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Red Hat EL 4.0 Released 88

Posted by timothy from the hey-no-fair-lookin' dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "As it has been noticed by some news sites, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 has been released. RedHat's web site doesn't seem to have any reference, but with Red Hat being probably the most used distro in the enterprise and featuring for first time a 2.6 kernel, this is a major milestone for linux in the server arena. There're already some reviews."
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Red Hat EL 4.0 Released More

Red Hat EL 4.0 Released

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  • Linux 2.6 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Turmio ( 29215 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @01:20AM (#11675109) Homepage
    I hate to disappoint you, but Linux 2.6 used in RedHat 4 enterprise distributions hardly makes it a major milestone in the Linux server arena. Enterprise Linux distributions with Linux 2.6 kernel is not exactly a ground breaking thing. SUSE LINUX Enterprise 9 [novell.com] featuring Linux 2.6 was released many months ago. Also the 2.4 kernel used in the 3 series of RedHat enterprise distributions isn't quite vanilla 2.4. It contains already many, many features backported from Linux 2.6.

    • Re:Linux 2.6 (Score:3, Insightful)

      by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:06AM (#11677233) Homepage Journal
      It is significant for everyone who uses Linux. While most other distributions have been using 2.6 for a while now, Red Hat is what the big corporations pay attention to. This means that people who develop software for Linux can no longer point to Red Hat as an excuse for not supporting 2.6.

      In other words, the whole world can now pretty much agree that the 2.4 kernel and the software that runs on it is in maintenance mode now.

    • RHEL & Long support cycle (Score:1)

      by Erik_ ( 183203 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @03:45PM (#11691888)
      Many IT reviews online are disappointed with the late release by Red Hat of an Enterprise Linux based on the 2.6 Kernel. I disagree with their views, Red Hat has done a lot to it's previous release running on the 2.4 kernel to make it stable, performant and has back-ported quiet a lot of interesting 2.6 features. Enterprise want stable systems above all, and they do not want to change their installed base to often (just look at how many Windows NT 4.0 servers there still are out there in companies, while SP1 for Windows Server 2003 is just around the corner).

      One surprising testament to this slow upgrade-cycle is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 will have a seven year support cycle. That's two years more than RHEL3, and way longer than other operating systems. And this is a customer request.

      What I'm looking forward in RHEL4 is LVM2, Larger filesystem support (1TB+), SElinux, e-poll (will provide better support for some commercial applications)

  • FP! w/e read on (Score:-1)

    by keeleysam ( 792221 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @01:22AM (#11675116) Homepage Journal
    As I HATE upgrading Linux boxes for fear of messing them up, and ive laready gotten the 2.6 kernal on my RHEL 3 machine, what benefit does this have?

    • A couple things... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Ayanami Rei ( 621112 ) * <rayanami AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @01:27AM (#11675141) Journal
      1) Fedora-like desktop. Of particular note: memory keys are auto-mounted thanks to dbus/HAL support and udev

      2) Ability to use selinux MAC and auditing

      3) New versions of OO, gimp, gtk, moz out of thje box...

      4) Aaaand... there's not much else that stands out. Most stuff that works on 3 will work on 4 and vice versa, maybe requiring a SRPM re-build. It looks pretty much the same, still bluecurve with some tweaks. Not that it doesn't look good.

    • Re:FP! w/e read on (Score:2)

      by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:43AM (#11677617)
      Redhat Enterprise 3.0 went thru 5 major updates in a span of 1 year. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the enterprise edition.

      Why does the enterprise version, which is marketed to be stable and rarely changing, have more updates than the Fedora set? It makes zero sense.

    • Re:FP! w/e read on (Score:2)

      by snorklewacker ( 836663 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:56AM (#11677738)
      > As I HATE upgrading Linux boxes for fear of messing them up, and ive laready gotten the 2.6 kernal on my RHEL 3 machine, what benefit does this have?

