Fedora vs RHEL

[Bill Oliver]

On Sat, 13 Apr 2013, Beartooth wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:14:09 +0100, Tethys wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> [....] what you get for support is, essentially,
>>> answers people are willing to give you for free here, in forums, in
>>> IRC, and so on.  If you install CentOS or SL, I believe the answer is
>>> roughly the same. [....] You, and your boss, have to be willing to
>>> live with that definition of support.
>>
>> The annoying thing is, I'd *gladly* pay Red Hat for support, if they'd
>> charge me a sensible amount. I'm not a multinational corporation. I'm a
>> home user with a single server, but it's important to me. It's currently
>> running CentOS and has a number of problems. I'd install RHEL in a
>> heartbeat to get support for it. But given the minimum Red Hat support
>> charge is several thousand, it's simply out of my price range :-(
>
> 	There is a real opportunity here for somebody. An old adage says
> "Find a need, and fill it."
>
> 	As the Baby Boomers retire, there will be an increasing number,
> well content with the situation Paul Frields describes, who have life
> partners whom they expect to outlive them. The astute ones should be
> thinking about adopting an OS in time for those partners to get used to
> it.
>
> 	Fwiw, I estimate that there are enough now for somebody to get an
> affordable support system for CentOS, SciLi, et alii off the ground.
>
> -- 
> Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Not Quite Clueless Power User
> Remember I have precious (very precious!) little idea where up is.
>

Heh.  Well, that's essentially what I did when I left the military.  I used to work at a place called the "Armed Forces Institute of Pathology" (AFIP).  One of my duties was to establish and run a small internal network that I and some other scientists cobbled together in the late 1980s.  Over the years, our stability, performance, and management policy  was such that more and more activities moved from the regular DoD network to ours.

When I left in 2003, the network was taken over by some contractors hired by the Pentagon who started enforcing management policies that were very good for efficiency of administration, but very bad for small scientific projects(and, because of some human factors issues, worse for security).  So the scientists pooled some grant money and hired me to work remotely from the town I'd moved to.  They had folk there who could do the stuff that required touching machines or stringing cable, and I did OS upgrades, security, network monitoring and remote management, etc.  It worked out well for about six years, until the activity finally shut down under the Base Closing and Realignment Act.

It was a nice, but not huge, chunk of change for me for me, and it was both much cheaper and more practical than trying to deal with one-policy-fits-all integrators hired by the Pentagon -- and I beat their socks off in terms of intrusions, performance, stability and cost.

Unfortunately, having this succeed depends a *lot* on having users who have some sophistication, or at least a good idea of what the responsibilities are, and who has to pick up the ball when a problem moves beyond your mandate.  In this instance, my clients were former colleagues, many of whom had sysadmin skills but simply didn't have the time or inclination to do the grunt sysadmin work (which, even though I think it's fun, can be amazingly boring sometimes).  And, I had enough understanding of what they were doing to figure out ways to accommodate them without sacrificing security.  Another activity approached me to do "the same" for them, but it soon became clear it wasn't the same at all.  They wanted a degree of support I thought was exploitative for what they were wanting to pay, and didn't understand that I needed flexibility with respect to responding to trivial issues -- since I had a "real" job that got first priority.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there isn't a zillion folk in their late 50s-early 70s who would love  spend a few hours a week playing with a network for knockin' around cash.

billo