Seeking Commerical Telephone Support for FreeBSD?

Dave H3 asks: " Does anyone know of any U.S. based firms that provide up to 24/7 telephone support for FreeBSD? I've been tasked with submitting a business proposal to list at least three potential, established, vendors. Other than Windriver I've not had much luck. I've checked several FreeBSD sites, including FreeBSD.org, to no avail."

http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consulting.html

[akharon]

Did you look here [freebsd.org]? I'd find it hard to believe that there aren't three there that would be willing to draft up something for phone support, especially that many of them consult network/server installations.

Depends

[mjoconnor81]

How much are you talking? I'm sure that alot of us would for the right price.

the manual says it all

[JDizzy]

To ask for support, you must have to do something up-and beyond most situations? Typically the manual [freebsd.org] is the best source.... read it like its your new bible, as it really does touch most mainline issues. I even use the manual to teach linux newbies how to do their typical tasks, rather than wishing them luck searching for a good linux-howto style article.

Secondly, the phone support bussiness is not very profitable at this point in time due to the economic situation in the USA. The people qualified to handle the support phones cost more than your average tech support people do, as they need special experience, and trainning.

The best solution for you would be to read the manual, and if you have something really freakish, then you should get a consultant under contract. Typically you can setup phone support service for a fee, however, I duno if your gonna get 24x7. I guess it depends on how much your willing to spend. =)

Take a look here [freebsd.org] at the freebsd website. There are freebsd consultants floating around, you might say...... you might consider advertising in the mailling lsits for some of the more choice people willing to do the work... you never know.

good luck

Re:Can one make a good living as a FreeBSD guy?

[akharon]

There aren't that many jobs out there where you can learn one thing and say you can earn a living off of it. Not NT, not Cisco, not anything. Of course, there are exceptions, but you really need to learn half a dozen things to be a well-rounded admin, and that's what's truely valuable to a company, because then you can adapt to changes in technology much easier.

Re:Can one make a good living as a FreeBSD guy?

[rycamor]

Well, what do most companies that use FreeBSD do with it?

Most of them are ISP's, since FreeBSD is, if anything, even a better bet than Linux for stable, cheap hosting. Many of the rest will probably be in some related field, such as web application development and rental, or large-scale web services. (Yahoo uses FreeBSD extensively)

Other popular uses for FreeBSD include firewalling and network storage.

So, learn (in this order):

1. Unix admin chores; how to install, customize, re-compile FreeBSD, and how to maintain it daily, weekly, monthly
2. Networking; TCP/IP, DNS, NAT Firewalling, NFS, FTP, Samba (for windows network storage)
3. Web server install/admin; how to set up Apache, usually with Perl/CGI or mod_perl, and often with PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL. How to do virtual domain hosting.
4. Shell scripting, in at least Bash and Perl, cron jobs, to automate administrative tasks
5. Webserver scripting; Perl and PHP both are best, Java/JSP is not as popular
6. Open source database setup (MySQL at least, Postgres a plus), SQL design and administration goes hand-in-hand with sebserver scripting
7. At least some HTML, so you can handle the output of webserver scripting tasks.

There is a LOT more that can be done with FreeBSD (I haven't even mentioned serious programming, clustering, data warehousing, etc...), but this seems to be the bulk of it. If you can handle at least a couple rows on that list, you can get a job. If you are good at more than 50% of that list, you should be in demand, and if you are profficient in 90% and more, you should be turning down employers, and worth at least $55,000 and UP.

Of course, most of this is not specific to FreeBSD, and can apply to Linux as well.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Carlos Laviola]

Yeah, like Debian [debian.org] is in it for the money.

Re:*BSD is dying

[poiuyt23]

BSD is on the verge of becoming the largest installed base of *nix on the planet with the adoption of it by Apple for the base of OS X. Beyond that, as a self professed newbie, even if BSD were to disappear 2 months from now, the skills you will learn from BSD should be easily transferable.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Arandir]

For the sake on folks thinking of choosing FreeBSD and OpenBSD to learn *nix, PLEASE REPLY with your thoughts on the future of FreeBSD.

What systems are going to be popular five, ten, twenty years from now? Nobody knows. So don't learn a specific system. Learn the general concepts and skills that WILL be useful in five, ten or twenty years.

My opinion is that as long as there are Unix and unix-like operating systems, there will be a BSD.

Am I wasting my time to learn it if I want a job or to run a home server or to develop software for some companies server "back end"?

If I had to hire one systems administrator and there were two applicants, one who knew only Linux and the other who know both Linux and FreeBSD, I would choose the second one every time. The last kind of person I would want to hire is someone who only knew one way of doing things.

So learn both systems. They're free. In the process you will discover which one you prefer. Make that one your primary system. But keep the other around on another partition. Having immediate access to more than one operating system is invaluable when it comes to software development. As for myself, I'm using both Slackware and FreeBSD, and after two years I still can't decide between the two.

I'm a programmer getting into *nix -- but not sure which one.

So don't get into "one" *nix, get into *nix itself. Generalists always have an advantage over specialists in times of change. And as history teaches, change is constant :-)

Re:*BSD is dying

[Noxxus]

Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [sysadminmag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

Erm, yeah. Since you're so fond of Netcraft's stats maybe you should take a look at Netcraft's Top 50 Uptimes [netcraft.com] and see which OS is heavily represented! :P

Re:*BSD is dying

[akharon]

Please don't feed the trolls. :)

Why would you want to run BSD on your telephone?

[duffbeer703]

At my office we have a Nortel Meridian system, and it works just fine with it's proprietary system. Why would I want to install BSD on it 24/7??

Linuxcare supports FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Greg Lehey, Linuxcare [linuxcare.com] also provides FreeBSD support.