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xaviermiller
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PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2013 8:51 pm    Post subject: "Gentoo OVH Release 2" is bad for the Gentoo Brand Reply with quote

Hello,

OVH is a french hosting service, which proposes "Gentoo Release 2" among many operating systems: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/distributions/gentoo.xml?sort=all

In the French subforum, we get very frequently support inquiries, and we observe that:
1. The portage tree is obsolete and badly patched by OVH
2. OVH ask not to sync the Portage tree

Bad.

As a consequence, those users encounter many problems due to very outdated packages, with missing security updates. Each time we dig into the problems and the user try to fix them, the conclusion is always the same : scratch that installation and retry with a "vanilla" Gentoo.

Bad.

And the support from OVH is catastrophic. Last week, a user came on the French subforum because OVH support told him to downgrade portage this way :
Code:
emerge -C portage && emerge portage

Guess what : no portage any more...

Bad.

So, I think (this is my opinion) OVH give a very bad image of Gentoo.

Isn't there some policy forbidding that bad behaviour?

Can't we ask / force OVH to no more use a bad patched version of Gentoo ?
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2013 9:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

XavierMiller,

I have a server with OVH. In December 2012 when I got mine, I did try to upgrade the provided Gentoo but it was still baselayout1 and an old gcc/glibc
All on top of a 3.x kernel though. I blew it away after 30 min and did my own install. That was more than usually challenging as the system did not reboot first time.
Well, its raid1, LVM and needed an initrd.

The real hardware is intel but for debug, you can boot your install into a qemu system running on your box but the qemu instance emulates an AMD CPU !
-march=native produces an ugly mess.

Don't get me started about their IPv6 either. The documentation is just wrong. I did point it out but I got the impression that they are not interested.

Anyway, its working now.

OVH clearly have no idea how to support Gentoo, or how to make an install. It did cross my mind to ask them to stop offering prebuilt Gentoo, since the offering was so badly broken, I wouldn't run a public facing server on it. I also thought that anyone putting Gentoo on an OVH server would follow the same path as me. Look at it, laugh, and start over. I also considered offering to help OVH fix their Gentoo but that would be my free time helping them make money.

I'm happy to provide support to OVH Gentoo users but unfortunately, only in English.
I wonder if they would notice how bad their Gentoo offering is if we supported Gentoo on their Forums?

If you would like the Gentoo Foundation to talk to OVH, please email trustees AT gentoo.org but one of them (me) already knows and isn't happy with their Gentoo.
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xaviermiller
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PostPosted: Tue May 28, 2013 10:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The big problem is not their patches, but the fact that OVH advertises it is a Gentoo.

Users come in the French section and don't mention this is a OVH flavour, and we see it later.
And OVH don't tell the user (s)he need to read the handbook, so when someone comes with "I want to run a .jar. I run "java blah blah" and see "java: not found". Please help", this is almost for sure a OVH user.

Nevertheless, the current Release 2 is now too old and I will ask trustees to take action (tomorrow, now it's time to go to bed).
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xaviermiller
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PostPosted: Wed May 29, 2013 6:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mail sent to the Trustees.
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boozo
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PostPosted: Wed May 29, 2013 8:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

XavierMiller wrote:
The big problem is not their patches, but the fact that OVH advertises it is a Gentoo.
(...)
I will ask trustees to take action

That's true. And I think too that a underlying problem for us : it's about our branding politics.

Despite the fact that the license provides this possibility, they use our notoriety for commercial use but as far as i know they do not provide a real quality support for their customers. :evil:

btw, on a closer look to this page, they seems to not support or sponsor our foundation in financial terms :( (but I don't know... maybe they donate various services or equipments to us and want to remain anonymous and I wouldn't want to make a mistake about that)
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aCOSwt
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PostPosted: Wed May 29, 2013 9:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmmm...

- How many tons of *badly* recorded clips of *crappy* music produced through *extremely badly* tuned, *wrongly* maintained hardware, in which clearly and distinctly appears the brand of some renown top-quality amplifier / microphone / loudspeaker / piano... manufacturer, do we get ?

Can the owner of the brand do anything efficient against this ?

- Do you remember Supertramp ? The highly particular sound of a piano they had especially fiddled but was still showing the name of its original manufacturer ?

Could Steinway(C)(TM) demand them to hide its name because Supertramp's piano was definitely not sounding THE way Steinway WANT their pianos to sound ?

Of course I do not support OVH in any way and I do agree with you that things like advising to emerge -C portage && emerge portage is more than stupid, it is actually disgusting!

I just want to highlight the extreme difficulty to act efficiently against that *wrong* practice.

