Hi there, On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Mithun Bhattacharya wrote:
> I have a choice between the very well tested 7.3 but highly likely > to become unsupported by RedHat soon. Or I could go for RedHat 9.0 A distribution is just a package of stuff that you could put together yourself if you had the time and energy. Generally it includes an enormous mountain of stuff you neither need nor want, but it has to have frills, bells and whistles to compete. For a mod_perl server all you need is a decent kernel, networking support, a shell and tools to build the server(s) e.g. an editor, a C compiler suite and Perl. You can add all kinds of goodies like mail, ftp and name servers but that isn't what we're talking about here. The less you have in there, the less there is to go wrong and the fewer holes there are in it. Even having a C compiler on the machine is an added security risk. Do you actually need or use RH support? I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it, but by the time you've a few years of Linux experience under your belt it's unlikely you'll need much more than the odd security patch - and you'll be able to deal with that sort of thing easily, even if it means installing a new kernel. I'd say stick with what you know. I tried RH9.0 on internal servers: I found so many things broke it was hardly worth the effort, except for the machine on our receptionist's desk which needs a nice GUI for her word processing stuff (even if it's less reliable than I'd like). Having said that, I had as much trouble with the latest Slackware distro. Things have changed a lot in a couple of years, so I think you either need to keep regularly up to date or else only do it when it's forced on you. I belong to the inertial navigation group. Must be my age. > Also does the Native Posix Thread Library support in RedHat 9.0 have > any added benifit for mod_perl/my applications ? I've no idea, but that's all a bit new and exciting for me anyway... :) 73, Ged.
