Web Server OS

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

That's quite a difference. I'm guessing it would have to do with volume and diversification of revenue.

Having used RH for a couple of years in a production environment, I don't think we've had to use our support contract at all.

Being in Microsoft enterprise support my view is a bit biased of course but I think MS support is one of the best reasons for being an enterprise customer. You call in with a server down, hemoraging cash, and stumped and the dudes here will hook you up. We pull out all the stops to get things fixed.

The critsit process available to our premier customer is insane. There are automatic escalation triggers that get your case one hop from the dev team in under 4 hrs. RREs (rapid response engineers) sit around with a packed bag waiting to catch a flight if it doesn't look like we'll fix things in the first couple hours on the phone.

The reason we CAN pull out all the stops and help the customer with no real regard to cost is because we charge the product team for every case. It leaves us free to help the customer no questions asked and forces the product team to pay the price if they write buggy code (cases become free if it's determined to be a problem of ours). Redhat (and the like)... pfft. That's a profit center you're talking to when you call them. I'm sure they have great techs and all but if they aren't careful of how much support they give, they'll go out of business. Side effect of trying to make money off something that's free.

How they manage to charge more for tech support than we do for the product is beyond me. Poor business model or something. I'm not a bean counter so I don't know.


sourceninja: yeah heard good things about Sun tech support. Good stuff I hear. IBM is the same way...great tech support, but with them oh boy are you gonna pay for it. Some of the big OEMs have good tech support too (enterprise side at least). Compaq comes to mind.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

That's quite a difference. I'm guessing it would have to do with volume and diversification of revenue.

Having used RH for a couple of years in a production environment, I don't think we've had to use our support contract at all.

Being in Microsoft enterprise support my view is a bit biased of course but I think MS support is one of the best reasons for being an enterprise customer. You call in with a server down, hemoraging cash, and stumped and the dudes here will hook you up. We pull out all the stops to get things fixed.

The critsit process available to our premier customer is insane. There are automatic escalation triggers that get your case one hop from the dev team in under 4 hrs. RREs (rapid response engineers) sit around with a packed bag waiting to catch a flight if it doesn't look like we'll fix things in the first couple hours on the phone.

The reason we CAN pull out all the stops and help the customer with no real regard to cost is because we charge the product team for every case. It leaves us free to help the customer no questions asked and forces the product team to pay the price if they write buggy code (cases become free if it's determined to be a problem of ours). Redhat (and the like)... pfft. That's a profit center you're talking to when you call them. I'm sure they have great techs and all but if they aren't careful of how much support they give, they'll go out of business. Side effect of trying to make money off something that's free.

How they manage to charge more for tech support than we do for the product is beyond me. Poor business model or something. I'm not a bean counter so I don't know.

They offer more than just tech support for the money, and some of their add-ons aren't free. It's not a new business model, but not many companies that I can think of off hand have pulled it off. I hope they manage to do well, competition benefits everyone.

sourceninja: yeah heard good things about Sun tech support. Good stuff I hear. IBM is the same way...great tech support, but with them oh boy are you gonna pay for it. Some of the big OEMs have good tech support too (enterprise side at least). Compaq comes to mind.

I don't know if I would say Sun has great tech support, unless you're paying out the rear or have some direct phone numbers. I remember having a manager having to go through the sales rep to get a satisfactory answer to some questions. And it was kind of funny when a couple of engineers came out to setup our 4800, sporting Toshiba laptops, running XP, and playing some Microsoft branded game while waiting for some files to load.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I don't know if I would say Sun has great tech support, unless you're paying out the rear or have some direct phone numbers. I remember having a manager having to go through the sales rep to get a satisfactory answer to some questions. And it was kind of funny when a couple of engineers came out to setup our 4800, sporting Toshiba laptops, running XP, and playing some Microsoft branded game while waiting for some files to load.

Hm. I won't argue. My positive reviews of Sun are second hand. Heard good things though.

