RHEL/CentOS support [was Re:Which Linux distro do you use at work?]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Timothy Hildred <timhildred-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| > The idea was that RHEL always involves support and they don't want to
| > have you pay for one machine but get, in effect, support for a bunch.

| My understanding is that the approach that Red Hat has taken in the past is
| that they'll make you recreate any issues requiring support from the CentOS
| boxes on the RHEL boxes as well.

I don't own any RHEL licenses.  I do run CentOS.  I've been able to
post to the Red Hat bugzilla and get action on a kernel bug.  Since I
was the only one observing it, I suggested that they *not* fix it
since it might cause problems for others.

On that machine, whenever I want to adopt a new kernel from CentOS
(Red Hat), I have to take the source package, suppress one of the Red
Hat patches, and build my own kernel.

Anyway, the point is, I'm actually impressed that they take bug
reports from CentOS folks and act on them.  Not the same as support,
but remarkable anyway.

(I actually contribute to fixes to Openswan, which is included in RHEL, so 
it goes both ways, but they don't know that.)

On the other hand, I've found CentOS support fairly weak.  They usually 
punt things to "upstream" because they are unwilling to diverge from it.

Perhaps my meaning of "support" is one-sided.  Usually I'm dealing with a 
real misbehaviour of the system, not the user.

For user misbehaviours, I generally find mailing lists, fora, and google 
are the best support tools.
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