[clue] CentOS new user experience.

[crichey at gmail.com]

I would not qualify to comment on "new user" experience with CentOS, since I have been a CentOS user off and on since the earl days of the district (long pre-dating the general agreement with Redhat). I haven't visited the website often, but I always managed to download what I needed. 

As regards what you get from a Redhat subscription, until this year I was routinely disappointed. The usual response to a query was "we don't support that!" My company now requires Redhat registration for all new servers. I'm working on a revamp of our ldap systems that employs the newer sssd interface created by Redhat as a replacement for the older, crappy, poorly maintained methods of authentication. When I encountered a problem with the controls to restrict access to hosts for individual ldap accounts, I opened a low-priority case with Redhat for sssd. To my amazement, I got a prompt response from Redhat support with exact instructions how to use the correct (very poorly documented) parameters to solve my problem.

All of my experience with Redhat/CentOS has been with REL6 and earlier releases. Now that I have CentOS7 on my home system, I'm massively underwhelmed by the revamp of the admin controls. No longer can you rely on standard UNIX approaches to anything. It's very much like the latest Solaris release. Forget about anything you ever learned about administration.

Belated Happy Christmas and New Year's to all.
Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 23, 2015, at 1:09 PM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:
> 
> Charles Burton wrote:
>> Red Hat actually does have a vested interest in keeping CentOS around.  It
>> keeps people using a RHEL clone without having to pay for support and
>> whatnot on it meaning they maintain that mindshare of people.
> 
> Sure, I understand that.  But I'm skeptical that CentOS needs RH support.  10 years ago people were 
> talking about creating the CentOS approach in response to RHEL because they couldn't afford the new 
> licensing model (and had religious objections to not RH).  So even if CentOS quit I think others 
> would do the job.
> 
> It is nice that RH makes it easy to replace their trademarks though (which aren't Free).
> 
>> Then, when you need support you pay Red Hat and convert your unsupported CentOS installs over to
>> RHEL.
> 
> Has anyone ever gotten meaningful support from paying RH?  I suppose it happens but the admins at 
> the last RHEL shop I worked in wouldn't have bothered to ask for help.  "Well, that sucks, let's see 
> how we work around this..."  Perhaps they would have asked the hardware vendors for help if it had 
> been hardware related.
> 
> I found, documented, and submitted a bug to Oracle once upon a time.  The answer was "the fix will 
> be in the next release."  That wasn't very helpful because a) the next release wasn't out, and b) we 
> weren't going to switch to it any time soon.  And we were paying Oracle a lot more than we would 
> have been paying RH.
> 
> So I'm curious to add a contra-anecdote to my collection.
> 
> Dave
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