[lug] Red Hat Professional Workstation

[Ferdinand Schmid]

--On Saturday, January 17, 2004 06:43:37 AM -0700 Rob Nagler
<nagler at bivio.biz> wrote:

> Nate Duehr writes:
>> says... "time to move on."  And yes, I am still a paying RedHat
>> Network  member.  Blindly thinking that paying $60 a year
>> (originally $99) would 
> 
> I'm in a similar position.  I am looking at SUSE.  I've loaded it on
> two boxes, and frankly I'm impressed and frustrated.  The install is
> clean, but the DVD didn't install out of the box and there was no
> readme.  I found something about passing kernel args, but that seems
> amateurish.

Write to SuSE and tell them.  I found that problems of this type are
being
fixed and I always received a very friendly acknowledgement from them
for my
bug report.

> There are lots of differences.  /etc/*/init.d structure is different.
> /etc/sysconfig/network is way different.  SaX didn't work out of the
> box on my LCD screen with dual monitors.  I had to fire it up with
> SaX2 -l.  I've got a lot of boxes to manage, and it is quite
> frustrating to deal with the capriciousness of it all.  Silly things
> like /etc/sshd/ssh_config is not setup to forward X11 by default.  And
> big thinks like postfix instead of sendmail.

It wouldn't be surprising if postfix would surpass sendmail as the
mainstream
MTA.  It has a good security record, good configuration capabilities,
and
performs well.  SuSE chose to switch to it some time ago for security
reasons.  Same with X11 forwarding - they are a very security minded
distro.
But whenever you put locks on doors you need to inconvenience people
with
having to carry a key.  You can unlock the doors yourself - but you
need to
learn which doors to unlock.  I admit there is a learning curve.  
Also not the nice config utilities for setting file permissions
(/etc/permissions.local, /etc/permissions.paranoid, ...)

> I've also written sales at redhat.com.  I've got 20+ RHN subsciptions,
> and I would have thought they would like to keep my business (maybe
> they'll just charge my credit card forever hoping I don't notice ;-).
> They haven't contacted me directly nor have they responded to my "What
> do I choose?" email.  Very strange for a company switching to a
> corporate model.
> 
> I'm still not certain that the move away from RH makes sense.  I just
> don't know what to expect from SUSE.  It's different enough that I
> have to treat it like Solaris.  That's a big issue for us, because
> we've developed a tools/knowledge for managing our 30+ systems.
> It's not very easy to simply switch our operations to a new OS.

For a Linux-Only admin the switch to SuSE means a short time of
learning but
generally things are the same.  The switch to Solaris is a huge change.
I
have done both (RedHat->SuSE, Linux->Solaris, among others like
HPUX->Linux
a long time ago).
Bear in mind that the Consumer versions of SuSE give you access to
update as
many machines as you like within your company.

> My biggest beef is that none of the distros seems to have figured out
> the upgrade/update thing.  I'm tired of having to bring down a system
> to install a new upgrade for an hour or so, when an update could do
> exactly the same thing.  If I don't keep up with updates, that's my
> problem.  Forcing me to upgrade everything en masse every year or so
> is plain stupid.  Subscriptions should mean that I don't have to deal
> with needless discontinuities.

Kernel updates require a reboot.  Package dependencies can cause serious
trouble if you don't update all packages at the same time.  That is the
reason
SuSE (and most likely also RedHat and other distros) backport paches
rather
than simply shipping newer versions of software packages.  I am also
aware of
some jakarta-tomcat servletes we run that had trouble with system
upgrades.  A
newer version of some library is all you need and your code suddenly
fails...

Since you brought up the SuSE example - you can keep running your SuSE
consumer package for two years and only do security updates.  After
those two
years you need to upgrade.  If you purchase the enterprise edition you
get
five years of support before you need to upgrade.  I think that is a
nice
amount of time.

I hope the above info is useful,
Ferdinand

--
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
Celebrating over 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
http://www.archenergy.com