24/7/365 commercial support wanted

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <pobox at verysmall.org>
To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com>
Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:29 AM
Subject: Re: 24/7/365 commercial support wanted


> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > No, you cannot get it from Rackspace - unless you go with one of their
> > custom-built servers that they host at their site.  That is pretty
useless
> > for
> > a server that you build hosted at your site such as 99% of all business
> > servers.
> >
> > Ted
>
> The people who can afford to build server infrastructure at their own
> site as reliable as Rackspace - will have the money to employ the team
> for the 24/7/365 FreeBSD (or whatever else) support as well.
>

I don't understand what you were originally ranting about, then,

You seem to be bitching that nobody guarentees support of FreeBSD
as if this is somehow a detriment to the OS, then when it's pointed
out that nobody guarentees support for any other OS unless it's hosted
at their own colocate, on their own equipment, you then complain that
it takes a lot of money for a company to attain the same level of
support as this mythical guarentee that you seem to think exists out there.

I think your just full of nonsense.  I have many FreeBSD servers that
I have built on shoestrings on cloney-baloney hardware that are just
as reliable as a Rackspace server, and I support my servers 24x7x365

It simply requires a dedication to duty and interest in learning how
the FreeBSD OS works that perhaps some people out there don't
have.

I have seen a number of medium-sized employee companies out there
that have CEOs and operations managers and such that seem to
think the ticket is to hire 2 or 3 young greenhorns
with no experience, right out of a 2 year trade school program
or some such, and pay them 25-35K a year.  Then they wonder why when
a fileserver dies at 2:00am that they can't reach anyone, and when
the IT people do come in, in the morning, they start blaming the operating
system
vendor for having a sucky support staff which is why they can't fix
the server.

You try making a suggestion that just maybe they might have a more
reliable network if they had hired just 1 single experienced IT person
at 50-60K a year, as an exempt employee, and have that person carry a
cell phone with him, and they look at you like your out of your mind.

Then these same managers will turn around and fork over $125/hour for
a consulting firm to come in and do major IT projects like deploying
new servers, etc. because their own people are too swamped with
firedrills to have time to do it, not to mention that even if they had the
time they would botch the job.

I guess the concept that if you pay well you can get more work and
better quality out of fewer and more experienced employees and thus
end up with the same labor costs, is a concept that comes pretty hard
to a lot of MBAs.  I really often wonder what the fuck
they are teaching these morons in business school these days.  Oh
well, as long as there's plenty of them out there like this, the consulting
gigs will continue to be where all the gravy is at.

Ted