[lug] RHN Basic--Worth the money?

[Kirk Rafferty]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 01:08:59PM -0700, The Matt wrote:
> With the veritable deluge of mail from Red Hat concerning Red Hat 9
> today, I was wondering if any one out there can comment on the value of
> a "Basic" RHN subscription.  Is it worth the $60/year for the "priority"
> access to errata for a person that rides Rawhide as much as I do?

We use the basic RHN subscription, and I feel it's certainly worth it.
The biggest thing it buys you is convenience and time.  While I can certainly
download updated RPMs from the public FTP server, it is time consuming to
figure out if I need an update, then apply it, and then wade through all the
dependencies that caused the update to fail.  RHN allows me to click a few
web widgets, and let RHN figure all that stuff out.

One of the most impressive things about RHN is that it will upgrade your
kernel for you.  I run seven production servers, and have updated the kernel
several times using RHN on all of them.  At first, I was scared as hell to
trust that kind of update to an automated process.  But it's performed
flawlessly every single time.

Keep in mind that RHN will only update and maintain packages for that version
of RHL.  If you're running Rawhide RPMs, roll your own, or just configure/make
from source, you're on your own and may not get a lot of value out of it,
depending on your mix of distro packages and homebrewed packages.  Also,
sometimes you will need to restart some services, such as when glibc is
updated.  But you'd need to do that anyway.

Hope that helps!

-k