Re: [Bacula-devel] [Bacula-users] Bacula status update + you can help

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

On Friday 29 September 2006 13:43, Alan Brown wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Kern Sibbald wrote:
> 
> >> One of the reason we dumped SLES on our production machines in favour of
> >> RHEL was that SUSE was consistently shipping with mismatching dynamic and
> >> static library versions - and would not fix it even when notified.
> >>
> >> SuSE may be great for home systems but having endured it (and SuSE's
> >> so-called "support desk") for 4 years, I do not believe it is suitable 
for
> >> enterprise or business production use.
> >
> > Well, with the exception of three things, I have found the installation 
and
> > stability 10x better than Fedora.
> 
> Fedora is by definition "bleeding edge" and we've frequently found that 
> Fedora won't even install on new hardware while RHEL will.

Yes, I like to be on current software but not the "bleeding edge".
RHEL is sometimes not as current as I would like, though they are excellent 
for their security updates.

> 
> > RHEL stability is exceptional, so I cannot
> > comment, but the SuSE installer is far superior to the RHEL installer.
> > However, I cannot afford to be on RHEL, and at least for the moment, would
> > prefer not to be on one of the "clones".
> 
> Centos is _very_ stable. RHEL can be licensed quite cheaply if you don't 
> buy the support package (about US$10/machine)

The last time I looked (some time ago), it was over $200/machine.  That is too 
much for me.  For a company or someone serious about servers, that's OK and 
quite far given their security updates.

> 
> > The second problem is that they don't take enough care to make sure that 
> > their updates have all dependencies resolved.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> This, plus their refusal to deal with people pointing it out even if they 
> have paid for support, plus the refusal to even talk to Novell management 
> when we escalated it) gives the impression of a bunch of surly teenagers 
> operating out of bedrooms rather than a professional software company.

Fortunately, I haven't seen that, and I hope it doesn't happen.  

> 
> > And finally, what is really disturbing me is this kernel oops.  It 
> > really killed me -- for two weeks I beat tried everything (lots of work) 
> > thinking it was a Bacula bug.  In the end, I had to "reluctantly" admit 
> > it was either a compiler or a kernel bug -- I've now proved it to be a 
> > kernel bug -- very frustrating.
> 
> Your experiemce is not unique.
> 
> >> Novell (SuSE's owners) management in the UK even tried to intervene on 
our
> >> behalf and were completely stonewalled by SuSE. If a company is this
> >> dysfunctional internally, then I don't hold out much hope for getting any
> >> problems fixed at all, let alone in a reasonable timeframe.
> >
> > I suspect that has changed and evolve even more in the future.
> 
> This was current as of June 2006.

Hmmm.

> 
> > PS: I'm going to test it against their SuSE 10.2 kernel (to be released 
> > in Dec if I remember right) and if it fails, I'll file a "blocker", 
> > which will ensure that it is fixed.
> 
> OpenSuse is similar to fedora - bleeding edge.

Well, up to today, I have found SuSE 10.1 very stable, and as far as I know 
they are not trying to put out a new version every 6 months (which IMO is the 
main cause of problems with Fedora).  Also as I said, without going into all 
the gory details, the installation is at least 10x better than anything I 
have ever seen (in short after loading the first of 4 CDs, my external CDROM 
drive for my laptop died, and I was left with a system that didn't even have 
a root login, but with little effort I was able to complete the installation 
via the network, it picked up where it left off -- no other distro can do 
that!  In addition, after getting all the right packages loaded, it even 
automatically reconfigured the screen to the correct driver, ...).

> 
> SLES is supposedly a more "stable" animal - and at US$1500 per machine per 
> year, I'd expect professional behaviour and responses, instead of refusal 
> to respond when serious deficiencies are uncovered.
> 
> AB
>