[plug] re: RHL Professional

[indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU]

I'll agree that there are different (and in some cases, better)
ways to do things, but the certification of platforms is part of
a logical system.

Our business depends on $APP from IBM, IBM certifies that
it will work on 8.0. If IBM is a good company this means they
have done extensive testing of this fact. IBM have not certified
8.2. THere might be changes in 8.2 that break $APP. I can try to do
serious testing myself, or wait for IBM to certify 8.2.

For a large setup, where $APP is sufficiently complex, testing is
far from trivial. Thus certification can make life a lot easier,
if the certifying company is a responsible one.

The best example of this that springs to mind is about the
reaction of a German Bank (TM) to the EOL announcement of Windows NT4.

At this point they had been testing Win2K since SP1 (which is a period
of years...) and it still didn't behave they wanted wrt some of their
internal apps. When M$ EOL'd NT4, said German Bank screamed loud
and lawyerly, resulting in many concessions from MS to such a 
valued customer.

It's easy to say that 2 years testing is overkill, but if your system
is large and complex, it's often what's needed to track the permutations
before rolling out a new OS.

And whil indirectly it is about protecting someon's job, it's actually
about avoiding downtime, particularly unscheduled, catastrophic
downtime. Which is probably something we should all strive to avoid.


Indy.



On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 03:14:32AM -0000, Simon Scott wrote:
> > Why an issue? IBM have certified SuSE 8.0 which is no longer
> > available... but 8.2 works just fine.
> 
> Because 8.2 isnt 8.0.
> 
> You need to change your mentality when working for mega-corps - throw all
> logic out of the window and realise that *every* move is done in such a way as
> to protect someone's job.
> 
> 8.0 is certified - 8.2 is not. We *all* know that 8.2 more than likely works
> better than 8.0, but this isnt the point. 
> 
> <CYNIC>
> If someone was to install 8.2 when it is not certified, and something were to
> go wrong, someone might lose their job/bonus.... and we cant have that. :-\
> </CYNIC>

-- 
Indranath Neogy
<indy at the-tech.mit.edu>