uport Support

[Charles Hedrick]

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.