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Red Hat Software Businesses Linux Business

Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed 191

Posted by michael from the marooned-on-taroon dept.
viewstyle writes "eWEEK has got a review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Beta, code named Taroon. It now has the new Red Hat Bluecurve interface. New important stuff includes: logical volume management and access control lists in the file system. The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time. If you're interested, you can download it here."
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Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed More

Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed

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  • Doo? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rylin ( 688457 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:14PM (#6769301)
    I was under the impression you had to buy a support-license to be able to use RH Enterprise?
    Have I been smoking something, or is there another explanation for this?

    • Re:Doo? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:17PM (#6769324)
      Don't forget that you also need to purchase a System V binary runtime licence for each CPU.

    • Re:Doo? (Score:5, Informative)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:57PM (#6769599) Journal
      No, the software is all FOSS. You just don't get support for it.

      Also, don't go buying one copy, installing 10 and wanting support for 10 on the price of 1. THAT is a no-no.

      "The term "Services" as used in this Agreement means, collectively, the Support Services and RHEN, each as defined herein."

      On the other hand, if you install 100 copies and later want tech support for just one then you must buy tech support for all 100 before you get help. :-)
      • Then where is the downloads for earlier versions? And will this be available after release?

        I've not seen them available at RH site... All I ever see is the 'workstation' edition ( and the Database iso )

        Or do you mean you have to create it by hand using a bunch of packages?

        Not that I'm trying to get out of paying for support, ( though I'm support in this case ), but I sure as hell wont ask a client to fork out $$ if I cant really show them what they are getting.... ( so I give them FBSD instead.. somethin

        • Re:Doo? (Score:3, Informative)

          by chill ( 34294 )
          I believe the GPL only requires that the sources be available on request. I saw the sources (SRPMs) for the ia64 version of 2.1 AW at ftp.redhat.com.

          Red Hat doesn't have to make binaries available for download.

          However, if you have an RHN account, you can get priority access to most files (200+ Kbps download speed as opposed to 30 Kbps from ftp.redhat.com). Right now I see the following available:

          RHL 6.2 Normal, Power Tools and Enterprise Edition
          RHL 7.0 Normal, Power Tools
          RHL 7.1 Normal, Power Tools
          RHL
        • Then where is the downloads for earlier versions?

          Red Hat doesn't make it easy to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux without paying for support. You can get source RPMS from the FTP site, but you need Red Hat Enterprise Network with an RHEL entitlement to get ISOs and binary packages.

          Someone with a subscription should be able to give you most of the packages, but possibly not the ISOs. The RHEL subscription agreement [redhat.com] is kind of scary, so I haven't been that interested.

          I'm disappointed that Red Hat has only

  • Call that a review? (Score:5, Informative)

    by kiltedtaco ( 213773 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:15PM (#6769310) Homepage
    That was just a general list of features! Does anything there actualy even suggest that the author actualy installed the OS?

    This is about as newsworthy as the "Top universities" thing.

  • LVM: article is wrong (Score:5, Informative)

    by menscher ( 597856 ) <menscher+slashdot@u i u c . e du> on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:17PM (#6769323) Homepage Journal
    It says "LVM first surfaced in the 8.0 release of Red Hat Linux", but I'm using it under RH7.3, so....

    • Re:LVM: article is wrong (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think it's a little misleading, but not outright wrong. LVM was indeed included in RH7.3 (disc2), but I'm not sure if it was available during the install process.

    • Re:LVM: article is wrong (Score:4, Informative)

      by justsomebody ( 525308 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @07:21PM (#6769753) Journal
      If I read it correctly, LVM was present in 7.3, but 8.0 was the first version that introduced autodetecting of LVM volume in booting up

      In 7.3 you had to edit rc.local and add commands to scan volumes, 8.0 contains

      # LVM initialization
      if [ -f /etc/lvmtab -a ! -e /proc/lvm ] ; then
      modprobe lvm-mod >/dev/null 2>&1
      fi
      if [ -e /proc/lvm -a -x /sbin/vgchange -a -f /etc/lvmtab ]; then
      action $"Setting up Logical Volume Management:" /sbin/vgscan && /sbin/vgchange -a y
      fi

      in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, that's difference as much as I see it

  • The review (Score:2, Funny)

    by slovin8 ( 579527 )
    Well, this review has no screenshots at all for the Bluecurve or anything else! The review didn't also evanglize KDE over Gnome or vice versa!! Now that's rare Anyhow, We demand screenshots!