As for competition: yea that's always good as long as the loser is willing to go home. It's not a good thing if someone wins a FAIR fight and then the rules are changed and the game started again. Kick the loser off the court and let the next challenger step up.

Right now Linux is fighting the fair fight so good for them. Makes us stay on our toes over here.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I don't know if I would say Sun has great tech support, unless you're paying out the rear or have some direct phone numbers. I remember having a manager having to go through the sales rep to get a satisfactory answer to some questions. And it was kind of funny when a couple of engineers came out to setup our 4800, sporting Toshiba laptops, running XP, and playing some Microsoft branded game while waiting for some files to load.

Hm. I won't argue. My positive reviews of Sun are second hand. Heard good things though.

My experiences may be a bit biased, I didn't care much for the sales guy, and I don't think he cared for us.

As for competition: yea that's always good as long as the loser is willing to go home. It's not a good thing if someone wins a FAIR fight and then the rules are changed and the game started again. Kick the loser off the court and let the next challenger step up.

Right now Linux is fighting the fair fight so good for them. Makes us stay on our toes over here.

The market is big enough for multiple competitors, and I think it's only a good thing. Customers win with more options, companies win by having to step up and do the right thing. Of course, everyone has to play by the rules for this to work, and how often to corporations play by the rules?

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
The market is big enough for multiple competitors, and I think it's only a good thing. Customers win with more options, companies win by having to step up and do the right thing. Of course, everyone has to play by the rules for this to work, and how often to corporations play by the rules?

I just don't want to see litigation instead of innovation. Novell is gone because they never got around to creating a viable application server. Wordperfect is gone because you had to hit Ctrl-Shift-alt-f11 or something to make bullet points instead of hitting the GUI button. They'll all bitch about the "monopoly" though :roll:

 

[jd90]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: jd90
You can also get free 180 day trials from the Microsoft website of enterprise edition. If you get a few and are willing to reformat every 3 months, you're good to go!

Uh....180 days is six months....

Ok, so my math sucks! Who ever used math anyways!?!?!? ;-)

 

[Nothinman]

Wordperfect is gone because you had to hit Ctrl-Shift-alt-f11 or something to make bullet points instead of hitting the GUI button

Totally OT, but Word is absolutely one of the worst apps ever produced by MS. The autoformatting that it guess at is almost never right, when doing documentation I spend ~75% of my time fixing the formatting and trying to trick Word into doing what I want. Sure it's probably a result of my ignorance about how to properly use Word, but things like bulleted or numbered lists should 'just work' and they don't.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Totally OT, but Word is absolutely one of the worst apps ever produced by MS.

WordPerfect 5.1 forever!!!

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Wordperfect is gone because you had to hit Ctrl-Shift-alt-f11 or something to make bullet points instead of hitting the GUI button

Totally OT, but Word is absolutely one of the worst apps ever produced by MS.

Just as OT, but I'll have to say Outlook 2003 ranks right up there too.
Couldn't help myself from saying that since we recently "upgraded" from Office 2000 to Office 2003, and I've had so many annoying problems with O2003 it's driving me insane...in fact I'm quite sure I would've had to be commited to a psychiatrical ward already if I didn't spend 80% of my time using Mozilla on my Linux box...

And to say something relevant to the thread(somewhat at least ), I've been rather happy with Redhat's support.
Only used it twice since we started using RHEL, and both times it was for low severity problems that just bored me, so I figured I might as well use the support we pay for and bore them instead
They worked both problems out more or less right away, and I actually found they had a bit of humor as well, I like that.

 

[RebateMonger]

What kind of problems are you seeing with Outlook 2003?

I always kinda' hated Outlook when installed on a workgroup. But, when combined with Exchange, it's been really good for me and my clients on SBS 2003 domains. And, of course, if you're using Exchange, there really is no other choice that makes sense for Windows clients.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
What kind of problems are you seeing with Outlook 2003?

