On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 18:22, Kerry Cox wrote: > We are currently in the process of looking at alternative solutions to > our Red Hat servers. We have been pleased with Red Hat and its > performance in the past, but the current licensing situation has us > looking for a new solution. > Anyone tried out any of the RHEL AS3 derivatives? I have tested Tao > Linux, Whitebox and CentOS. I have been particularly pleased with Fermi > Linux. It appears to be the best choice so far. > I have been working with a single copy of RHEL AS3 and compiling all > updates from source RPMS. The derivatives are fairly true to the > original. > We have tested Debian, FreeBSD and SuSE, but we need to keep everything > consistent with the programming and coding done so far. > Management wants to start migrating everything to SuSE on account of our > current agreements with Novell. > Anyone have any input on the matter? Anyone leaning heavily to a new > distro or spinoff?
I'm a little surprised (not much, just a little) to hear of an enterprise (or is KSL smaller than I think?) going /away/ from RHEL. I know that the non-educational license is more expensive than what we're paying, but Red Hat is really a great distro, especially if you've already invested in it. We just set up a machine with RHEL and started managing it from the Red Hat Network and it's a dream. A year ago I would have laughed if someone told me Linux could be that easy to maintain. You can even reboot the machine from the web console, or install new packages. It seems to me that if your servers are important to you you'd want to have someone accountable behind them. That's not to say that you, Kerry, aren't that someone, but that when you move on is there someone else? Will there always be? There will be if you're on a support contract with Red Hat. This kind of thing tends to offend those of us who support these machines ourselves, but if you look at it from the perspective of the people who lose money when something goes wrong it doesn't look like such a bad idea to pay to have outside support available. I also like the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat. It seemed like a bad idea when I first heard about it, but the longer they are both around the more it looks like exactly the best way to do it for everyone involved. I would not put Fedora on an important server, but I wouldn't put anything else on my desktop. Supporting Red Hat by choosing them for your servers benefits the Fedora project in the long run, and using Fedora at home and on less critical machines benefits Red Hat in the long. SuSE may be a good option for it's own reasons, particularly it management wants it already. Sometimes going against management for technical reasons doesn't give enough benefit to outweigh the benefits of having management feel like you (all) made the right decision. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
