Why redhat will never get another dime of my money.

[Michael Halligan]

Over the past 8 years, I've deployed about 1800 redhat servers, 1/2 of them being in turnkey beowulf clusters,
the other half at various companies I've worked at. I have in plans, over the next year, to deploy anotherr
300 linux servers. RedHat will not be involved in any of my future deployments.

Why?

On March 15th, RedHat released a new version of rhncfg. This new version, typical with redhat, was not properly
qa'd, and it brought our current development project to a grinding halt, making 100 servers that were due to
be deployed wednesday of last week unusable.  

I called up tech support, but it was 20 minutes to shift change so I was shrugged off, and told to call the australians. The
error I was getting was somewhat cryptic, and was obviously a bug in some part of the satellite server.. Calling up Australia
is like trying to get a newborn infant to perform amazing acts of tensor calculus.  It's always the same script :

Customer : I have a serious problem with my satellite server.
Australian : "Let me go find our satellite guy, please hold"
- Bad hold music ensues -
- 15 minutes later - 
Australian : Hello?
Customer : You thought I'd let you off that easy? I'm still herre
Australian : Right. Our satellite guy is, uhh, busy right now, can he call you back?
Customer : Sure, you can reach me at these 3 numbers, or in an emergency you can page my wife and she'll drag me out of bed, I need this fixed.
Australian: You'll be called within the hour.

16 hours pass, time to call tech support and get the americans.

Usually at this stage, there's a satellite "expert" who fixed your problem. Not this time. This time I'm given the shrug off again and again,
until, FIVE DAYS LATER, I call up my account rep and inform him of the unacceptable level of support that I have paid 10s of thousands of dollars
for.  He assures me he's talking to the head of GSS and it will be fixed blah blah blah.. Hearded this with 4 of the last 10 tech support issues
I've had with satellite server.

Now it's been a week. I've been given a fix that would work if I were to manually rebuild 100+ servers. Thanks guys. I stayed up until 3am last night
working with the morons in australia, trying to get a working fix together.. I was promised that there would be one no later than 24 hours after that
call, but no earlier than 8 hours. I figured it is what it is.

I wake up, all happy and bubbly that my problem might be fixed, and the 10 senior developers I'm supporting might actually be able to deploy their software, and that the company who is all anxiously waiting the next release phase of the product that we're devoting so much capital into, will finally happen, is all knocking on my door, 40 door knocks this morning already, saying "Are we good to go?"

I check my e-mail. Sorry. We have to put this fix through regression testing, maybe on april 4th it will work.

I believe we paid $50k for satellite server, a server to run satellite server, and all of our provisioning entiltements & OS licenses. The irony here, is microsoft would have been cheaper. The other irony here, is if this one little package were open-sourced, instead of proprietary to redhat, I could have changed the ONE BROKEN LINE OF CODE in the software, rebuild the package myself, and install it.

Thanks redhat, you have assured that I am moving my infrastructure to SuSE & Zenworks, and that our future plans, as well as mine as a consultant, will not include a software distribution with the word HAT in it.








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Michael T. Halligan
MyPoints Beta
Infrastructure Engineer