Day: 18 June 2003

Apple support and verizon fraud

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I am having a bad week dealing with big companies. I ordered a High speed (well sort of) data card for a laptop at work. We got it through verizon wireless. the card is fine, but for some reason I got charged an extra $575 on the same day from verizon. In their defense they cannot find the charge in their system and believe it to be fraud. But it had to be one of their people doing it. I called the order in over the phone. At least my credit card company is taking care of it.

As for apple. Their support is good, when you get them on the phone. But if you don’t have applecare (i don’t) you pay first and then only if your problem requires hardware to be fixed within the first year they wont charge your credit card. First off applecare is expensive. Does other support agreements cost that much? Apple hardware is more money as it is, I don’t want to pay an extra $250 for a support deal on top of my expensive computer.

At least in my case the problem IS hardware related, but I hate giving out my credit card number to people if I am not actually buying something.

IDE Raid and other stuff

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IDE RAID is nice. I have spoken of its virtues on this blog before. It is cheap and it is not that much slower than SCSI. What it is NOT, is very compatible with stuff. Because of all the different versions of Linux (or so I guess) the new versions are not supported with any of the IDE RAID devices. I cannot get drivers for either the promise controller’s or the 3ware controllers. We have both. The newest we can get is Red Hat 8.0. our older IDE RAID systems can’t have anything newer than Red Hat 7.2 because the drivers will never be made for anything newer. On the flip side I can run Windows 2003 server on all but the oldest IDE RAID system. Those drivers are being made.

I can’t believe I am complaining about driver compatibility for Linux, but people can change. I mean these inexpensive solutions are perfect for linux. Linux doesn’t need a high end machine to run. It will work perfectly on a cheaper server with IDE drives, but the nice cheap $1500 servers we buy can’t run the latest version of Linux. You can’t win!

On a happier note we have a Linux System Administrator starting on Friday. He can help with our backlog of linux related projects. I have at least 8 at last count. But I keep remembering more. The only down side is I get tripled up in my office:( As I said before it is only temporary, or so we say.