I al­ways liked SuSE's Lin­ux dis­tros. They even used to mail me a box ev­ery now and then when there was code of mine in it. It al­ways seemed nice­ly done, and well in­te­grat­ed. Of course I on­ly used it as a work­sta­tion.

Re­cent­ly, I had the dis­plea­sure of in­stalling a SLES9-based serv­er for a clien­t.

I say dis­plea­sure, be­cause it was by far the worse ex­pe­ri­ence I had with any Lin­ux dis­tri­bu­tion ev­er. It was worse than the time I had to in­stall openl­dap on a P2 with gen­too that was con­nect­ed to the in­ter­net over a 56k di­alup and had on­ly 100MB of free disk space.

And that one was a scream­er!

What were the prob­lem­s?

Well, for starter­s, it was a pun­ish­ing throw­back to the times of pro­pri­etary soft­ware in­stal­la­tion.

I in­stall it. Ok.

I try to up­date it. Not Ok.

The prob­lem? You need to au­then­ti­cate to the servers in or­der to get the up­dates. And there is no user/­pass­word any­where in the box. You have a se­ri­al num­ber (in a word file in­side a CD, not on a stick­er), and no ex­pla­na­tion on how to go from one to the oth­er.

It turns out you have to call Sup­port to get the auth data, and that de­pend­ing on how you do it you get da­ta that lets you ac­cess to the nov­ell servers or the suse servers (and not the oth­er).

Then, af­ter we got that (48 hours on tech sup­port­), I start in­stalling the soft­ware I need.

The mis­sion of this serv­er is sim­ple. It's a mail for­ward­ing serv­er. It han­dles out­go­ing mail, and it stores in­com­ing mail for a few min­utes un­til a CRM soft­ware (in win­dows) grabs it via POP3.

I can do such a serv­er on Cen­tOS, De­bian, (hel­l, yes, even gen­too) in about 2 hours with­out count­ing in­stal­l+up­dates, in­clud­ing mi­gra­tion of old da­ta.

I in­stall post­fix and imapd (I think it's wu-imapd, which suck­s, BTW, but the al­ter­na­tive was cyrus, which was gross overkil­l).

It seems to work. But the CRM can't fetch the mail. Out­look can, though. What the hel­l?

Well, SuSE de­cid­ed to dis­able plain lo­gins for POP and IMAP over non-SSL con­nec­tion­s. And there is no way to en­able it.

Since that's the on­ly kind of con­nec­tion the CRM will do, it will not work.

Mind you, in this case, it is ab­so­lute­ly no se­cu­ri­ty risk what­sow­ev­er, since the mail serv­er and the CRM are seg­re­gat­ed from the user's net­work...

Ok, I will in­stall couri­er-imap, which is bet­ter any­way. But it's not on SLES9 CD­s, and the RPMs on the web are for ev­ery oth­er SuSE and not SLES9. So I had to build it my­self.

That is, of course, be­cause there is no free repos­i­to­ries for SLES9. You have what comes with it, or what you can build your­self. Any­thing else, you are SOL.

The same thing hap­pened for al­most ev­ery­thing I want­ed to in­stal­l. Ei­ther it was not there, or it was for some oth­er SuSE, so it was time to com­pile a RPM again.

It was like Gen­too, on­ly with­out the au­to­mat­i­cal de­pen­den­cies, and with no hope for fu­ture se­cu­ri­ty up­dates un­less I build them my­self.

At that point I was al­ready telling the cus­tomer that maybe I could just in­stall Open­SUSE, which was free and would not have these prob­lems (hel­l, I would even get ap­t4­suse and avoid the damn nov­ell server­s).

Of course that means they would be a few hun­dred dol­lars poor­er for no good rea­son.

But any­way, it took me rough­ly 3 ex­tra days to set this up, which made me ac­tu­al­ly lose mon­ey on the gig. ANd I lost the time in the most pa­thet­ic way, sit­ting in a cus­tomer's of­fice wait­ing for tech sup­port, watch­ing my mon­ey go away.

That had nev­er hap­pened to me be­fore. I must say I am pret­ty dis­ap­point­ed.

But what was the root of the prob­lems here?

• There is no free SLES clone like Cen­­tOS

If there were, then there would be 3rd par­ty re­pos. The cus­tomer would still have bought SLES9 be­cause they are sup­port groupies, but my life would have been eas­i­er.

Of course, it would prob­a­bly cut in­to SLES sales, but hey, that is not my prob­lem, is it?

• Nov­ell Ar­­gen­ti­­na tech sup­­port sucks for Lin­ux.

The guy on the phone lit­er­al­ly had no idea what I talked about when I asked about how to get in­to YOU to up­date the box.

But don't wor­ry Nov­el­l, I heard Red Hat Ar­genti­na's is quite bad too.

If you re­al­ly want SuSE, buy a reg­u­lar one, the ones with pub­lic FTP repos­i­to­ries, and avoid trou­ble. Or get Open­SUSE.

Me, I'm pret­ty bummed :-(