    • Re:The review (Score:3, Informative)

      by justsomebody ( 525308 )
      Yeah, right. And then you'll probably ask for a review how good is RH Advanced Server for desktop.

      Just like people were reviewing M$ Server 2003

      Server is SERVER, but if you expect some fancy tools, you're wrong. Differences between RH AS and Desktop are mainly for what purpose it was compiled together, and for what services, oh yes and RH AS 2.1 has Java server.

  • ACLs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:18PM (#6769328)
    Does anyone know if ACLs are included in the Red Hat 10 Severn beta or is it strictly for Enterprise?

  • Feature list (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cly ( 457948 ) <myspampot@@@yahoo...com> on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:18PM (#6769333)
    That's not a review. That's just a list of features copied from the README file or something.

    And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?

    • Re:Feature list (Score:3, Insightful)

      by FreeLinux ( 555387 )
      Als, please pay special attention to those "server" apps that were covered in the review, KDE, GNOME, Evolution, Eclipse, OpenOffice. I don't know how my servers have managed without these for so long. The only items they mentioned that are truely important to servers are ACLs and LVM.

      Absolutely no mention was made of Apache, SQL server, SAMBA, mail, performance, reliability, nothing.
      • Disclaimer: I did NOT RTFA.

        I would venture to guess that they "reviewed" the WS version...

        RedHat has 3 versions of Enterprise:
        AS == Advanced Server
        ES == Enterprise Server
        WS == WorkStation
      • Als, please pay special attention to those "server" apps that were covered in the review, KDE, GNOME, Evolution, Eclipse, OpenOffice.

        They *are* server apps if the environment is full of thin clients.
    • It's amazing how sterile and robotic reviews sound lately.
      Hell, even my spam mails sound more compelling.
    • I really liked the way they spelled out all the acronyms!
    • And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?

      My immediate reaction to this was "You're kidding, right? What the hell kind of word is 'Taroon'?"

      Then I glanced at the article, saw that you were right, and that made me sad.

      I don't care what the rest of the article said, if I wrote an essay for my English course and started 60% of the paragraphs with the same word, my prof would fail me. Period.

  • ACLs already in SuSE ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Marcus Meissner ( 6627 ) <marcus@jet.franken.de> on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:21PM (#6769353) Homepage
    ACLs have been in SuSEs Enterprise Server since end of last year, so they are barely news.

  • What review?? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Broken_Windows ( 658461 )
    We are currently looking at 2.1 vs SuSe enterprise for an upcoming application so I though this would be worth a read, not. Looks like a local review is in order.

  • ACLs (Score:3, Informative)

    by Plix ( 204304 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:26PM (#6769392) Homepage
    The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time.

    FreeBSD [freebsd.org] has had ACLs (in the 5.x branch) for some time as well.
    • Linux has had it since the kernel 2.2x days. Its just not compiled by default on most distro's. I think SUse has been doing this for awhile but I am not too sure.

      ACL's are really a VMS thing and NT thing. In these operating systems bits for ACL's as well as permissions are stored in the filesystem. I believe ( not to sure ) that ext2/ext3 only has the permissions bits set in atrributes in the filesystem. This makes ACL support in Linux less powerfull. I have not used Linux in awhile but I do remember playi

      • ACL's are really a VMS thing and NT thing.

        Dunno about Linux ACLs, but the FreeBSD ones follow POSIX.1e rather closely, and Solaris seems heavily inspired by them, even if it's not API compatible. Sounds like a Unix thing to me, even if the standardization effort has been canceled (the downloadable versions of POSIX.1e have "Withdrawn Draft" printed all over them).

        It's really not much more than a generalization of the user/group/other read/write/execute matrix. How you implement it, using extended attri

  • fair warning (Score:2, Informative)

    by jacquesm ( 154384 )
    RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release, so don't install this on anything mission critical (as in it's your living or someone will get mad at you if it fails).

    Are you on the grapevine yet ? [wwgrapevine.com]

    • Re:fair warning (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:34PM (#6769454)
      You're talking about the regular Red Hat stuff. Not the Enterprise stuff. Their current version is 2.1. 2.1 is solid.

