HP Announces Support for Debian Linux

Bain writes "PC World reports that HP is to offer support for Debian Linux on its ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers. Support will be provided by HP telephone operators rather than the discussion-group method that current Debian users rely on. The move to support Debian continues HP's relationship with the community-based OS, which stretches back to 1995."

Re:Other Debian distro's?

[neonprimetime]

From cnet [com.com]

HP's offer will apply to the current "Sarge" version 3 of Debian and to version 4, "Etch," due in December. (Debian versions are named after characters in the movie "Toy Story.")

bdale garbee?

[xoundmind]

I'd be interested to know how much this gentleman had to do with it:
http://www.gag.com/~bdale/ [gag.com]
He's a former Debian Project Leader and now Linux/OSS CTO at HP.

Security Support

[baggins2001]

Are they kidding. The last version was only supported for one year after the previous version. So I'm going to go tell the PHB we should start using a distribution that should be upgraded every other year. Unless they can offer longer version support I don't see this helping.
Those of us working in the real world don't change versions unless we have to, because it lowers our TCO.
I know a data center that was still using RH8 on some of their servers up until 4 months ago and last year I talked with a guy who said they still had RH6.2 on one of their servers.
Heck, until six months ago I had RH7.3 running on 3 servers and still have RH7.1 running on one.
At a minimum I want 3 years security support and prefer 5. Why would I care if I obviously have servers which aren't using security support. Because I don't want multiple flavors of linux, this keeps my training cost down and support cost down.

Re:define "support"

[KokorHekkus]

...What do you think the odds of joe schmoe trying to compile the latest kernel getting help from those guys are though? In my experience I've found there's a VERY large void between the lemmings and the experts at HP, and 9 times out of 10, you get stuck in that void trying to get support.

As I said, only time will tell. But this isn't a service for Joe Shmoe. It's only available for HP Integrity and HP Proliant servers with some HP specific programs added to the Debian install. Which most likely means it will not be cheap and cheerful but expensive and serious (as 24x7 support is when it works)

And I would also say that HP seems to have way more than a fleeting interest in Debian. Debian IS their internal development platform company wide and has been since about 2002. They had to pick one distro because there were to many different ones used all over the company. So it's just not just "those guys" that have linux experience, those are only the visible to the outside.

And HP also runs QA testing on servers to make sure they actually work as well.

Re:Troubleshooting Linux is easier than Windows.

[IANAAC]

The Windows event logs do pretty much what you're looking for, even though they're not plain text files, per se.

If you want to take a raw look at the files, they're located in c:\windows\system32\config\... event, application and security.

This isn't anything new. It's been around for ages.

Re:This is vital

[IANAAC]

Unfortunately Red Hat can't compete with that (yet)

They sure are ramping up though. They're heavily recruiting. I went through a round of interviews with them for a travelling support position.

When I say travelling, I mean 95% of your job is travelling to other sites.