6 ms·

The only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support. There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear d

by mbakke 3y ago

The only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support. There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear down the monoculture.

chasil 3y ago
Rhel does things to their distribution that customers do not want. This is well-known. Two shining examples are the removal of older SAS controllers in the kernels of newer versions, and the fate of btrfs. OpenELA could easily grow in influence to a point where rhel will lose customers if they try it again. It will be interesting if such decisions push effective control of rhel to OpenELA. It could easily happen.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  Redhat doesn't ship btrfs because they don't have any engineers working on it and thus can't provide support for it. Anything that ships in RHEL is comes with a strong support guarantee that they just couldn't hold up for btrfs. The SAS controllers may be a similar thing, maybe they don't have the hardware anymore to regression test against.
  - chasil 3y ago
    Amazing how well btrfs works in Fedora. The first thing to do with a rhel install to restore complete functionality is to remove the stock kernel. With extreme prejudice.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      What support "guarantees" does Fedora come with? The two are not contradictory. Fedora's btrfs functionality can absolutely be exceptional - nothing about that means that Red Hat has engineers working on or able to effectively support it. Disclaimer: I am an ex-Red Hat employee, though I was nowhere near RHEL.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - chasil 3y ago
        If there is no value in the technology within it, then why grasp it? Let it go, and cut the Fedora/rhel tie. Conversely, there is no value in the limitations imposed upon rhel. OpenELA gives us a voice in letting them go.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    rather they don't have any customers demanding it. if they had, hiring engineers to support that should not be the problem. incidentally, i never had a chance to figure out what the big deal was with the centos stream change, because i was already forced to switch to debian because btrfs was removed from the centos kernel.
    - chasil 3y ago
      > i was already forced to switch to debian because btrfs was removed from the centos kernel. Funny!
    - p_l 3y ago
      CentOS being in lock-step with RHEL minus support also included certain certifications that applied to RHEL also applied to CentOS, most importantly if you were in the business of selling to US government or related customer.
- ungamedplayer 3y ago
  Btrfs was tech preview. There is no support or guarantee that tech previews remain in a release.
  - chasil 3y ago
    And there is no guarantee that we will not use the UEK, because the feature is compelling.
    - ungamedplayer 3y ago
      And you have that right. If uek meets your needs of support and gives you what you need and rhel does not you absolutely should use it.
spandextwins 3y ago
It's enterprise in that you pay for it, but their support sucks. We had lots of open tickets they never solved. Total waste of money. Instead of fixing the problems they went back and forth with us asking for more log files until they just closed out the ticket because of lack of activity. It was their lack of activity. At least Canonical/Ubuntu enterprise support stumbles into a solution and helps out.
- chasil 3y ago
  Oracle's UEKR4 stopped updating Intel microcode for several months (in the middle of the spectre/meltdown hysteria). After a community forum post, they demanded an open SR so I had the pleasure of explaining all of this again. Even with a support contract, sometimes they are amazingly obtuse. We dumped support. We are paying enough for the database as it is.
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  Really? It's been a while, but 5 years ago I worked for a company with a Red Hat support contract, and we found them incredibly helpful. Everyone we spoke to had deep Linux knowledge, and their team solved issues and gave us real worldn advice much faster and better than any vendor. I'd be sad if that's no longer true.
  - spandextwins 3y ago
    I remember thinking why don't they just do a WebEx with us to see what's going on. Nope, never. They just wanted us to ship logs to them and try random crap until they closed the ticket. Total waste of time and money.
    - ungamedplayer 3y ago
      Because there is legal complications in giving someone remote admin.
      - spandextwins 3y ago

by mbakke 3y ago

The only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support. There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear down the monoculture.

chasil 3y ago

Rhel does things to their distribution that customers do not want. This is well-known. Two shining examples are the removal of older SAS controllers in the kernels of newer versions, and the fate of btrfs. OpenELA could easily grow in influence to a point where rhel will lose customers if they try it again. It will be interesting if such decisions push effective control of rhel to OpenELA. It could easily happen.

nolist_policy 3y ago
Redhat doesn't ship btrfs because they don't have any engineers working on it and thus can't provide support for it. Anything that ships in RHEL is comes with a strong support guarantee that they just couldn't hold up for btrfs. The SAS controllers may be a similar thing, maybe they don't have the hardware anymore to regression test against.
- chasil 3y ago
  Amazing how well btrfs works in Fedora. The first thing to do with a rhel install to restore complete functionality is to remove the stock kernel. With extreme prejudice.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    What support "guarantees" does Fedora come with? The two are not contradictory. Fedora's btrfs functionality can absolutely be exceptional - nothing about that means that Red Hat has engineers working on or able to effectively support it. Disclaimer: I am an ex-Red Hat employee, though I was nowhere near RHEL.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - chasil 3y ago
      If there is no value in the technology within it, then why grasp it? Let it go, and cut the Fedora/rhel tie. Conversely, there is no value in the limitations imposed upon rhel. OpenELA gives us a voice in letting them go.
- em-bee 3y ago
  rather they don't have any customers demanding it. if they had, hiring engineers to support that should not be the problem. incidentally, i never had a chance to figure out what the big deal was with the centos stream change, because i was already forced to switch to debian because btrfs was removed from the centos kernel.
  - chasil 3y ago
    > i was already forced to switch to debian because btrfs was removed from the centos kernel. Funny!
  - p_l 3y ago
    CentOS being in lock-step with RHEL minus support also included certain certifications that applied to RHEL also applied to CentOS, most importantly if you were in the business of selling to US government or related customer.
ungamedplayer 3y ago
Btrfs was tech preview. There is no support or guarantee that tech previews remain in a release.
- chasil 3y ago
  And there is no guarantee that we will not use the UEK, because the feature is compelling.
  - ungamedplayer 3y ago
    And you have that right. If uek meets your needs of support and gives you what you need and rhel does not you absolutely should use it.

spandextwins 3y ago

It's enterprise in that you pay for it, but their support sucks. We had lots of open tickets they never solved. Total waste of money. Instead of fixing the problems they went back and forth with us asking for more log files until they just closed out the ticket because of lack of activity. It was their lack of activity. At least Canonical/Ubuntu enterprise support stumbles into a solution and helps out.

chasil 3y ago
Oracle's UEKR4 stopped updating Intel microcode for several months (in the middle of the spectre/meltdown hysteria). After a community forum post, they demanded an open SR so I had the pleasure of explaining all of this again. Even with a support contract, sometimes they are amazingly obtuse. We dumped support. We are paying enough for the database as it is.
averageRoyalty 3y ago
Really? It's been a while, but 5 years ago I worked for a company with a Red Hat support contract, and we found them incredibly helpful. Everyone we spoke to had deep Linux knowledge, and their team solved issues and gave us real worldn advice much faster and better than any vendor. I'd be sad if that's no longer true.
- spandextwins 3y ago
  I remember thinking why don't they just do a WebEx with us to see what's going on. Nope, never. They just wanted us to ship logs to them and try random crap until they closed the ticket. Total waste of time and money.
  - ungamedplayer 3y ago
    Because there is legal complications in giving someone remote admin.
    - spandextwins 3y ago