On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, akrherz@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
yum is the updater in RHEL5 :)
And I love yum, except for one thing: it's a bit slow in getting all the
files it needs to decide what needs to be updated. Otherwise, it's great.
I am not sure why all Universities don't get Red Hat site subscriptions.
It is *very* economical. At Iowa State, it works out to roughly 7
dollars per machine per year. Students can use it as well on their
personal systems.
That's an easy answer: standardization. For universities like NIU, we're
encouraged to have as many systems controlled by the campus IT department,
all updated and administered remotely, etc to save on sysadmin costs. The
problem comes when you need special software installed. It's both costly,
and it can take time to get approved. We certainly aren't alone in
that regard. And I don't blame our IT department for that; those that have
their own IT guys here do customize the PC's for each user. If they had
to run Linux, Macs, Solaris, and multiple flavors of Microsoft Windows,
they'd never be able to handle it.
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Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
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