Ok, this is not the best place to post a question like this ... after all if you use LQ, well you either don't have linux support or you think it sucks.

nevertheless, it has to be said that today quite a number of companies are making money from linux support, so there is a small chance somebody here has used it. I am referring to support from people like RH, Novell, Ubuntu, Oracle (who famously launched cheap RH support ), etc.

Wi their phone service, do they put you on the usual queue and then have a first line generalist take the question, who then must pass you onto to second level support (after 2-5 days). Is it any good at all?

I expect the update/patch service is the main part, but this hardly requires human intervention.

In short, any experiences on this side of the linux world?

Your mileage may vary....

I've used both SuSE enterprise and RedHat enterprise, and both have been pretty good. Most of the questions I've asked have been pretty hardcore (SAN/HBA support, kernel tweaks for Oracle, etc.), and I've gotten answers pretty quickly. RedHat has lagged for me a bit, though, but it's hard to say whether it was related to the question (HBA driver related), or due to a dud in tech support.

Our Oracle support here goes through our <sarcasm on>GREAT DBA team</sarcasm off>, so they handle that stuff, while we focus on the servers themselves.

I've used RHEL support once and they sucked. I found the answer faster by searching on google afterwards when I didn't find it the first round. That was a long time ago, I tend to find the answers faster on my own.

Enterprise support packages are just that. They are to make the boss feel better that something is being done if nobody truly understands the problem. It's also a great scapegoat for something not working properly within a day. Unless you are on the bleeding edge of technology and software (or your equipment has never been supported in linux) then I would think that the cost does not justify the service for a home user. I would say it's probably worth it if you have one tech support guy with a server and 25 work stations and they all blow up at once with different problems.

Agreed...we only use it here, so we don't get vendor finger-pointing about a 'non-supported' configuration ("Oh, you're using CentOS...sorry, we only support RedHat EL5....reload your server, and get back to us when you do...").

Most of the time, Google is the best way to go...but it is helpful to have a fall-back that HAS to answer your question...

I don't think that's at all bad. You do need somebody to say "the buck stops here on this issue" even if the issue has to be shelved because it can't be resolved.

I think technical people can lose the run of themselves on an issue because they find the chase, the chance of discovery to be too enthralling, so they spend too long on it, and forget that may be the benefits of the resolved issue were quite small.

So you need support to tell you - well we can't solve it so it ain't worth solving.