At the beginning of this past summer I made a personal goal to learn as much about Linux as possible.  Up until about 2 years ago I thought that it was pretty crazy for an enterprise to put up open source applications and services because it required too much effort in support.  The organization I work for spends a fair amount of money each year in service and support contracts.  Who doesn’t right? 

In my job capacity I quite often need to make use of these services.  Call me dumb but if we are paying for the service then it should be useful to us, or at least one would think so.  I am surprised at how more and more often I am hearing from the support techs called that this is the first time they have heard of my problem.  I have to ask myself.  Am I so good at my job and configure these services so well that if and when there is a problem it becomes a new discovery all together?  Other times I make the call and someone very pleasant in nature answers and takes down some information to have an engineer call me back ASAP.  I usually continue to work on the problem myself until I hear back from someone.  When I do hear back from an engineer I usually get a good sounding answer that logically sounds correct and I am left with the impression that this should indeed work.  I quickly apply the suggested solution.  Sometimes the suggestion works and sometimes it takes another try or two.  No real complaint here so far.  Lately, however, I have noticed that the suggestions do not work at all.  I find myself going over and over each possible solution again and again in my head.  I loose a little sleep maybe and search the web, lists and newsgroups to see if someone has the same problem and has posted the answer.  Somewhere in all the guesses, tries and retries I find a solution.  It never fails that as soon as the problem is solved and the faithful engineer calls back to see if anything worked acts surprised that the solution worked at all then asks to close the trouble ticket and thanks me for my business.  I have to wonder what exactly I paid for when the solution usually comes from a fellow tech. 

I have been trying to always look at an open source version of an application or service I am testing in my job responsibilities.  I find more and more that simple searches on Google seem to solve every encountered problem in half the time it takes to play phone tag with support.  I just have to wonder why.  It is just like when you buy an extended warranty on your brand new camcorder and when you take it back to the store for a problem they give you the address of the manufacturer to ship it back to.  So you ended up paying 200 dollars for an address?  Aren’t phone books pretty much free?

ALL I ASK IT THAT YOU GIVE US SOMETHING FOR OUR MONEY OR QUIT ASKING US TO PAY IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!

10:50:03 AM