We reinstall many times. Nothing. Do all the upgrades, patches and fixes. Nothing. Sounds like hardware, right? Nope. Upgraded to 2003 and worked fine since.
The fact that the box could have run 2 years without major issue then break out of nowhere with 5 very smart people trying to solve the issue and can't makes me wonder.
Get the real facts.
Much of the point of the blog was that open source accessability on open source (gnome in his example) works really well. His point is that Microsoft has terrible accessability API's. The only reason that decent software exists for the disabled is that hacks were created for Word. Custom scripts were created to suit word perfectly. Gnome on the other hand has a properly set up API. So as whole, open source has better accessability software. But for the specific case of Word on Windows that OpenOffice on Windows is behind. It would be equal if Microsoft and Various software makes would properly support the java accesability API, but they don't.
The idea of the hybrid isn't about directly saving money on gas. It's about changing attitiudes in the auto industry. Hybrids are the first of their kind to be mass produced by many car manufactors. It's gotten the ball rolling on mass producing hydrogen and natural gas powered vechiles as well. We've been stuck with basically the same power source for our cars for decades. By purchasing a hybrid you are telling the car makers that you _are_ interested in saving the environment and that you _are_ interested in getting away from foreign controlled oil. Purchasing a hybrid now isn't about saving money on gas today, it's about saving the earth and being self reliant in 30 years. The narrow mindedness of articles such as this show that the author's have little insight as to the long term goal of the hybrid.
Because a given subject is once discussed on slashdot, does that mean stories can NEVER be posted about it again? Only one Sony rootkit story allowed? Do they have to always post the "this was previously discussed here" everytime a story has anything to do with a previous story? There's a difference between posting the EXACT same article, and an article on a similiar subject.
The anti virus companies are pussies. They are too afriad of the legal recourse of removing said product. That's why we can have updated anti virus on every single one of our computers here and still have machines loaded with spyware. It's almost pointless. The modern day malware isn't the I love you virus, it's the sony rootkit's. And they are just too afraid to remove the Sony rootkit's of the world.
We don't _need_ ipv6 this very second. It's not cool or sexy. It doesn't really bring anything fun and/or critial to the table. It was developed to help catch future problems of ipv4 before they became critical. It's not going to be a hot button issue until we REALLY need ipv6. At that point the unprepared are going to be running around like bumbling idiots screaming that they did not get enough warning. The only thing that could really change that fact about human nature would be intervention from various governments. And we've seen how well that worked with HDTV.
It may seem to the public like they are one big entity, but in reality they are a huge company with many opinions within. This is really true of any organization. Even within our own department here there are huge disparities of attitudes. Sometimes a project will arise that only needs one programmer and they get free reign on how to do things. Invariably they will write it in their favorite language on their favorite platform. If an outside person were to see my programs they would think "wow, they really have a commitment to open source". Then later, "wow, a program in VB? This seems out of character for them".
Since Novell has taken over, they've open sourced a lot of suse. Yast is now open source. The basic suse linux distribution is now freely available immediatly (there used to be a wait time and ftp only installs). Maybe there have been massive internal changes that aren't aparent to the public, but it seems to me they've become more open lately. The quality of Suse offerings have become better as well. I tried suse a few years ago and wasn't terribly impressed. Lately however, I've been inclined to use it on my desktop and some servers.
going to members.lycos.co.uk/sugi brings up some other files that look like they are phishers too. I think rather than immediatly shut them down, it would be more effective to set up a sting. Lycos could retrieve the last ip address to log into that account. If it wasn't a compromised machine, they could contact the isp. When the next login is attempted, they could have the isp locate which customer it is, and bust down their door.
It's really sad that the AV companies haven't tried to shut the site down via contacting Lycos. It really shows me their commitment to security for the sake of security.
The more I learn, the less I know
I heard that a few years ago. The older I get, the truer it becomes. The more I learn about life in general gives me insight as to what's possible out there, and as to what I haven't accomplished!
I think they sat down and did the numbers and decided that the number of users they would actually have to support in practice would be enough to either break even, or be a slight loss (but a enough a gain in popularity that other Asian countries would want in and be good in the long term).
