 | | | RFC: Open letter to Red Hat sales and management | RFC: Open letter to Red Hat sales and management 2004-02-03 - By Bernd Bartmann
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Hi,
after reading the discussions about all problems with missing packages
in RHES3 etc. in the Taroon mailing list I decided to write an open
letter to Red Hat. As some of you suggested this letter should be send
to Red Hat 's sales and management but before sending this out I 'd like
to hear your comments, suggestions and corrections. So here it goes:
Dear Sir or Madam,
as a long term Red Hat customer I hereby wish to express that I 'm not
fully satisfied with the Red Hat Enterprise (RHES) product line. This is
mostly related to several missing or removed packages and the way bug
fixes / erratas are handled. Being used to Red Hat Linux now for over 10
years I 'm getting more and more disappointed by the way Red Hat handles
the Enterprise product line. Let me explain in detail where I see the
biggest problems.
Working for a small company providing IT support for our customers
system- and network administration is my daily job. I 'm responsible for
more than 30 Red Hat Linux based servers. These system run Red Hat Linux
7.2 / 7.3 / 9 and now RHES3. Over the years I got used to several tools
that eased my life as a system administrator. Some of these tools are no
longer available in RHES3 and no alternative tool is provided. This
makes my daily job a lot harder than nescessary. Here is a short list of
the packages I 'm missing most:
mailman - mailing list management
ncftp - command line ftp client
mc - text mode file manager
iptraf - simple network traffic monitoring
tripwire - file system integrity checker
gkrellm - system monitor
anacron - special cron for system that don 't run 24h a day
What I find really strange is that more of these packages are still
included in Fedora Core 1. I could understand the removal of packages if
you would provide alternatives. But for none of the above listed
packages there is an usable alternative included in RHES3.
Some of the systems I manage don 't have direct internet access or are
connected via low bandwidth links (analog modem / ISDN). This makes it
impossible to get updates via RHN directly. So I have to download the
updates from RHN manually from another machine. What I find really
annoying is the fact that it is impossible to download all rpms
belonging to a specific errata at once. RHN provides this features in
some of the beta channels but not in the errata channel.
Most of our customers don 't have a company credit card. As a result they
ask us to if they can buy a RHES subscription from us. This seems to be
impossbile as least with the RHES basic edition. Also why do I have to
request an real invoice every time instead of getting one automatically?
Another point is that there are a lot of critical bugs reported in
Bugzilla that are either sitting in state NEW forever (nobody seems to
take care of) or the bugfixing takes ages (wait for the next quarterly
update). Here are some exmaples of bugs that I reported:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=112712
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107988
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=112034
Isn 't it in Red Hat 's own interest that bugs get reported and get fixed?
~ I always thought reporting bugs is a way for me to help you. This is my
way to give something back to Red Hat as an RHEL subscription with
support is simply way too expensive for small companies like we and most
of our customers are.
Don 't get me wrong I still think that Red Hat provides the best Linux
distribution out there but some things can be done better.
Best regards.
- --
Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Bernd Bartmann <Bernd.Bartmann@(protected) >
I.S. Security and Network Engineer
SoHaNet Technology GmbH / Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 10-11 / 10553 Berlin
Fon: +49 30 214783-44 / Fax: +49 30 214783-46
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