- The idea I would suggest is to study how the "gentoo" production can be somehow registered as "Propriété littéraire et artistique"
Copyrights aim at protecting the investment. Not the idea. Mind about patrimonial rights. Not about moral rights.

What you are (rightly) complaining about is definitely *not* a problem of patrimonial right. It's formally speaking a matter of moral. (Aesthetic if you prefer)

If the gentoo production could be covered by some PLA, then gentoo would be able to legally and efficiently oppose to any sort of usage / display / recording / implementation... that gentoo would state *wrong* for whatever reason that gentoo would even not have to justify. Saying "that practice is wrong I don't want that period!" Would be enough.

The problem you are concerned with Xavier is a true moral problem. Not a patrimonial one. => PLA is the only possible formal solution to it.
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boozo
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PostPosted: Wed May 29, 2013 12:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

aCOSwt wrote:
(...)
Could Steinway(C)(TM) demand them to hide its name because Supertramp's piano was definitely not sounding THE way Steinway WANT their pianos to sound ?
(...)
I just want to highlight the extreme difficulty to act efficiently against that *wrong* practice.

- The idea I would suggest is to study how the "gentoo" production can be somehow registered as "Propriété littéraire et artistique"
Copyrights aim at protecting the investment. Not the idea. Mind about patrimonial rights. Not about moral rights.

What you are (rightly) complaining about is definitely *not* a problem of patrimonial right. It's formally speaking a matter of moral. (Aesthetic if you prefer)
(...)

:lol: ok I understand what you mean and your analogy.
Then just to round off an angle : Supertramp(©) haven't recorded an album with Steinway's(©) name in the title... :wink:
So anyway, I'm definitely not a lawyer and subtle are the differences between US and EU rights in this, but I'm agree with you that is not a partimonial rights question.

Btw, if I'm referring to the Gentoo Linux copyrights, maybe the trustees can do something or try to discuss ?
Quote:
4. Use of Gentoo name

You are permitted to use the Gentoo name in computer-related content, provided that:

- you acknowledge that the name "Gentoo" is a trademark of Gentoo Foundation, Inc., and
- you do not entitle any software project or computer-related product "Gentoo" or have "Gentoo" appear within its name, and
- the fully-qualified domain name for your software project or computer-related products does not contain "Gentoo", and
- you clearly state that the content, project, site, product or any other type of item with which the "Gentoo" name is associated is not part of the Gentoo project and is not directed or managed by Gentoo Foundation, Inc.

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steveL
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PostPosted: Wed May 29, 2013 4:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Personally I think it's terrible, and at least someone should get in touch with them and ask them to keep their Gentoo offering current: point out the myriad support channels, and suggest they hire someone with Gentoo admin experience, if they don't have the current knowledge.

However, as stated there's not much anyone can do, since they aren't breaking any of the trademark terms, afaict, nor any copyrights. The most one could do is publicise their lack of response and capability, should they refuse to remedy the situation. IOW resort to social pressure, if it is impossible to unilaterally withdraw the trademark.

I find it quite ironic though: this is exactly the situation the Ion3 developer, tuomov, complained about and for exactly the same reasons. It made his software look bad, and led to a massive support burden on him, as users on "current" bindists with old versions of his software, expected help from him, and didn't look favourably to the idea of downloading and compiling a new version.

Why would they: they're binary distro end-users. Of course such old versions are impossible to support: that's why new versions have been released to fix the bugs, and both the user and the project lose out, because a downstream commercial entity can't be bothered, past making a sale.

It's ironic because so many of the Gentoo community joined in the witch-hunt against tuomov at the time, without bothering to find out what the issue was.
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augustin
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Four years down the line...
Has the situation gotten any better?

I am wet behind the ears with my new gentoo on my desktop, but I still use Ubuntu 14.04LTS at OVH, which I have until 2019 to upgrade to Ubuntu/systemd....
Before then, I might consider migrating to another server running gentoo.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 3:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

augustin,

OVHs idea of support is that when your server breaks, you rent another server and migrate/reinstall.
I left OVH several years ago as they were (surprisingly) no longer cost competitive.
I ended up getting much more server for my money elsewhere.

You can have Gentoo at OVH, just don't use theirs, at least, not for more than 30 min.
Boot your server into rescue mode and do a normal Gentoo install.
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augustin
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 3:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, got it. Thanks.
I have another two years to consider my options.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 3:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

augustin,

Unless OVH pricing has changed, in two years time you will still be paying the same for your server as you are today.
Shop around then. You way find you can save money or get a better server for the same money.
Even OHV will have reduced prices for the same hardware as you have for new contracts, so it might even be worth migrating to a new contract with OHV.

