to beat RH.

I had the choice of RH AS3 or SUSE 8 Enterprise (not 9, 8), for my Opteron Oracle / EMC connected servers. I wanted Suse for the XFS file system since you can't get that w/ RH right now.

I paid for 2 copies of Suse 8, at about $2,000 a pop. This claimed to come with support. Yeah right. The support was "installation" only. This was the full priced enterprise version. We are using only listed "supported" hardware. The system installed. We could not use 9 since the variety of commerical stuff such as the EMC powerpath drivers was not certified to run on it yet.

On the first reboot, it went into an endless panic / reboot cycle. This was same behaviour on 2 identical boxes.

Their response: It is installed, so the installation support does not cover your problem. For that, you need to upgrade your support to 'x', at a cost of 'y', and until then we won't talk to you. There was several days of back and forth while they stuck to their guns. As the project getting later and later.

That was about $4K thrown away. A RH AS 3 went in cleanly. and we were in operation in under 2 hours. So I suffer with the EXT3 file system. At least it WORKS! And when we call for RH support, someone answers.

I will probably never take a chance on a non-RH Linux box in the corp environment again. Timing is too tight, and unknowns are too damaging when they bite you. We have incremental knowledge and comfort level w/ RH, and it would take something MAJOR to throw that away.

When they come out with their next server level, with the 2.6 kernel, then the file systems I want will be part of it. So I suffer for a while over speed issues. Better than the alternative.