[CentOS] Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

[Ron Blizzard]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Joseph L. Casale
<JCasale at activenetwerx.com> wrote:
>>which is about as useful as Microsoft Windows support... is it broken?
>>"reinstall windows"....
>
> FFS, this attitude amongst opensource guys that MS is the devil and are
> trying to murder your family or  sabotage your life is such BS.

I don't know what Microsoft's support is like for servers, but on the
desktop they *definitely* tell you to reinstall for almost any major
problem. I don't work on computers for a living anymore, but my wife
is always telling people that I can help them when their Windows
computers go down. An older lady at our church had a Vista machine go
KSOD (black screen of death on her). It was a fairly new Dell. I
called them and explained to them that I couldn't get it to boot --
they gave me instructions on reinstalling. Microsoft's support
suggestion was to reinstall. I found out later why, there must have
been 10 different ways to fix KSOD (that worked for some people but
not others) and I tried every one. Finally using MSCONFIG I was able
to open a "hive" (I've purposely avoided Vista so this is all new to
me) and backed up the user directories to a portable hard drive. And
then I did what I almost always have to do with Windows... reinstalled
it. The KSOD "event" occurred after an automatic Windows update (which
isn't all that uncommon I found out).

> Take the Tin Foil Hat off and settle down, MS support is easily on par w/
> or *the* best support there is.

Again, telling you to "reinstall" is not good support, in my opinion.

> I maintain both Linux/Unix and Windows machines, and since high school days
> I have been using PSS and there is nothing like it. They have have *ALWAYS*
> fixed everything but one issue I have had, where that one issue I resolved
> before them.

Okay, what did they tell you about KSOD? Even if I can't fix it, I
would at least like to know what really causes it. (There are a lot of
theories out there.)

> Spreading your FUD reflects on _you_ not MS.

All he said is that they tell you to "reinstall" which is what they
do. It's not FUD.

> I love Linux (and prefer to toil in this forest) but don't preach that anti-ms
> crap, its utter malarkey.

Seems to me you're a little bit too sensitive here. I've reinstalled
Windows on many personal computers for friends and family, and have
seen many Windows computers "re-imaged" in the corporate environment.
"Reboot" and/or "reinstall" are two of the most common "fixes" for
Windows. This is not "tin-hat" malarkey, it's the simple truth -- and
it's one of the big reasons I moved to Linux.

-- 
RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3