On Mon, 2002-12-23 at 13:49, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am a little surprised that I haven't heard anyone on the new "product end
> of life" policy. Maybe I haven't been looking to well though...
RedHat is trying to make money.
I don't disparage RedHat for what they are doing.
They are not being "bad" or "evil" or anything like that....
No one should be expected to give things away for free.
For my personal uses of RedHat, (my home firewall and PC)
it is no big deal to upgrade my boxes to a new version once a year
or so. And I couldn't afford buying Windows 2000/XP and all the
software to set up firewalling/DHCP Cacheing DNS, Web Server, Mail
Server, Security programs, VPN services...
((( Not to mention the problems with consistency, stability
and PRIVACY/FREEDOM )))
I also would find
it expensive to pay about $800/yr to have AS on my boxes...
Also it would cramp my style to not have something closer to
the latest and greatest versions of toys that the 'base' distributions
offer.
Heck I usually have upgraded my personal boxes more than once
every 18 months anyway. I used to use Slackware in the
old days, but security wasn't as much of a concern back then.
The last few years I have skipped 7.0 and 7.1 went
straight from 6.2 to 7.2, then skipped 7.3 on my firewall and
went to 8.0 just last month. I upgraded my workstation from 7.3
to 8.0 in one day. (Yesterday)
Professionally it is a total different equation...
It is not practical to migrate our Web Services, NMS systems and
database applications to new versions of PHP/PERL/Apache/libc/binutils
and it is not feasible to ignore known security
vulnerabilities in servers that are used for business.
So what are the options? How do we cope with this?
If we only had a few servers (1-10) I would say that the Cost-Benefit
comparison of RH Advanced Server when compared to Solaris/HP-UX/Win with
the corresponding lock-ins of HW/SW and/or the TCO of possibly
maintaining our own tarball'd dists of Open Source packages for Solaris
or HP (or dealing with the variable quality of the packages from
Sunfreeware/HPPD, or the stability/support/security of Windows)
would still favor RH Advanced Server at a cost of 700-800 per year for
support.
However when we are talking about 30-50 servers that we need to keep
up2date and maintained, then the economy of scale kicks in, and RedHat
can't have their cake and eat it too. RedHat, *MUST* continue (AFAIK)
to distribute the SOURCE RPM's for the bundled binary RPM's of Open
Source packages that they ship out with Advanced server.
So, with 30-50 servers to maintain we will probably start maintaining
our own RH Advanced Server "rpbbuild" box. Where we keep downloading
and building Source RPM's as they are released, and with SSH and shared
keys we will be able (with a little scripting) to make a secure package
distribution system that will be a lot more work than up2date and rhn,
but worth less than 30 X 800 $/year
I explained to my RedHat Salesman that if we could pay for Advanced
Server in a way that reflected our alternative cost of scale....
full price for servers 1-5
80% for servers 5-10
70% for servers 10-15
60% for servers 15-20
50% for servers 20-25
and 40% for all servers over 25
That we would definitely buy and maintain support contracts on all
our Linux Servers that we need RedHat advanced server on.
This makes sense for RedHat to do as well. Because the cost of doing
good quality testing and packaging is fixed. After they make the
updates for Advanced server packages they are only paying for bandwidth.
And even that doesn't scale linearly, because most people with more than
a dozen servers will have a caching proxy server and with GPG key
checking on the packages and UseNOSSLForPackages turned on in up2date
I only download the packages once per office site.
I think that RedHat will probably do that...
If they don't, then I will be building a set of scripts to distribute
my rpmbuild'd Source Rpms that I will download for free from Redhat.
What are the downsides of this??? Well for one, I will have trouble
getting Support from Dell/Oracle/Veritas/Peregrine Systems/HighDeal
NetCool... However I get better support from the user groups for those
products than I do from the traditional support mechanisms anyway!
And, when you get to the *tough* support issues that are real bugs or
problems the "expert" support technicians aren't as by-the-book as the
on-the-phone help desk guys anyway. So I don't really see a downside.
-Ben.
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