discuss: Production use distribution? ---Re: [olug] Linux sysadmin position

[Nick Walter]

LSB won't help a bit with the vendors I deal with.

When a telephony hardware vendor tells me they only have drivers for Red Hat
7.2, what they mean is:

"We wrote the driver specifically for kernel 2.4.7-10 with Red Hat patches.
We've never looked at any other kernel version.  We'll never ever release
the source code to these drivers, and so you'll have to use that exact Red
Hat kernel because its the only one we promise that our binary-only driver
module will load into.  If you so much as think about using a different
kernel we'll refuse to support you even though you paid us 25 grand for a
year of support.  Have a nice day"

Now, that isn't to say that an "unsupported" distribution of linux won't
work just fine, but management can't stomach that thought so it isn't
allowed.  I do most of my Oracle testing on RH 8.0 at work ( Oracle 9i
R2/Red Hat 8.0 is not a supported combo) and it works just fine.  If I
wanted to go into production for an important app, I'd have to use RH
Advanced Server so we don't invalidate the incredibly costly Oracle support.

Nick Walter