Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!paul.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport Subject: Re: uport Support Message-ID:Date: 12 Jul 88 06:21:29 GMT References: <17124@sgi.SGI.COM> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 18 Whether support is worth it depends upon what you expect. My experience is that their user support is fairly good. I define that as including answering questions and helping work around known problems. However as far as I can tell, their user support people don't fix kernel bugs. So if you call them and report that their tty driver drops characters, they may be able to give you help in finding a configuration that minimizes problems, but you shouldn't expect the support person to fix the problem. Actually, this is a common distinction to make. At Sun it seems like many of the support people don't even have access to developers at all, which isn't true at Microport. I did get an interim release from uport once under my contract, and it did resolve a serious problem I was having. But there are continuing problems with SV/AT in the areas of serial support, floating point, memory management, and support of certain hard disk configurations. They have people working on these problems, and probably they'll be fixed in 6 months to a year. But you shouldn't expect that the support person you get on the phone is somehow going to be able to make them go away.