      Speaking as someone forced to admin RHEL 3 without provisioning credits (it's politics and bureacracy, not money), what did you have to do to get kernel 2.6 on it, did you have any problems with it, and could I bum the RPMs off of you? I have a SuSE 9 box right next to it on identical hardware, and it's blowing the doors off the RH box (some of it has to do with them installing ext3 on the RH box instead of xfs, but that's not the whole story).

      I'm relying on openpkg [openpkg.org] to run non-core packages, but it's hardly a great solution.

  • Red Hat! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @01:38AM (#11675196)
    *looks down*

    *smiles*

    *shakes head*

    Ol' Red Hat. Heh. Didn't know people were still usin' it.

    *low whistle*

    I remember that one time my RPM database got wedged in the middle of a critical glibc upgrade. Let me tell you, them admins didn't like being paged at 4 in the AM. But that's how it was with ol' Red Hat.

    And that time I tried to install a customized version of PHP. I just wanted to change one little line in the config for a client. But I had to hunt down and install 12 different devel RPMs first. I didn't want no ODBC, but I had to compile it anyway. Then when I was done, it turned out I downloaded some with security holes. Why couldn't they just put all latest RPMs in a single directory so I could download them easy? That's how it was, with ol' Red Hat.

    *looks whistfully into the distance*

    *Yup, ol Red Hat. Wonder how she's doin' now. But don't get me wrong, it's over between us. We had some fun. But when her ass started gettin' big and she refused to go on a diet, and she still wore those ol' 1970's style hats when she new it looked stupid, well, that's when it was time to move on. I got a new love now. She does whatever I want and doesn't fight back. But that don't mean she ain't strong. Nooo sir. She just wants the same things I like. Stability. Ease of use. Flexibility. Ain't never seen a distro bend like she can. Whew!

    What's that? No I ain't tellin' her name. I figgur, long as you're over there with Red Hat running PostgreSQL 5.0, kernel 2.2, and whatever else, trying to figure out how the heck a .spec file is supposed to look, and payin' through the nose for it, my business is already one step ahead a your'in.

    Well, nice talkin' with you son. I best be movin' along. This ol' back a' mine don't take well to settin' still.

  • The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Caydel ( 851013 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @01:51AM (#11675236) Homepage
    Now, I am not trying to start a flamewar here, but how relevant is RedHat anymore these days?

    Now, don't get me wrong, I used it for a long time, and I'm sure we all did. However, Redhat fell behind the times a few years ago, and many of us moved on to bigger and better things. ie. Fedora, Xandros, Debian, Mepis, Knoppix, etc.

    So how relevant would you say Redhat is the Linux distro wars of this day and age?

    • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wakejagr ( 781977 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:12AM (#11675305) Journal

      To the average linux user: not very.

      To non computer geeks, who only hear about linux through mass media: almost as relevant as back in the day.

    • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Leghkster ( 603558 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:32AM (#11675381)
      With much (most?) commercial database, email, etc. server software supported only on RHEL in the past, it's the familiar comortable choice for businesses that have already jumped. Remember the "E" in RHEL. More often, recently, I see Suse officially supported, but that's often a harder sell to the bosses. They've heard of Red Hat by now. How do you pronounce that Suse thing? ;-)

    • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Meetch ( 756616 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:32AM (#11675382)
      (Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion.) If you're building your own box for your own purposes, and expect to be able to fix things yourself based on google/forums/friends, then don't go RedHat. It's too limited in scope for that. FC gets good support from their development framework, but again you don't need it. From what I see on a daily basis, RedHat's big plus is it's heavily certified with Oracle (and I'm not sure what else, because that really doesn't concern me in my work). There's only a few distros that have this support advantage, and RedHat was one of the first there. I'm fond of SuSE myself, but we can't justify going that way with the local support we can get if we have to.

      As for making the jump from EL3 to EL4, well the main reasons IMHO are to dump all the backported patches made since EL3's inception first, going with packages a little less off-the-beaten-track, and then a few updates of things that help the job for frustrated admins. Little things like installing on logical volumes at the outset (long overdue!) and the nature of LVM 2, which allows taking multiple read-writable snapshots of any logical volume, and if lvcreate's usage is to believed, at some point we will be able to take snapshots of snapshots.

