Re:your admins are not qualified (Score 5, Interesting)

That's very true. SAP is a very complicated application and it takes an extreme amount of patience both to install it and to keep it working correctly. In other words it takes an administrator who knows how to interpret the SAP documentation and then follow that documentation in a very, very precise manner. I've installed SAP Enterprise on RedHat 2.1 more than a couple of times. The RedHat portion of the installation is so easy that I cannot imagine how anyone could screw it up. It's really the steps following the RedHat installation where an administrator can get into trouble. This includes memory settings and some really crucial environment variable additions in the system profile. Get one of these wrong and a SAP installation will quickly turn into a major headache. But if the instructions from SAP are followed step by step, then the whole process can be done in about 6 to 12 hours (depending on the speed of the machine). We currently have 5 SAP systems running on RedHat Advanced server 2.1 and I cannot ever remember an outtage that was related to an issue at the OS level. It has been a rock-solid stable set of systems that require little intervention. The SAP documentation is so stupidly complicated that one literally has to spend days reading it before attempting an installation. If these admins tried to shortcut that process, then obviously made a mistake. Thanks, - J. Haynes Helena, MT