I check prices every year and migrate servers every two or three years.
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krinn
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If people are stupid and brought a server and service without looking at what they brought, it's on them.

Going to OVH, you can see that they don't support software update/installation... http://docs.ovh.ca/en/faqs-server-issues.html#software-support
So if you are renting them a server with Gentoo on it, you are the admin and maintainer of it.
They even clearly tell you that

https://www.ovh.com/us/support/ wrote:
You're the expert!

Using dedicated servers with an IaaS means you have total control over your server. You have complete freedom, allowing you to reinstall when you need to, update when you want to, and modify and maintain your software as you see fit. Your success is the product of the synergy between the hardware of OVH and your software expertise


And a stupid user will always blame them/us/whatever but not himself for being stupid.

You can rent them a debian, it won't make you a debian power user, and they won't support you with that debian too. The OS is not important: no support on software.
And their software part is kinda resume to : look it boot, server is working, so hardware is ok, our job is done.

If people dislike that, they could try find a company that will provide software support, if any company is doing that and support the software, it could get nasty costly for them, and of course, that price will be put into the renting fee.

And first thing that people do when they have done shit, is lying:

I'm more incline that the user who report that they ask a "emerge -C portage" is lying, first they don't provide support, and second if they were by that time doing support, it seems strange a user with a problem that get poor support is giving up just after their first try at supporting him. Only if you are able to judge the value of that support you will then realize that this value is so poor that you need someone else to get real support ; but if you are able to judge "emerge -C portage" is stupid, then it's because you know what it will do, and knowing that, how the hell you end up doing it???
In real, if any user do that, it won't be big surprise that after calling OVH and get kick with a "sorry no support", he came here to put blame on them instead of showing to everyone that: he did a stupid thing and unmerge portage, he did another stupid thing by renting a server with Gentoo on it without any base with the OS the server will run on, and he also didn't read that OVH won't provide him support before renting it.
Even everyone is or has done things like that in our life, when you realize how stupid you were, you don't really wish everyone knows it ; that's when the little lie come to help.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

krinn,

Check out the OVH forums. You will find may examples of users who know what they are doing sending in smartctl output that showed a dead or dying HDD that wasn't getting replaced.
The fix for these users was to migrate to another server and leave the dying hardware to be recycled to a less knowledgable user.

Software support, as you say, you get what you pay for. Thats everywhere, not only OVH.

When I was with OVH, if you took their ready made installs, you got their root ssh key at no extra cost.
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augustin
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 1:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks, I'll shop around.

With regard to Gentoo at OVH, I guess the issue boils down to serving a gentoo 'mirror' that is not in sync with the official gentoo repositories. The warnings above apparently still stand.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

augustin,

OVH Gentoo 2 is a binary distro based on Gentoo. It was using software that had been out of the portage repository for over 6 years when I installed it.
After spending about an hour trying to update it, I gave up and did a normal install.

The update would have been a wonderful educational experience but that not what I wanted a server for.
I have some old installs lying around on boxes that have been powered off for years.
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Ant P.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 8:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some more anecdata while this thread is warm:

I rented an OVH server for a year. The first thing that hit me is their web control panel is a miserable, laggy, hacked-together pile of premade bootstrap templates.

Knowing better than them, I decided to install Gentoo the correct way: boot into the "recovery" environment (a Debian image of some sort, I didn't check to see how bastardized *that* was) and follow the handbook. It was made quite a bit harder by the fact that despite paying through the nose, they didn't give me a remote console of any kind or UEFI, so getting it to boot on a new kernel was (and still is) blind trial and error.

The web control panel is permanently stuck in a state of thinking I don't have an OS installed, so it shoves an obnoxious and dangerous "wipe your disks instantly and install a premade distro with just one click!" popup in my face every time I have to interact with it. Those interactions are in short supply because I made the mistake of assuming they could implement 2FA competently like every other website I've ever used it on, so now I'm stuck using backup codes and unable to reset it without sending in obscene amounts of PII (which they have no reference to compare to).

And last December — surprise! — I started getting reports of dozens of bad sectors from smartctl on one of the disks. It only has a few weeks left on the lease so it's not worth the effort to fix. And after what I've just read above... well, that saves me another five minutes of writing up an email to support. They can go deal with the chargeback when they try to flog that server onto another unsuspecting customer.

OVH (and the other names it operates under - Kimsufi/SoYouStart/etc) are a roach motel. It was an expensive lesson, I hope I can spare others from the same.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 9:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ant P.

OVH used to provide an option to boot your install into QEMU, and get to the console over the web.

I rented an Intel system there, installed with -march=native.
QEMU was set up to be an AMD CPU ...
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