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Re: Best practice Linux support vendors?

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snorble wrote:

> When administering Windows servers, I have found that between the
> hardware vendor support (Dell, HP, etc) and Microsoft support, that
> takes care of most of the big "oh crap" situations, like having to
> restore a domain controller on different hardware or other hairy
> issues.
> 
> For Linux, the hardware vendor part stays the same. Dell replaces the
> parts regardless of OS. What about Linux support from vendors? I
> believe Dell has some offerings, and there's RedHat, etc. I use Linux
> for my own stuff, but for a customer it would be nice to have someone
> to call in a pinch. Any advice in this area? Thanks.

From my personal experience, it has usually not been necessary - we've 
always had enough expertice and autoation to be able to restore any given 
system from backups onto new hardware in about 1/2 day (excepting very large 
filestores where the time to physically restore the data takes a day+ in 
itself).

1) The first rule is make sure your backups work (rsync based disk-disk 
means you can afford to run incremental backups often, sometimes multiple 
times per day - or look at filesystem snapshots in addition to real backups)

2) Understand your deployments in detail and practise restore-from-backup as 
part of deployment;

3) Have configuration management covering every config file;

4) Have critical services replicated where possible - certainly DNS, 
kerberos, LDAP. Postgresql 9 also makes that possible for RDBMS.

If you still want vendor support, it's quite understandable to want to do so 
- given RedHat a call. Thye have a variety of support levels and response 
times. I have no experience, but that's where I'd start if I were going down 
that route. RedHat is not my personal favourite linux (I much prefer Debian) 
but RedHat is pretty stable, pretty conservative and seems to pretty much 
stay working.

You will want to be careful to do things "their way" and not make your 
systems too weird or offbeat for best effect.

It's also worth mentioning, that for certain application software, eg MySQL 
or Postgresql you may be able to further contract specialist support for 
that from another vendor.

Also, for RedHat - you can put your most critical stuff on contract and use 
CentOS (which is a RHEL recompile and free) on the less critical stuff and 
save money on licenses.

=======

If you were to tell us what types of servers (ie what applications) you were 
considering, we might be able to give more specific advice.

IME - Linux screws up in less bizarre ways on the whole that some other OSes 
and is almost always fixable.

Cheers

Tim

-- 
Tim Watts

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Thread

Best practice Linux support vendors? snorble <snorble@hotmail.com> - 2011-07-13 19:12 -0700
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-14 08:36 +0100
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? snorble <snorble@hotmail.com> - 2011-07-15 10:17 -0700
      Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-07-15 18:35 +0100
      Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> - 2011-07-15 20:09 +0000
        Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-16 07:49 +0100
          Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> - 2011-07-16 13:40 +0000
            Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-16 18:19 +0100
              Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Aragorn <stryder@telenet.be.invalid> - 2011-07-17 03:44 +0200
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? aw@anhrefn.saar.de - 2011-07-14 15:25 +0200
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? notbob <notbob@notbob.invalid> - 2011-07-14 14:13 +0000
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-07-14 19:01 +0100
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? ray <ray@zianet.com> - 2011-07-14 14:51 +0000
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? JeffM <jeffm_@email.com> - 2011-07-14 14:34 -0700
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com> - 2011-07-14 17:32 -0500
      Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-15 06:59 +0100
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-15 06:57 +0100

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