On 10/10/07 15:54, Vincent Fox wrote: > In our DataCenter we have both and I can tell you RHEL has > it's own set of difficulties. And the patching situation is not > fundamentally better it's just different.
On the contrary; the patching situation with RHEL is dramatically better than with Solaris. RPM provides a dramatically improved interface for identifying every customized configuration file (rpm -V), identifying what packages own which files, accurately representing dependencies, etc. You'd think Solaris would have figured out that a real packaging solution was needed by now... > At least with our Solaris > systems kernel patches USUALLY don't break things, which > is not the case with the RHEL boxes. Even the simplest > example is I can't apply new kernels to RHEL without > breaking OpenAFS. If you have kernel customizations, you just need to build the new kernel or modules targeting the new version before you reboot. > I have been intrigued by the Debian way of doing things > lately though. A couple of our guys use it but we don't > have it in any production role so I can't comment further. Debian and derivatives (e.g. Ubuntu) have significantly faster patching performance than Red Hat, but sport a brain-damaged package signing scheme (sign the entire repository, rather than individual packages), so be warned if signing is important to you. -- Jefferson Ogata <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> NOAA Computer Incident Response Team (N-CIRT) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Never try to retrieve anything from a bear."--National Park Service
