A lot of this discussion has been occurring over on the Beowulf list,
where a lot of us had standardized on RH. There's mixed emotions, too.
I'm going to sit on the fence, though, a little longer. I suspect that
we're seeing a minor paradigm shift, wherein we're going back to
downloading our distro's and getting less support. But to be honest,
that's the way my networking lab has been functioning for several years.
Westandardized on RH because, at the time, it _had_ the best package
management tool. We've experimented with Gentoo, debian and Slackware,
and not changed because there haven't been significant benefits (in our
opinion, for our purposes) to warrant it.
What I expect to see is Fedora will continue to be (about) the same
quality as the workstation RH's have been. It's going to evolve faster
than the Enterprise variants, but if one stops to think about it, an
"enterprise" release should, generally, be rock-steady and respond
rapidly only to major bug issues and security holes. If that's the
realm you want to stay in, pay the money.
We also tend to evolve some pretty savvy linux administrators, so adding
packages from tarball isn't nearly as scary as it might be. So if
you're comfortable with the concept, and you want to stay in the
Enterprise arena, pay the money and then go visit apache.org, or for
that matter, fedora's distro sites and get what you need. While I
expect the support folks will disavow problems introduced that way, my
experience has been that I've made no more than 3 calls to RH since I
adopted their distro (and we've actually bought copies, just to get the
support and try it...). And, on one of the calls, I ended up providing
the definative response to a documented problem that'd resided for
several months on their bug lists, so I guess by most definitions, we're
self-supporting.
Finally, it's been my experience that the folks at Unidata are
knowledgable in the nuances of *nix to the point that if something
breaks with LDM or GemPak installed, they likely can help sort it out
better and faster than a call to a generic support line, where they
never heard of LDM or GemPak.
I expect we'll look at SuSE.... er... SuVell... NoSE? and see how it
stacks up. As I'm looking at some dual Opterons for Mesonet, I will
almost have to go there initially, or sort out the issues with RH's
newly found Fedora support for those chips. And, a colleague with a 256
node cluster of Opterons has nothing to say but good things about SuSE
in his life.
So: I don't think it's quite time to panic. I think RH is changing to
try to improve profitability, which I view as a good thing, overall, for
Linux users. I think there are other distros out there that will be
usable for this group, and that we'll continue to offer anecdotal
support to each other on what we've found that works.
I don't think the sky's falling just yet.
Regards,
Gerry
Dan Vietor wrote:
On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 16:19, Arthur A. Person wrote:
Hi...
It was brought to my attention today that RedHat is apparently dropping
support for it's free versions of Linux. This leaves us (and I'm sure
many of you) in a quandary as to what to do. The options appear to be
either to buy support (which apparently will be $150 per desktop, more for
servers) or switch to another vendor.
We will probably be forced to switch to another vendor, at least for
many of our desktops, because of the costs involved. I'd be interested in
any opinions anyone has as to preferences for other Linux distributions
and why. Also, are there any gotcha's with the other distro's as far as
running the LDM and gempak are concerned?
This does concern me in terms of the direction Red Hat is going.
According to the email I got, Red Hat 9 is the last version Red Hat is
going to release and support for it will end on April 30, 2004.
It looks like Red Hat is trying to get everyone to move to Red Hat
Enterprise. The new equivalent looks to be Enterprise Linux WS which
will cost $179 for basic (no CD, download only, no support, 1 year of
updates) or $299 for standard edition (CD at no charge, web support,
etc). My only problem with Enterprise is that it will be more like
Solaris. In other words, major updates will occur, not every 6 month,
but more like every 2 years with intermediate bug and security fixes.
Enterprise 3.0 is essentially Red Hat 9 and probably will be for a
couple of years. Also, WS will only have Apache, Samba and NFS on the
server side. If you want server programs like FTP, IMAP, DHCP, YP, etc
you will have to move to Enterprise Linux ES which will cost $349 for
Basic (no CD, no support) or $799 for Standard.
I'm also not quite sure where Fedora is going. It looks like this will
be a download only with very limited support and documentation. Since
Fedora seems to be a Red Hat light (limited Red Hat financial backing
but mostly community developed, tested and supported), it might be more
difficult to use it in a operational environment.
I guess as long as RH 9 continues to run here, I'll stick with it. I
wonder how Novell buying out Suse is going to change that product??
Also, it might not be a bad idea to try out other Linux releases such as
Slackware.
--
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager@xxxxxxxx
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.847.8578
Page: 979.228.0173
Office: 903A Eller Bldg, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