    • Re:fair warning (Score:2, Informative)

      by Nighttime ( 231023 )
      That was the general rule of thumb for the regular RedHat releases but this is the Enterprise edition we're/they're talking about. Besides, RH8 and RH9 have proven themselves to be fairly resiliant.
    • RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release

      Redhat will not be releasing point versions for the consumer versions, not sure about the Enterprise versions though. So home users won't really have a choice but to use RH 10 if they want the latest and greatest from RH...

      • RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release
        Redhat will not be releasing point versions for the consumer versions
        Both can be true...

    • Re:fair warning (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sloanster ( 213766 )
      That's FUD - red hat's enterprise stuff is 100% supported for mission critical applications.

      You're probably thinking of the unsupported consumer releases, which in the past have been a bit buggy at *.0 releases and shaped up nicely by *.2 releases.

      Having said that, our RH 9 firewalls are holding up nicely after some months of heavy use - but managers love the accountability of having someone to yell at with the "enterprise" editions...

    • Re:fair warning (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 )
      Well as others pointed out that doesn't nearly apply to their enterprise offerings. I'd also like to say Red Hat 8.0 also pretty much crushed that myth. Maybe for workstation use 6.0 wasn't that great, but for basic server use I've found Red Hat has serverd me well regardless of the version. So I'd say its basically time to put the Red Hat .0 myth to bed now.

  • Eclipse + no JVM (Score:3, Informative)

    by maharg ( 182366 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:27PM (#6769405) Homepage Journal
    Taroon ships with version 2.1 of the open source Eclipse Development Environment. Eclipse requires a Java virtual machine to run, but Taroon doesn't ship with one.

    Huh ? Eclipse + no JVM seems a bit pointless IMO..
    Eclipse is a cool IDE tho, and it saves a download..
    • I presume they strip out the JVM as they can't restribute them freely. In the commercial, final package, you get a commercial JRE with the whole thing.

    • Re:Eclipse + no JVM (Score:3, Informative)

      by chill ( 34294 )
      I had this discussion with the reviewer via e-mail earlier today. The website (http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2-1.html) mentions that the IBM JDK is delivered with the product. [Read it again Jason, it *does* refer to WS as well as EA and AS.]

      However, it seems it wasn't either included or installed with the reviewer's beta. Hopefully, this will be fixed before the actual release.

    • Re:Eclipse + no JVM (Score:2, Informative)

      by rkz ( 667993 )
      Eclipse no longer needs a JVM to run.
      They are using the GTK version. [slashdot.org]
    • While the other comments to this post address the issue, it raises hope for the group of Linux sysadmins who don't need Red Hat for their technical support, but want to be able to run a version of Linux that's commercially supported by their application vendor.

      The only 'non GPL' part of RHEL 2.1 was the JVM; if they're leaving it out of 3 entirely, then (pending trademark issues) there should be nothing stopping you copying an entire RHEL 3 CD. And while I'm not saying that you perhaps should, it sure mak

  • Coincidence? I think not!!11!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by bad_fx ( 493443 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:30PM (#6769433) Journal
    Taroon.. Hmmm... Taroon.. Aha!!!11

    If you reverse Taroon you get "Noorat", Right?
    Okay, now... tihs is clearly ROT-14 encoded so decoding it you get "Zaadmf" uhuh? stay with me here... Now reversing that gives "Fmdaaz" Yes? Good...

    Now... md clearly stands for "Must Die" and F is clearing code for "SCO". (or "Fuckers" if you prefer) Finally I have also uncovered through unrevealed sources at Red Hat that "aaz" is special inhouse code for "(sponsored by IBM)."

    So Taroon is actually code for.....:

    "SCO must die! (sponsored by IBM)"

    DARL WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!!11!!!11

    ...i'm not cray.. i'm not crazy... *sits in corner twitching*

  • duh look at the price (Score:3, Insightful)

    by atari2600 ( 545988 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:36PM (#6769466)
    . Red Hat officials said they plan to ship RHEL 3.0 in October. As with Version 2.1, the new release will come in workstation, departmental server and data center server versions, with the high-end version priced at about $2,500.

    Ummm who thinks this is a little expensive even for big organisations? Also..

    Taroon ships with version 2.1 of the open source Eclipse Development Environment. Eclipse requires a Java virtual machine to run, but Taroon doesn't ship with one.

    HUH!!!

    • Re:duh look at the price (Score:4, Informative)

      by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Friday August 22, 2003 @07:27PM (#6769789) Homepage Journal
      No - I work at a small business. My boss priced a low end dell server (like $6k) - then he had to pay the license for win2k and SQL server- I think it ran somewhere around $10k- four thousand dollars more than the server.

      We went with PostgreSQL on Red Hat. It doesn't do everything SQL Server does out of the box- but we didn't need everything SQL server does. $25,000 is peanuts.

    • The RH ES and WS are more reasonable prices (the list price is something like $400 and $200 per year per machine if all you want is right to use license and the updates)
    • "As with Version 2.1, the new release will come in workstation, departmental server and data center server versions.."

      The beta dir linked to in this story only has downloads for WS and AS - no ES. Why is there no beta of the one version that will probably be the most popular (due to price/features tradeoff)?

    • who thinks [$2,500] is a little expensive

      You have several options [redhat.com], ranging from $180 to $2,500. $2,500 gets you RHEL AS with premium support, which includes 24/7 phone support for critical problems. Most users will want RHEL ES with basic ($350) or standard ($700) support.

  • Red Hat ES license Issue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:38PM (#6769479)
    You have to pay for support even if you don't need it on a development server:

    4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System.
    http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2- 1.html

    You have to abide by the above agreement if you buy a server. So this means if you install it on additional servers, you have to buy support even if you don't need support for a development box.

    That sucks. This is even ok with GPL
    • If don't rely on their included servers... you can do your development on the Basic WS version for $179.00 a box.

      As explained to me by RedHat, the only difference [redhat.com] between ES and WS is the server software in the install.

    • From the GPL FAQ:

      Does the GPL allow me to require that anyone who receives the software must pay me a fee and/or notify me?

      No. In fact, a requirement like that would make the program non-free. If people have to pay when they get a copy of a program, or if they have to notify anyone in particular, then the program is not free. See the definition of free software.

      The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits people to use and even redistribute the software without being required t

    • I assume it's a way to try to make it more fair. It wouldn't be fair that a company running one server and a company running 100 servers woulc be purchasing support for one each (and the one that's supported has all the problems and need all the patches, right? Which would then happen to end up on the 99 others.)

      Yes is sucks if you just want to have a test installation. But trying to put down "fair" in a non-ambigious service contract is very difficult, so a flat out "We support all or no installations, ma

  • I've been using this for a couple weeks. (Score:5, Informative)

    by j1mmy ( 43634 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:40PM (#6769495) Journal
    Stable enough, though pretty haphazardly put together, even for a beta release. The distro is missing stuff like postgresql's server and pine. You can build these from source rpms or download them from up2date, but they're not available as binary rpms anywhere on redhat's ftp. Other than that, it seems to be pretty solid on my dual opterons.
    • on my dual opterons. Lucky bastard.
    • Resonable surprised that postgres is missing. However, pine is most intentional. Pine is going by the wayside due to the licensing by Washington University (I think they wrong it). It's not free software, so RedHat won't ship it. That was explained in the RH 8 or 9 README.

      Kirby

      • Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. (Score:5, Informative)

        by fo0bar ( 261207 ) * on Friday August 22, 2003 @08:30PM (#6770128)
        [Pine's] not free software, so RedHat won't ship it.

        Close, but the reason is this: Red Hat CANNOT ship pine, techically. This is because Red Hat includes its own patches in nearly every RPM it releases. (This is usually to fix a bug in hardware X with glibc Y that only occurs Z minutes each year... you get the idea.) While Pine's license allows for the creation of patches against the product, it does not allow for distributing patches binaries, without prior approval from UofW. Whether those patches are available to the end user is irrelevant, Pine's authors don't like "modified" binaries to be released.

        Of course, source-based ports systems like Gentoo or *BSD are fine, due to their nature, but distros like Red Hat don't want to go through the hoops involved with Pine, so they just choose not to.
    • It's not just Pine. All University of Washinton stuff is on the way out. Pico (basic text editor) is replaced by GNU Nano. UW-IMAP will be replaced by dovecot, but not till next release (already happened in RH10 beta, but not AS), WU-FTP will be replaced by vsftpd (happened as of v9 AFAIK). Means I'll need to learn some new config tricks/have to rewrite cron jobs/work out new chroot setup. Hopefully it will be painless, but you never know. I'm looking at the glacial pace of change of Solaris, and almost fee

  • RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:5, Informative)

    by MmmmAqua ( 613624 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:44PM (#6769520)
    For anyone who's interested...