I always kinda' hated Outlook when installed on a workgroup. But, when combined with Exchange, it's been really good for me and my clients on SBS 2003 domains. And, of course, if you're using Exchange, there really is no other choice that makes sense for Windows clients.

Well, this really is for another thread, but...ah screw it
Randomly stops processing my rules, that sucks cause I'm signed to a whole load of mailing lists, so it clutters my inbox pretty nadly

Randomly "disconnects" my PST files where I store my mailing list mails(and no, this is not the cause of the above, this happens like once a week tops, the above happens damn near daily).
Restarting Outlook solves the above.

When selecting a bunch of mails(say cleaning out some trash in the inbox), if a mail shows up in the inbox, everything becomes unselected, guess this could be by design, but that's a pretty fvcking crappy design.

Just a few I could think about off the top of my head, there are lots of little things that add up as well.
Overall, I didn't mind Outlook 2000 too much, but Outlook 2003 is definitely on my ****** list.

Oh and since we upgraded, the IMC and IS services on our Exchange server have started crashing on a weekly basis, I guess this could be some compatibility problem(we're still on Ex 5.5, upgrade pending), but still, it'd be nice if it would just say so instead of crashing the server.

 

[Jay]

If you are having difficulties, Xampp http://www.apachefriends.org/en/ is a great user friendly application which you can use on MS or Linux.

 

[djdrastic]

Sunner , your 2nd problem . I've had the EXACT same problem , before and it irritates the shite out of me

 

[Brazen]

In case nobody else has mentioned this... I just want to point out that while running Apache on Windows sounds like it would be more secure, Apache does have known exploits and there is not way (that I know of) to have automatic scheduled patching for Apache on Windows - you would have to be sure to check periodically for new versions for security patches. However with IIS on Windows, you get nightly checks for updates. Of course the best route would be Apache on Linux, since it can be easily automatically patched on a schedule using yum on Fedora or apt on Debian.

 

[RebateMonger]

Unfortunately, many Microsoft patches require a reboot, so people seldom set servers for automatic updates anyway.

 

[nweaver]

not to mention that it's IIS5 on XP, which is not as secure out of box, or in the long run, as IIS6

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Sure it's probably a result of my ignorance about how to properly use Word, but....

Yeah, probably.

 

[Nothinman]

Yeah, probably.

But isn't it supposed to be easy to use?

 

[imported_goku]

I think the OP should have his windows based server do what he needs to do in the mean time and figure out the linux thing on another machine so he doesn't feel pressured when learning this stuff. I can see where he's coming from with this stuff..

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Yeah, probably.

But isn't it supposed to be easy to use?

Yeah, not really sure how you are managing to screw it up.

 

[Nothinman]

Yeah, not really sure how you are managing to screw it up.

I'm not the only one, because most of our department here bitches about having to use word to do documentation.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Yeah, not really sure how you are managing to screw it up.

I'm not the only one, because most of our department here bitches about having to use word to do documentation.

You can add my department at work to that list.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Yeah, not really sure how you are managing to screw it up.

I'm not the only one, because most of our department here bitches about having to use word to do documentation.

You can add my department at work to that list.

Just so I'm clear. None of you people can make a bullet list?

 

[Nothinman]

Just so I'm clear. None of you people can make a bullet list?

Sure we can, it's just more work than it should be and editing that list afte the initial creation is problematic at best. It's even worse when it's a numbered list.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Just so I'm clear. None of you people can make a bullet list?

Sure we can, it's just more work than it should be and editing that list afte the initial creation is problematic at best. It's even worse when it's a numbered list.

Well, I never use bullet lists, I just type everything the way I would in Wordpad, only I save it as a .doc because someone thinks that it's a good idea to make the file 20x as large for no particular reason.
My problem arises when I have to deal with other people's documents, with tables and stuff(and yeah, bullet lists have cause me problems too, I guess I could work them out given some time, but it just seems so much easier to use notepad, in fact I'd say it's far far easier to learn vi than Word).