[rescue] Vendor software support [was Re: RPi vs SS20 benchmarks (interesting)]

[Peter Stokes]

Hi All

I would pretty much agree with the comments about vendor support. Many moons
ago, early 90s, we were Solbourne disti in the UK. We had a large system
install with many IPI disks on it. To soak test the disks I ran multiple
copies of format/analyse on different disks at the same time, after an
indeterminate time the whole system would crash, sometimes a few mins, at
others it was a few hours. Thinking this was either a system or O/S problem we
contacted Solbourne's support and were told it should work etc. I spent over a
week trying various configs to get it stable thinking it was a hardware issue,
even changing out the disks (there were a lot of them....). Eventually
speaking with one of their more senior engineers late one evening he
commented, 'oh yes it does that'. At this point I wrapped up the system, went
through the customers acceptance and it ran for the rest of its time as that
config without issue.

My view on vendor support after that it was simply a way of getting patches,
something which are of course only available for Sun paying customers
nowadays.

Peter

On 2 Jan 2016, at 09:09, Mike Meredith <very at zonky.org> wrote:

>> On Fri, 1 Jan 2016 17:01:00 -0500 (EST), Mouse wrote:
>> The only way I've gotten decent software support out of a vendor is to
>> already personally know a geek inside the company - and, arguably,