My opinion on what they should use? Create their own based on Debian or Asianux. Debian is by far the best building block distribution I've seen. Asianux has the lure of having the specific goal to localize to Asia as best possible. China's Red Flag linux is based off this. It becomes a source of national pride.
>On a more inflamatory note do we even want those VB programmers to develop for Linux?
Probably not. It may be a stereo type, but in general, VB code is sub-par. If a given VB programmer is of quality, they've probably jumped ship already to one of the many other RAD languages. Obviously some people still have to keep up with legacy applications; but maintaining software written for windows 98 becomes more of a problem with each release cycle. That can't go on forever!
The effort that would go into trying to support VB could be spent in improving one of the many awesome open source RAD environments. The community would spend all this time and effort, for what? To support a legacy piece of crap? In reality, VB was/is rarely used as the right tool for the job. There are a glut of VB applications that, when translated to the Unix world, would be much more effective as a shell script, ruby/phython/perl/etc script, Java/C/C++ program, etc etc. I'm all for supporting quality languages. But I don't see the point in trying to bring over a language that will create our own September that never ended.
>>Blue Gene/L and ASC Purple together are expected to consume 10 megawatts of the 45-megawatt capacity that LLNL's Terascale Simulation Facility can supply for computing and cooling.
Sadly, the mcfly computer won't get off the ground until it can get it's 1.21 gigawatts.
YEP~ I found that a little sketch too. These people were sophisticated enough to come up with a laser guided titty milker but have an uneeded hard drive? I've been using IDE-CF adapters myself with 256 mb CF cards. I would have thought they would want a system like that solid state. The only reason I could think of them not wanting to use flash would be if it does constant writes (which will kill most flash memory after awhile). Many CF's and the like are rated at 1,000,000 writes before beginning to fail. I'd think if they were just careful how often they wrote to it, it wouldn't be a problem. I also found the use of Red Hat 7.3 a little suspect as well. Wouldn't you want something like uclibc buildroot, damn small linux, or even just strip down debian stable? You are wasting precious cpu cycles by running something that heavy. Maybe for development it's ok, but it just seems like a really odd choice being an old OS but still really bulky.
or maybe the fact that this story was chosen to be posted in the first place would be reason to have the disclaimer.
k thx think before you post n00b. har har har~~~~~~
I think consolidation would be good for Novell at this point. They offer A LOT of services and software. Not all of them being highly profitable. However, though not seeing the numbers, I can't imagine groupwise being a loser for them. In fact, I consider it to be one of their stronger products. Instead of dumping certain services all together, I think certain products should be dropped and their engineers refocused. For example, they used to (still might?) have a radius server. Currently they put resources into freeradius to help it interact with e-directory. Bam. A full fledged radius server better than their own with minimal of effort.
They could dump their printing services and integrate with cups rather easily I think. Also, border manager should be dumped in favor of iptables and squid. They should phase out their current myriad of configuration tools in favor of yast. Give it an online component that is fully compatable with yast modules. Hell, don't tell anyone and just revamp iManager to do this. Groupwise really has no open source analog imo. It provides pop,imap,smtp,news, and client reader abilities all in one. These are all available as individual open source projects. However, none are as integrated as groupwise. If anything, revamp it and make it use edirectory natively.
Ideally it would be nice for Novell to develop a few of their key services and attempt to integrate with other open source projects on others. This way they have a few really kickass services that integrate really well with some kick ass open source projects. We're doing Freeradius + edirectory for Wifi and it's working really well for us. I'd like to see more of this!
Ummmm, I read through that link provided. Starter edition is going to be software controlled at being able to use only 256 megabytes of ram? Are you kidding me? It's meant for first time PC users. I can't imagine even getting an OEM first time PC with less than 512 megabytes of ram.
J2EE based web services are 900 pound gorillas. Sure, amazon etc use it, but I don't spend my day making amazon.com's. I spend it getting requests from various departments for single purpose programs that are web based (so we don't have to maintain yet another fat client on the desktop). These simplier frameworks make it possible to make quality web applications quickly. Most of these programs are just a varation on a theme. 2 or 3 tables with maybe a foreign key and 3 or 4 web pages. These frameworks make it possible for me to give them a finished application in a couple of hours so I can spend my time doing more important stuff.
