System Administration

What Support?

One common argument against open software is that it is unsupported. This is specious. When you buy binary-only software you have no recourse, and so need vendor support. In some cases, this helps; in others, you just made a very bad decision.

Take this site for example. It has been off-line since November 24, 2003. It hasn't been brought back up in a usable state for one reason: the site is built with Microsoft's Active Server Pages. For certain site functions it relies on a third-party DLL from ServerObjects. We can't get the thing to instantiate objects so that we can act on them. ServerObjects has not been responsive. While we wait, we're rewriting the site to not use ASP.

Outages aren't fun. They're even less fun when you can't fix them.

12:11:11 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration