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Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed 191
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."
Doo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Have I been smoking something, or is there another explanation for this?
Re:Doo? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Doo? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Doo? (Score:2)
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)
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
Thats what i thought. (Score:2)
Just wanted to verify things hadnt changed..
Re:Doo? (Score:2)
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)
This is about as newsworthy as the "Top universities" thing.
Re:Call that a review? (Score:2, Informative)
And later: "During tests, we were pleased with the feature's usability."
Sounds like they installed it...
Re:Call that a review? (Score:2)
Re:Call that a review? (Score:2)
Re:Call that a review? (Score:2)
LVM: article is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Re:LVM: article is wrong (Score:2, Informative)
Re:LVM: article is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
In 7.3 you had to edit rc.local and add commands to scan volumes, 8.0 contains
# LVM initialization
if [ -f
modprobe lvm-mod >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
if [ -e
action $"Setting up Logical Volume Management:"
fi
in
Re:LVM: article is wrong (Score:2)
The review (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The review (Score:3, Informative)
Just like people were reviewing M$ 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)
Feature list (Score:5, Insightful)
And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?
Re:Feature list (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely no mention was made of Apache, SQL server, SAMBA, mail, performance, reliability, nothing.
Re:Feature list (Score:2)
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
Re:Feature list (Score:2)
They *are* server apps if the environment is full of thin clients.
Re:Feature list (Score:1)
Hell, even my spam mails sound more compelling.
Re:Feature list (Score:1)
Re:Feature list (Score:2)
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)
Re:ACLs already in SuSE ... (Score:2)
What review?? (Score:2, Interesting)
ACLs (Score:3, Informative)
FreeBSD [freebsd.org] has had ACLs (in the 5.x branch) for some time as well.
Re:ACLs (Score:2)
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
Re:ACLs (Score:2)
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)
Are you on the grapevine yet ? [wwgrapevine.com]
Re:fair warning (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fair warning (Score:2)
Are you on the grapevine yet ? [wwgrapevine.com]
Re:fair warning (Score:2, Informative)
Re:fair warning (Score:1)
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...
Re:fair warning (Score:2)
Re:fair warning (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
Eclipse + no JVM (Score:3, Informative)
Huh ? Eclipse + no JVM seems a bit pointless IMO..
Eclipse is a cool IDE tho, and it saves a download..
Re:Eclipse + no JVM (Score:2)
Re:Eclipse + no JVM (Score:3, Informative)
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)
They are using the GTK version. [slashdot.org]
Re:Eclipse + no JVM (Score:2)
Re:Eclipse + no JVM (Score:2)
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)
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
God I wish... (Score:2)
I would laugh and laugh...
Re:Coincidence? I think not!!11!! (Score:2)
duh look at the price (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:duh look at the price (Score:2)
Re:duh look at the price (Score:2)
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)?
Re:duh look at the price (Score:2)
Re:duh look at the price (Score:2)
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)
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
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
Possible Workaround (Score:2)
As explained to me by RedHat, the only difference [redhat.com] between ES and WS is the server software in the install.
Doesn't look compatible (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doesn't look compatible (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, if that's true, then it's fine. Then it's simply a matter of "the support contract is nullified if such-and-such or so-and-so." But the quoted language of the license is different, it says the customer will buy additional support contracts if the software is installed on additional machines. That is placing restrictions o
Re:Red Hat ES license Issue (Score:2)
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)
Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. (Score:2)
Kirby
Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks. (Score:2)
RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
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
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
As for the silent install, you are correct: this is an option - but only if you've gone through it once before and cre
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
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.
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
I cannot speak to improvements in the IDE layer, as the only IDE device in any of my servers is the DVD-ROM.
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
But as I tested (on SCSI), it does make a little difference, when there are simultaneous connections over network to different files
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
Re:RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2 (Score:2)
This evaluation is only applicable to Linux, of course, but we're talking about Oracle on Linux.
Its things like this.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
So, at least as far as a JVM goes, the author has a valid bitch.
Re:Its things like this.... (Score:2)
Useless Review.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Useless Review.... (Score:2)
Further, why bother? If you can't run java, and let's be realistic, a lot of their enterprise customers are going to want to do just that very thing (be it an application server, or oracle), what's the point of the product?
Re:Useless Review.... (Score:2)
Logical Volume Management (Score:4, Informative)
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
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.
Re:Logical Volume Management (Score:3, Informative)
One. You don't have to allocate your storage at install-time. I always screw up and make some filesystem too small, and end up wth a maze of symlinks after a while. With LVM, just make some volumes, add enough space to install and then some, and grow them as you need more space.
Two. One day, you're going to run out of space on your disk. So you buy more. For old-style installs, moving all the data around is a problem, but with LVM you ju
Re:Logical Volume Management (Score:2, Informative)
as a home user, you're probably not finding yourself having to expand suddenly-too-small filesystems very often. (although if you are, you want LVM.) but you might occasionally find yourself w
Re:Logical Volume Management (Score:3, Informative)
LVM makes it practical to use separate file systems, and it supports snapshots. Since you've already got a separate /home file system, you may not want to bother migrating to LVM until your next full install.
Before LVM, I would just make /boot and / for maximum flexibility.
With LVM, I can make /boot, /, /home, /opt, /var, /tmp, /usr, and /usr/local.
WS, AS.. hey where's ES? (Score:2)
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?
Re:WS, AS.. hey where's ES? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WS, AS.. hey where's ES? (Score:2)
At work we're looking at deploying several new Redhat ES servers and it'd be nice to test ES 3.0 before purchasing.
Upgrade path (Score:2)
Red Hat is Headed for Extinction (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:ACLs in Linux is new? (Score:1)
Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.
Re:ACLs in Linux is new? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't quite agree, unless you think that group permissions and a limit of 32 groups total, and 15 over NFS is enough to have sufficiently fine-grained access controls. We don't, so we have been running Mandrake on XFS for 2 years.
Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.
s/vendors/Red Hat/
SuSE and Mandrake have ship
Re:ACLs in Linux is new? (Score:2)
ACLs are also far easier to manage and require less effort to modify.
Re:Maybe its just me, (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly what is beta? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe its just me, (Score:2, Insightful)
But I'd trust my data on a beta OS before trusting the worm infested nightmare unleashed by some multi-billion dollar software company. It's a matter of perspective, but the order goes like this:
M
Hardly off-topic! (Score:2)
The parent post discussed the stability of beta OS releases. All software is in a perpetual state of beta as new features are added -- a "release" is just a sometimes-more-stable snapshot.
...and the moderators get fooled... (Score:2)
While I have not read the actual article, I sincerely doubt that the preceding quote was actually in the article.
Re:Downloads of non-beta? (Score:2)
Re:Access Control Lists suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's assume that you want to eliminate ACLs but still need to implement fine-grained access control (like, you want to give Ann access to payroll records, but not to bank records, while giving Barry access to the bank records but keeping him out of the payroll.) You can do it in Linux without using ACLs: you simply set up a bunch of groups for things like 'payroll' and put Ann in payroll, but not Barry, etc. If you want to make it finer-grained, you could give Ann access to payroll for hourly and Amy could have access to payroll for exempt -- you now need groups 'payroll-hourly' and 'payroll-exempt'.
Pretty quick, you have something like
in which every file has with it a group, and each group has the name of the user permitted access. In fact, since it's usually a few people, not just one, who has access, you will end up with a list of people who have controlled access.And all without access control lists. Except for the lists of people who are allowed access.
What an advantage!
Re:Access Control Lists suck (Score:2)
Re:Access Control Lists suck (Score:2)
Yes, setting up UNIX-style groups is a pain for administrators. But giving users the ability to put arbitrary combinations of permissions onto their files is worse, at least in large, multi-user environments.