    I run Oracle 9iR2 on RHAS 2.1 machines at my work. Generally, I have been very happy overall with the performance and stability of Oracle on Linux (though, for home use, certainly not - Oracle costs an arm, a leg, and both of their respective prosthetic replacements). There are a couple of things that RHAS 3.0 does much better than 2.1 (that I've noticed, and these only relate to Oracle on Linux, so this may be completely irrelevant to you). All tests were done on a Dell PowerEdge 2650, dual 2.8Gz Xeon, 6GB RAM, a PERC3Di RAID controller driving a five-disk RAID 5, and dual gigabit ethernet controllers.

    First, the inclusion of the hyperthreaded scheduler. I run dual Xeon machines, and enabling HT on the 3.0 beta allowed the machine to handle 10-12% more load than with HT disabled. Enabling HT on 2.1 incurred a performance penalty, as the scheduler would tend to starve one CPU.

    Second, you can now use bigpages with a shmfs large SGA (SGA > 1.7Gb). My production servers have a 3Gb SGA, and using 4kb pages is painful. I don't know what the problem was with 2.1, but this is a big fix for me, as it means I don't have to lower the mapped base address for all of my Oracle binaries anymore. Woohoo!

    Third, LVM is nice. You can use LVM with 2.1, with a little doing, but in general it is a pain. Being able to create volumes at boot time is nice, and then later on, when I decide to hang a PowerVault enclosure off the PowerEdge, being able to just toss that large pool of extra storage into the volume is nice, too.

    Lastly, if you are using Java in your Oracle database at all, then you will see a big benefit from NPTL. At least, I am assuming it's NPTL, but my Java stored procedures which spawn threads to parallelize some heavy lifting are executing much faster. I'm probably jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I don't care. Some of my extproc .so's are threaded, and they're running better, too.

    I don't really care about Bluecurve, because I never use X on the Oracle servers. The only reason X is installed is because Oracle has no command-line installer anymore, so I have to do a remote X session for the installs. That's Oracle's fault, though, so no digs on Red Hat for that. I also really, really wish that Red Hat would include some more filesystems. Ext3 is okay, but for larger database files, I would much rather be using XFS.

    All in all, I think RHAS 3 beta is a significant step forward for Red Hat, at least for Oracle users. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the hanic (High-Availability NIC) daemon from Oracle runs better on 3.0 beta than 2.1. It's cool to be able to yank one of the ethernet cables out of your machine during heavy traffic and have everything keep running.
    • The only reason X is installed is because Oracle has no command-line installer anymore, so I have to do a remote X session for the installs.

      How the world seems to regress. To me, this was a big advantage of installing (and using) Oracle on Linux, vs. the pointy-clicky Windows version. I could write a script to automate the install and just let it run, vs. a painful morning's worth of click-and-wait on Windows. I could easily experiment with different installation options. And a script lets you painles

    • You forgot one little detail.

      RH AS 3.0 will be faster. Everything goes in favour of disk-access. I can't really speak for SCSI but for extra large LVM Volumes on IDE drives it will make a great difference.
      • There are few, if any, changes in the driver for Dell PERC RAID controllers. I have both the PERC3/Di and PERC4/DC controllers in my test machine, and have noticed no improvement in IO performance. These devices were plenty fast in 2.1, anyway; I have a PowerVault 220 with 14 U160 disks in it in a split backplane configuration, and with 2.1 I could easily saturate the PowerVault's SCSI channel.

        I cannot speak to improvements in the IDE layer, as the only IDE device in any of my servers is the DVD-ROM.
        • Yep. SCSI change will be affected in 2.6 due to new scheduler, which includes simultaneous device write/read improvements.

          But as I tested (on SCSI), it does make a little difference, when there are simultaneous connections over network to different files

  • CON: Distribution channel for vital, for-cost add-ons such as Java virtual machine and Flash Player remains unclear; on the desktop, lacks range of application availability enjoyed by Windows.

    Please correct me if im wrong but the Red Hat Enterprise releases are ment to be used in the server environments, I couldnt see but a very few cases were a workstation might need an enterprise version.

    Assumming im correct its statements like this that really get to me --

    CON: Distribution channel for vital, for-cost

    • Re:Its things like this.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by MmmmAqua ( 613624 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:50PM (#6769560)
      Well, RHAS is pitched to enterprise applications, and one of the biggest enterprise applications is Oracle. You are supposed to have installed both Sun's 1.3.1 JVM, and Blackdown's 1.1.8 JRE on RHAS machines which are intended to run 9i.