A lot of companies pull shit like this. At any given time it's more a question of who's getting raped and who's doing the raping. I agree it's not Dell's fault in this case, but it doesn't mean that at any given time Dell wouldn't be ready to screw MS at any given chance.
It's like MS breaking off negotiations with the RIAA. They are both evil, just turns out RIAA tried to greed the greester and got pwnd.
Ok, I wouldn't be pissed off if it was just internet speculation that they were going to release a web office. But it wasn't. It was some jackass at Sun making this out to be the next internet revolution. All it did was make him look like a jackass, Sun look like a jackass, and make google look like a jackass by association. If I were google I would have cut my losses there and backed out as carefully as possible. Google is very quiet and humble about their releases. They don't talk about the next big thing and revolutions. The deal is next to pointless. It's not worth a shitty distribution deal to have your company made to look a fool...
What leads you to believe this? What online application does google currently have that is slow, poorly designed, and ad-ridden (google ads aren't really intrusive)?
I think there are a few factors that are making this the right time for office apps on the web.
For one, I agree that wider bandwidth combined with low latency has made it more practical to send data back and forth between browser and server seemlessly.
Another is the modern browser. It isn't just netscape and IE anymore each trying to do things their own way. There's Opera, khtml based, and gecko based browsers out there trying to be standards compliant. IE is still a pain in the ass to work with. However, in general my code works with khtml, gecko, and opera if I code for standards. A modern standards compliant browser can do a lot of cool shit.
Teaching an old dog new tricks. For the most part, not a lot has changed in the past 2 or 3 years as far as the technology behind this goes. However, a lot of people are taking a second look at stuff that's been there a long time and saying "I think there's more that can be done with this technology". And they are pulling off some amazing things.
Sadly, because google is working with Sun, the whole thing will probably be in Java. Which really isn't anything revolutionary. It'll probably be an openoffice port completely in java that'll run on the desktop anyway. I have yet to see Sun not push java on every project in the past 5 years. Maybe they will suprise me and do the whole thing in css, javascript, xml, and html. Not holding my breath though.
It seems like the admin never really wanted to be on Linux in the first place and his knowledge of Linux is highly lacking. The fact that he knew nothing more to describe his problem than "blue screen of death" shows which OS he wanted in the begining.
I've had ongoing issues like that before of random crashes spaced weeks apart (userland software problem, not OS problem). I worked with the vendor very hard and we got the issue resolved over the period of a few months. Some suggested we switch to windows. Myself and my contact at the software vendor didn't think it was a good idea. In fact, it wouldn't have been a good idea, because there was a corruption in the data itself that was crashing it. An OS switch would have been loads of time and effort, just to have the problem still be there.
The fact that he never even returned Red Hat's calls leads me to believe he really didn't want the problem fixed. He wanted to make Linux look as bad as possible to his superiors so he could switch to what he really wanted. I doubt the whole operating system crashed. A misconfigured SAP was probably crashing and he was too incompetant to be able to tell the difference.
Also, what lameass autopatches on a mission critical server? That's such an incredibly bad idea. I'm sure all Red Hat's patches are of the highest quality, but if downtime could be a problem at all, take 20 minutes out of your day to look over the patches and make sure none will conflict with your particular setup. There's no replacement for human intervention if it's that important.
Ultimately I highly doubt the problems are rooted in Red Hat or SAP. They are rooted in a stubborn admin who didn't know what he's doing on Linux and found it easier to blame everyone else.
This is going to happen regardless...
Another admin and I were trying to figure out good passwords for 4 users for sensitive data. We spent a good 20 minutes figuring out memorable passwords that were secure and had meaning. They very easy to remember because they all had meaning to that individual person.
Well... a few weeks later I'm in that dept. helping pull cable. Sure enough on a monitor is a yellow post-it with site address, username, and password. Right there on the monitor. We could have just as well made it gobbly-goo because they are gonna stick it on the monitor regardless.
Then again, there sure are a lottttttt of ads in flash.