[CentOS] Wait for 5 or just use 4.4?

Fri Mar 30 21:47:18 UTC 2007
Morten Torstensen <morten at mortent.org>

John R Pierce wrote:
> indeed, I've heard Oracle flat out won't support you if you're running 
> on CentOS 4, even tho its functionally nearly identical to RHEL4 which 
> is supported.

No-one wants to support too many things in enterprise environments (and 
RHEL/CentOS are enterprise grade linux distros). I have worked in that 
environment for quite some years (never directly with Oracle I am happy 
to say) and usually there can be some leeway. Sure, RHEL and SLES are 
ususally the only officially supported versions but there are levels of 
support. You would probably get support from most if you can reproduce 
the problem on RHEL, or if it is unlikely that CentOS is part of the 
problem. Of course, if you are a big customer and want to run CentOS, 
money talks :)

There is also a big difference between supported as certified, supported 
as works-here, supported as 
we-have-no-idea-if-it-works-but-we-will-fix-it-if-it-doesn't. We would 
also many times just ignore parts of a platform. We can also ignore 
unsupported parts of a platform if we feel it is irrelevant. Even in 
enterprise environments you have the human factor for support and 
personal relations matters.... that is why many big companies stay with 
a product even if it is not perfect. They know what they have and not 
what they get, and they can live with the imperfections.

So if a large Oracle customer told Oracle they wanted to run it on 
CentOS, Oracle would most likely support it. OTOH large companies would 
just run RHEL -- no real compelling reason for them to choose CentOS.

So how intreresting is it to get Oracle to support it? It should run 
just as well or bad on CentOS as RHEL. If it is for a small customer, 
they could not affort much support anyway. For testing, development, 
stuff like that you don't usually need full support.

-- 

//Morten Torstensen
//Email: morten at mortent.org
//IM: Cartoon at jabber.no morten.torstensen at gmail.com

And if it turns out that there is a God, I don't believe that he is evil.
The worst that can be said is that he's an underachiever.