Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joao Barros" <joao.barros at gmail.com>
To: "Nikolas Britton" <nikolas.britton at gmail.com>
Cc: "FreeBSD-Questions Questions" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>; "Chad
Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC" <chad at shire.net>
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?


> On 6/28/06, User Freebsd <freebsd at hub.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> >
> > > On 6/28/06, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC <chad at shire.net> wrote:
> > >>
> > > [deleted]
> > >>
> > >> ---
> > >> Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
> > >> Your Web App and Email hosting provider
> > >> chad at shire.net
> > >
> > > Do you offer Xen hosting Chad?.. and back on topic... What's the point
> > > of iLO Marc? What's wrong with having your server text message your
> > > cell phone and then you ssh in and check what's wrong / fix it? If
> > > it's a hardware problem you'll have to show up anyways, right?
> >
>
> If the server is 300KM from... no you don't want to.
> If the server is in another country for example...no you don't want to.
> If you have to pay extra for someone to reboot, put a cd, whatever on
> the machine, no you don't want to.
> Think this through outside your usual enviroment.
>

I've supported and support those types of environments and it depends on the
application.  If the app is a critical "cannot ever go down" then
you have redundant servers, and I don't care if it costs $$$ to get
and keep a warm body there, your going to be spending that money.

However, the vast majority of apps are NOT "cannot ever go
down" apps, despite what a lot of the line managers in the organizations
would have you believe about their pet projects.  They can tolerate
downtime if it only happens a once or twice a year, for example,
even though they will scream about it, you just learn to ignore that.

In those environments, if the server goes down hard and won't
cold-boot, you FedEx one out there the next day and talk someone
over the phone into plugging it in.  And yes this can be rather expensive.
That is why in those environments, people generally set them up so
the servers -aren't- remotes, rather they just get better wan links.

Ted