[ale] Suse vs. Ubuntu. Is is worth the time to switch to ubuntu?

Wed Aug 1 09:37:38 EDT 2007

For most folks that know what they're doing calling support is usually
an act of desperation (or worse yet a matter of policy because the
powers that be can't stand paying for support if you're not calling -
this was a maddening fact of life at a prior job).   Usually one has to
do some major escalation because front line support for everyone assumes
the callers are morons (and having once done support for customer sites
I can tell you that about 75% of the time they are).

You're final sentence, however, seems to make the point I was making -
you use a distro that Oracle has "certified" so you have the opportunity
to make the call and not immediately get laughed off the phone.

Also while my example was Oracle I did note that there are several other
commercial products that are only "certified" on these "commercial"
distros.

Not being a DBA I will say that the few calls I've made to Oracle about
our RHEL systems running RAC and Mobile Lite were much more productive
than similar calls to Dell for Linux support.   On the flip side the
number one annoyance I have about Oracle (and all DBMS companies) is
they always assume the issue is the OS first and the DB last - our DBAs
always look at the 15 possible causes of any given issue and seize on
the last one that says "or it may be a disk or OS issue" and ignore all
the DB specific troubleshooting steps suggested.

I'm not a huge fan of Oracle but will say that it did scale up at a
prior job in a way that Sybase would not.   My major knock against
Oracle now is that having gotten the DB tier and the application tier
(Oracle EBusiness) they now want to have the OS itself (Unbreakable
Linux).   They haven't quite reached the M$ level of evil in my mind yet
but they're not far from it.

________________________________

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Sid
To: ale at ale.org
Lane
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 8:50 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Suse vs. Ubuntu. Is is worth the time to switch to
ubuntu?

while your points are factually correct I would argue that Oracle
Support is pretty much worthless for anything beyond basic
install/config issues anyway (at least w/DB, apps may be different).
I've been an Oracle DBA for 10 yrs now and I've yet to have them
actually solve a problem I couldn't myself or get from a group like
this.  in my most recent TAR I was getting 600s during "alter database
open resetlogs" (this is profoundly BAD for you Oracle moguls) and they
were asking me things like "um, does the directory for the redo logs
exist?" (um, yes & that wouldn't throw a 600 anyway) and "um, can you
send us the alert file?" after I already sent them the udump (if you've
never seen an ORA-00600 in an alert file all it says is "ORA-00600 - see
this udump for details") 

that said, we do run our Oracle on SLES so we can at least have the
chance of them helping on the rare occasion we do log a case...

On 7/31/07, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com> wrote:

Commercial support isn't just about paying someone for tech support.  It

also includes what other commercial products are supported on the
platform.  e.g. If you're planning to use Oracle products they only
"certify" RHEL/SUSE and their own so called "Unbreakable Linux".  Not to

say someone couldn't make it work on another flavor (I've forced our
DBAs to use FC6 for Oracle R12) but it does take some work and you'll be
SOL if you try to call Oracle about it because they'll say its not a 
"supported platform".

Though I talk about Oracle above there are many other commercial
products that are in this boat.   (Not talking about whether
non-commercial alternatives such as MySQL are "better".  Oracle DB is 
used by many folks using Oracle or SAP applications that don't have a
choice of DB.)

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto: ale-bounces at ale.org
To: ale at ale.org
<mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org> ] On Behalf Of
Brian Pitts
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 12:13 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Suse vs. Ubuntu. Is is worth the time to switch to
ubuntu?

Jeff Lightner wrote: 
> If you're looking for commercial support like Suse has you might want
to
> consider RedHat rather than Ubuntu.

Canonical will gladly sell you support for Ubuntu.

http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid

Coverage        9 x 5   24 x 7
Desktop support         $250 (USD)*     $900 (USD)*
Server support  $750 (USD)*     $2750 (USD)*
Thin client and cluster support         $1200 (USD)*    $4000 (USD)* 
Term    1 year  1 year
Live phone support      Included        Included
Email support   Included        Included

They just announced a new tool available to support customers
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070724-ars-at-ubuntu-live-canonic
al-releases-web-based-server-management-platform-for-support-subscribers
.html

Landscape is a web-based systems management platform that simplifies 
administration of desktop and server computers running Ubuntu. Landscape

makes it possible to remotely deploy patches, updates, and packages. It
also provides extensive support for reporting and resource-usage 
analysis across groups of systems. In order to provide more flexible
group management, Landscape allows administrators to organize groups of
systems by using tags. Launchpad also includes an auditing framework
that can show a history of actions performed on the local system as well

as changes made by an administrator through Landscape. Landscape has
support for "semi-connected management" functionality, which will queue 
operations for systems that aren't currently online and then perform the

tasks when the system is once again network accessible. Semi-connected
management makes it possible to manage systems that don't consistently 
have connectivity, like laptops that are deployed in the field.
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