17 Nov
2011
17 Nov
'11
9:44 a.m.
On 17 November 2011 03:24, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
I suppose it depends on your level of expertise. When I ran a
DEC-based server network in the early 1990s, with fairly minimal
knowledge of VMS except as a user, I found DEC support /excellent/ on
a number of occasions. At that time, the fact that the call made its
own way through callcentres around the world when I pulled an
all-nighter was very impressive: whoever I spoke to, from India to
Australia, knew the whole history and could hand-hold me through the
next step.
Best IT support I've ever had, in fact.
Compare that to the bad joke that is vendor support in the PC
industry, where the only thing they can really do right, if you've
paid enough, is come round, swap out the affected device and replace
it with a new one.
This is why virtualisation and so on is getting so big, indirectly.
There are few really clueful people in industry IT any more. The
answers to most problems are:
* If it's hardware, power-cycle it. If that doesn't work, replace it.
* If it's software, wipe it & reinstall.
So being able to migrate system images to heterogenous hardware, and
just restore new blank system images with a click, are /massively/
useful tools.
Overall, oh hell yes.
Which is why it's annoying that one of the business arguments
/against/ FOSS is that either there is no support or that it's really
expensive.
Free community support is generally more use than the professional
paid-for stuff from the vendors, IMHO.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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The
"support" which is supposedly the privilege of paying through the
nose and enduring lock-in - frequently just isn't really there.
I know.
I went through my larval phase under VMS, back in the '80s, when DEC
was still DEC.
I - well, formally, the lab I hung out at - must have generated at
least a half-dozen SPRs (then-DEC's name for bug reports). ?The only
one I ever saw any response at all to was the one that was a total
brainfart of my own. That's
just things get done, in Proprietary Land... unless, I
suppose, you are Fortune 100 and can use a red telephone.
Even that doesn't always help.
I once worked on a robotics project that involved JPL and some Sun
hardware. ?JPL bought the right to internal support from Sun, as in,
we could call and talk to one of their internal techs.
We tried it. ?More than once (I don't recall exactly how often). ?Every
time, we already knew more about the thing we were asking about than
the tech we spoke with did.
And this was the special spend-oodles-of-money level of support.
I am very thoroughly cynical about proprietary vendor "support".