      So, at least as far as a JVM goes, the author has a valid bitch.

  • Useless Review.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ElGuapoGolf ( 600734 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:48PM (#6769548) Homepage
    This is not so much a review as a rehash of the feature list. I don't care about bluecureve or the wonderful interface on an advanced server product.

    As they're not shipping a JDK with it, it's hard to know if their kernel modifications will break whatever JDK they do ship with (like the last RHAS did). Or if they only let you install to ext3, unless you feel like playing with command line install options.

    That java thing was a horrible mess, and was why we ultimately went with SuSE. Don't bill yourself as an OS for running those java application servers unless you test. Hopefully RH has fixed their issues this time around.

  • Logical Volume Management (Score:4, Informative)

    by Yonder Way ( 603108 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @06:48PM (#6769552)
    It's been shameful that RHEL customers have had to do without official LVM support while the retail users have had it for some time.

    I'm using it presently on RH 9 and found that Red Hat's implementation of LVM prevents snapshots from working properly. That is, you can create a logical snapshot, but you can't mount it. I downloaded the latest kernel source from kernel.org, copied the .config file over from the RH kernel, but didn't apply the Red Hat patches. Not only does the system work precisely as expected, but LVM snapshotting actually works just fine. I'm now able to properly back up my desktop machine.

    That Red Hat has known about this problem for ages and neglected to fix it is shameful. LVM should have been a priority all along for RHEL.
  • What happened to ES? Has this been dropped for 3.x?

    WS is Work Station - for desktop machines.
    AS is Advanced Server - comes with failover and other HA features.
    ES was the in-between one - the one that's almost affordable.

    Anyone know?

  • Does anyone know if it would be possible to upgrade a retail RedHat Linux version (say 7.2 or 9) to RHEL ES 3.0?

  • Red Hat is Headed for Extinction (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 23, 2003 @01:24AM (#6771265)
    On our campus, Red Hat is the most common Linux distribution in use. Hardware is currently being certified to run it as a production platform within the main data center.

    However, everything has been roiled by their pricing and End Of Life announcement to the point that an exit strategy is being crafted.

    The problem is the 1 year End Of Life for desktop products. Production systems cannot be built on a platform that will lose support within a year -- it takes 4 months just to certify that the build is good, leaving only 8 months of production. Turning over the OS every year is a non-starter.

    The $2,500 price tag is also a non-starter. The data center is manned by UNIX professionals, several with RHCE certifications. Yes they need support, but they don't need $2,500 of support for every machine. The entire Solaris support contract for the data center covering dozens of machines, running "free" Solaris, is $3,000.

    The allied agency, NCSA, has already abandoned Red Hat because they couldn't get a reasonable price for their Beauwolf cluster.

    The problem is exemplified by one UNIX group that supports Departmental and Faculty machines on a contract basis. Red hat has been, and is, the most installed version. However, this customer base won't install $400 to $2,500 Red Hat to get the longer support life-time, they'll only go for the free/cheaper version with a 1 year EOL. The problem is Departments and Faculty also don't want their machines turning over every year (worse than Microsoft). To ameliorate this problem for the short-term, this group is getting ready to take over creating security patches (i.e., making RPM's) for 2 years after the official EOL for desktop versions. This will allow them to service existing and new customers. To solve this problem for the long-term, this support group is actively working to find another distribution that can offer a better EOL and pricing point. Currently, SUSE, with all of it's weaknesses, is the favorite candidate. This Fall, the group plans to learn SUSE, then shift the Linux Administrators course they teach from Red Hat to another distribution (possibly SUSE).

    Unless Red Hat realizes they need to site license to Educational institutions, this will be the year they lose most of the Educational market. They'll still have a few contracts here and there for data center installs, but the vast masses (Computer Science Departments, etc.) will be encouraged to move to another distribution that can be supported for a reasonable cost.

    Two years from now, unless Red Hat wakes up, they won't have significant penetration in the Educational market.

    Folks aren't necessarily asking for "free," but they are asking for some reality in pricing. Currently, Red Hat turns a deaf ear to any criticism that their pricing structure is not appropriate. They can can continue to turn a deaf ear, but soon they'll find no one is bugging them anymore because we'll all be running another distribution.

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