Hi Simon, On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 11:53:01AM +1100, Simon wrote: > AT the risk of starting a flamewar.....I am being advised by consultants > that I need to 'upgrade' my Fedora Core servers to RH Enterprise as it > is 'more robust', 'better supported', 'easier to upgrade' etc etc. We > are currently running them as our webserver (informational only - no > transactions), mailserver and intranet webserver (this one is a bit > slow, but just needs more RAM). > > I am unaware of any major differences in the products that would require > us to change over and start paying for what we now do for free - > maintenance has been trivial, yum runs regularly via cron, downtime has > been non-existent.
There are two sets of differences between FC and RHEL4 - one is that RHEL4 is commercial software, with a price tag and commercial support, whatever value you and your business want to place on that; if you don't see value there, then projects like CentOS and Tao Linux give you robust and free (as in beer) alternatives. The second difference is that RHEL4 is an *enterprise* OS, meaning longer release cycles, guaranteed product life, formal regression testing, certification with some hardware and software products, etc. FC, on the other hand, is a consumer OS, meaning it's much more bleeding edge, has much shorter release cycles, and (probably) a shorter product life. So they _are_ different. You've got to decide whether those differences end up making one or other more suitable for your use in your business. Your consultants aren't necessarily being unreasonable - they're saying that enterprise OSes (compare SLES vs. Open SuSE in the SuSE world) tend to be better choices for business server use than consumer ones. That said, you've also got to weigh up the execution risk involved in taking nice working servers and 'upgrading' them for no particularly immediate gain. I'd say it's not a particularly compelling case as you present it. Finally, one other option you might want to know about is that you can usually do simple upgrades (i.e. not reinstalls) from FC servers to their closest RHEL or CentOS relative - there are various howtos available on the net or via the CentOS site with the details. I've done a few and they've all worked nicely. Cheers, Gavin -- Open Fusion P/L - Open Source Business Solutions [ Linux - Perl - Apache ] ph: +612 9875 5032 fax: +612 9875 4317 web: http://www.openfusion.com.au mob: +61 403 171712 - Fashion is a variable, but style is a constant - Programming Perl -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
