[Beowulf] Oh.. IBM eats Red Hat

[Prentice Bisbal]

IBM Support leaves a lot to be desired. Not necessarily in the technical 
knowledge of their staff, but in how it's administered. I once spent 
close to 4 weeks convincing IBM's GPFS support that I was entitled to 
support for my GPFS system because it was considered a part of the Blue 
Gene /P I was supporting at the time. I would call BG/P support, and 
they'd tell me to call enterprise storage support. I'd call enterprise 
storage support, and give them the S/N for my GPFS system, and they 
wouldn't be able to find it in their system, since my support was tied 
to the BG/P S/N, So I'd give them the BG/P S/N. Then they'd tell me to 
call BG/P support, and the cycle would start all over again. Once i 
stopped that t merry-go-round and actually spoke to tech support, they 
identified the problem and fixed it in literally seconds.

To be fair, I had a similar problem with Cisco, and that too 18 months 
(!) to resolve, whereas IBM fixed this in 4 weeks.

Prentice

On 10/29/2018 02:03 PM, INKozin via Beowulf wrote:
> oh yes, and forget to be able to find anything ever unless the pages 
> are externally accessible and index by google.
>
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 17:06, John Hearns via Beowulf 
> <beowulf at beowulf.org <mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>> wrote:
>
>     I just realised...  I will now need an account on the IBM Support
>     Site, a SiteID AND an Entitlement to file bugs on any Redhat packages.
>
>     For those who don't know the system - every site (University,
>     company, Laboratory etc) has a SiteID number.
>     You had better know that number - and if someone leaves or retires
>     you had BETTER get than number from them.
>     (I handled a support case once where a customer had someone retire
>     - and not pass on the site ID- we had to get a high up in IBM UK
>     invoplved);.
>
>     One person on site then has the ability to allow others on the
>     site to open support issues.
>     You just cannot decide to open a support issue -you must have the
>     rights to ask for support for that product.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 16:55, Joe Landman <joe.landman at gmail.com
>     <mailto:joe.landman at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>         On 10/29/18 12:44 PM, David Mathog wrote:
>
>         [...]
>
>         > It turns out that getting up to date compilers and libraries
>         has become
>         >> quite important for those working on large distributed code
>         bases.
>         >
>         > Libraries are harder.  Try to build a newer one than ships
>         with CentOS
>         > and it is not uncommon to end up having to build many other
>         libraries
>         > (recursive dependencies) or to hit a brick wall when a kernel
>         > dependency surfaces.
>
>
>         This was my point about building things in a different tree. 
>         I do this
>         with tools I use in https://github.com/joelandman/nlytiq-base
>         , which
>         gives me a consistent set of tools regardless of the platform.
>
>         Unfortunately, some of the software integrates Conda, which
>         makes it
>         actually harder to integrate what you need.  Julia, for all its
>         benefits, is actually hard to build packages for such that
>         they don't
>         use Conda.
>
>
>         > In biology apps of late there is a distressing tendency for
>         software
>         > to only be supported in a distribution form which is
>         essentially an
>         > entire OS worth of libraries packaged with the one (often
>         very small)
>         > program I actually want to run.  (See "bioconda".) Most of
>         these
>         > programs will build just fine from source even on CentOS 6,
>         but often
>         > the only way to download a binary for them is to accept an
>         additional
>         > 1Gb (or more) of other stuff.
>
>
>         Yeah, this has become common across many fields. Containers
>         become the
>         new binaries, so you don't have to live with/accept the
>         platform based
>         restrictions.  This was another point of mine.  And Greg K
>         @Sylabs is
>         getting free exposure here :D
>
>
>         -- 
>         Joe Landman
>         e: joe.landman at gmail.com <mailto:joe.landman at gmail.com>
>         t: @hpcjoe
>         w: https://scalability.org
>         g: https://github.com/joelandman
>         l: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
>
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>
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