Re: [rhn-users] New version on redhat - Fedora + RHN?

[Ken Snider <ksnider flarn com>]

Michael Gargiullo wrote:

> Neither do we.  I mean I understand they need to make money.  We
> purchased several dozen enterprise entitlements, and didn't renew them
> when we got the news that the regular product line is being
> discontinued.

We aren't renewing either.. and this is the reason:

*every* RH product now comes with RHN. From RHEL AS, all the way down to 
their boxes workstation product.

And now, with them not supporting Fedora, there's no product that doesn't 
come with an RHN subscription any longer.

In short, the "Update" RHN entitlement is now totally worthless. I'm sure 
they'll "upsell" you the Management or Monitoring package, but I haven't 
even seen that as an option.. Looks like if you want to go from "Update" to 
"Management", you pay the full price. A poor choice on the part of Red Hat.

Their "Monitoring" product confuses the hell out of me. I was *totally* 
gung-ho to sell it to our execs, but you need *hardware* to monitor the 
systems? We have 20 co-located facilities! I'm not paying for 20 dedicated 
"monitoring" appliances, that's nuts!

Between me and Michael, I'll bet RH is losing somewhere from $8-10K a year 
in RHN entitlements. They don't *want* this money?!

So, here's the deal. I need RHN. I need reliable updates. But their prices 
are insane, and I'm not prepared to to buy 75 copies of RHEL *per year*. Not 
even WS. Even WS nearly *triples* the cost (compared to ~$60/yr for RHN 
"Update" service).

And that doesn't even cover the other huge problem we have. Opterons. We 
need them, we want them. Red Hat wants $1992 *per year* for the software. 
Devel costs, right? *wrong*. A cmp was done on several RH9 rpms recompiled 
on Taroon (RHEL3 beta for AMD64), against the available RHEL3 recompiled 
RPMS. Guess what the results were? over *250* of those rpms were 
*identical*. That means over 250 packages *did not change* from RH9. At all. 
 combine this with the fact that "most" applications are 64-bit aware 
already anyway (for Solaris), and there's *no way* $2k/year is justified. 
That's half the cost of the SERVER, per YEAR! Here's hoping Fedora makes a 
version.

My plan? I'll be buying *one* copy of RHEL. I can't use the updates from RHN 
to redeploy on my other boxes, but I *can* recompile the SRPMS myself, which 
I intend to do.

So, I'll be rebuilding the entirety of RHEL3 on my "entitled" box, and use 
those SRPMS to build a "new" set of install ISO's, which I will use to 
install RHEL3 on all of our servers. Red hat gets $179 from us, per year. 
That's it. And the sad part is, we were prepared to pay them $6K/year already.

For reference, there are several projects underway to provide this very 
service (rebuilt, license-free versions of RHEL from the source RPMS):

http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhel-rebuild-l.html
http://caosity.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=53&op=page

And a note to Red Hat: It's not that I don't want to be a customer - it's 
that you are not providing me an option I can reasonably present to our 
CTO/CFO. Please, reconsider your product offerings. Either support Fedora in 
RHN, or gives us a RHEL build that costs less than *triple* the cost of RHN 
per year, at minimum. And please, offer a "WS Basic" version of RHEL for AMD64!

--
Ken Snider