      By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for. I like having a filesystem that genuinely allows for atomic disk transactions without any noticeable performance hit. But as has already been stated, RedHat aren't interested in supporting it. It's a real shame, but something we have to live with for now.

      • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:3, Informative)

        by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:00AM (#11675457) Homepage Journal
        By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for.
        Ah, but you don't need a journalling file system to run Oracle, do you?

      • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:4, Interesting)

        by sbennett ( 448295 ) <[gro.ootneg] [ta] [bps]> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @09:01AM (#11676331)

        By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for. I like having a filesystem that genuinely allows for atomic disk transactions without any noticeable performance hit. But as has already been stated, RedHat aren't interested in supporting it. It's a real shame, but something we have to live with for now.

        And they're not supporting it for good reason-- its extended attribute implementation is horrifically broken, and so it won't even mount on an SELinux system. IMHO (and a great many people share the same view), the increased security from SELinux is more important than the slight speed gain, especially at the expense of much higher CPU usage.

      • You needed to install the kernel-unsupported RPMs from the (4th?) disc. It didn't show you it in the install because they didn't to encourage anybody to use something they couldn't support as easily. But if you wanted it you could have it. They even provided the user space tools by default (jfs-utils).

      • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:0)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @01:09PM (#11689868)

        lvcreate's usage is to believed, at some point we will be able to take snapshots of snapshots.



        Why would you ever want to do that? I am glad that Red Hat is starting to get on top of LVM2. It's been a mess since they got it from Sistina.

    • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:22AM (#11675637)
      RedHat is the new Sun Micro.

      However, since you punks never understood how Sun was relevant, that probably doesn't mean very much to you.

    • Re:The Relevancy of RedHat (Score:3, Informative)

      by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:54AM (#11676152)
      for geeks it is not of value For enterprises it's the leader. Debian and Fedora don't give you support when oracle runs slow.

  • Compared to . . .? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wakejagr ( 781977 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:05AM (#11675281) Journal

    From the article:

    Conservative release cycles and a more exhaustive test cycle make Red Hat Enterprise Linux a safer bet for the business community--they don't have to chase the release of the week.

    I guess they aren't comparing release cycles with Debian . . . maybe Longhorn?

    All joking aside, I think RHEL isn't so much competing with other Linux distro's as with Windows. RedHat is trying to offer a choice to companies that are considering the jump away from MS: AS and ES for server machines and WS for workstations, solid support. I haven't used RH in a while, but I hear RPM hell isn't the "killer" app it used to be. Sounds like it's good competition for Windows.

    • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:1)

      by Caydel ( 851013 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:18AM (#11675335) Homepage
      Hmmm... The whole idea of conservative release cycles doesn't seem to me to be that much better for a business. We all know that linux is not a finished product, nor will it ever be. Things advance rapidly enough in the Linux world, that even if a release is only 1 year out of date, it sometimes feels almost stone age compared to the new, bleeding edge distros. For many businesses, some of the late-and-breaking advances would be of considerable interest, as they deal alot of the time with security and such. And to wait through a whole development cycle for a complete update is sometimes very wearing. Of course, I guess that is what many of them are used to if they use Windows.

      • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:2)

        by Wdomburg ( 141264 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @10:22PM (#11695920)
        They introduce regular new releases every eighteen months for the people who want the latest and greatest. And under their enterprise license you have the right to run any currently supported version, including newly introduced ones.

        I find most people who've never done large scale administration highly overestimate the value of new versions. Especially when there's the option of a stable platform with all the relevent security updates.

        Most businesses I've dealt with are prone to be lax with regards to security, even, if it means they can avoid the expense of disruptive upgrades. In many cases we're talking about platforms that haven't seen updates in over a decade.

        Sure, it's true that new features have value. But then again, if what you have works, is it really worth it? And how much do the important things really change? Web servers are still webservers and even fairly ancient platforms can run the latest version of apache. File servers still serve files. Mail servers still serve mail. Blah blah blah.

    • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hdparm ( 575302 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:19AM (#11675343) Homepage
      Well, it has ousted Sun from pretty much all of the big financial organisations and is making inroads elsewhere but not necessarily 'attacking' Windows. It will be long and hard battle in all places that have Windows AD installed - there still isn't open-source replacement for it out there. Hopefully, samba 4 will give us leverage on that end as well.

      I personally can't make much sense in using commercial distros for replacing Windows in a small / medium enterprise market - much easier to sell is free (as in beer) OS. Plus, FC3 does the job well on a server and on a client side - it's been rock solid for my needs (file, print, squid, email mostly).

      • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by SunFan ( 845761 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:05AM (#11675468)
        Well, it has ousted Sun from pretty much all of the big financial organisations...

        I'd bet Linux has a single-digit percentage share in financial institutions behind mainframes and Solaris/HPUX/AIX. What is the basis for your so confidently stated statement? Even that Omaha bank article that re-surfaced recently had their IT people saying they would have stayed with Sun if Sun's current product line up were available a couple of years ago.

      • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:0)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:02AM (#11675851)
        At this point, I'd just settle for a nice half-assed version with ACLs. I'm all about lowering my expectations.

    • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:34AM (#11675662) Journal
      I think RHEL isn't so much competing with other Linux distro's as with Windows.

      Not at all. RedHat is very happy staying in the "Enterprise Unix" niche -- J2EE, financial applications, Unix, Oracle. They're stealing business like mad from UNIX/RISC companies and barely acknowledge Microsoft. Who needs Main Street when you have Wall Street?

      RedHat has done almost nothing to compete in the "LAN" or Windows server market -- file & print, directory services, groupware, RAD apps -- they've simply got no answer to this stuff. (SuSE/Novell at least is building a product lineup.)

      • Re:Compared to . . .? (Score:2)

        by kosmosik ( 654958 ) <kos&kosmosik,net> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:06AM (#11677230) Homepage
        Red Hat People are working on native Eclipse port... This would be for RAD. Also for "LAN" (what do you mean anyway? Local Area Network?) - they are starting the Stateless Linux project that touches this surface (mobile, desktops etc.). Also Fedora incorporates lot's of desktop enhancements like RH NetworkManager and (desktop) configuration utilities and so on... Also they are looking at embeded Linux market. So they are (or wan't to be) in almost every market that Linux can be used... IMHO.

  • Call me when... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ZuggZugg ( 817322 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:17AM (#11675497)
    I'm no Solaris or Windows fan per se, but RHEL is still missing a few things:

    -Xen or virtualization solution like VMWare, Virtual Server, Solaris Zones
    -Fair Share Scheduler like in Solaris
    -Better management tools with better documentation, particularly GUI tools to displace Windows installs

    RedHat needs to integrate/clone/whatever the following solutions:

    -A fully supported Samba + LDAP solution like IDEALX, to eliminate the need for MS ActiveDisease
    -A mail/groupware solution with a client (suggest latching onto Mozilla project) to displace the killer MS Exchange+Oultook combo and Lotues Notes.

    Don't get me wrong RHEL is a very good product given its age, but it could be better that's all.

    If they can do the above in the next 12-18 months RedHat will be a serious contender...

  • Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by menscher ( 597856 ) <menscher+slashdot@@@uiuc...edu> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:27AM (#11675514) Homepage Journal
    Every time any /. article mentions RedHat, we get a bunch of kiddies attacking it. So, I propose a new rule: before attacking RHEL, please consider a few points:
    • Do you have 5+ years of sysadmin experience?
    • Do you have 100+ users?
    • Do you have 10+ machines?
    • Do you have to support enterprise applications?
    Seriously, if you can't answer "yes" to all four questions, perhaps you should just keep your opinions to yourselves. The other distros are great for your mommy's basement, but in the enterprise, there are serious support/stability issues to consider.

    • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:-1, Flamebait)

      by QuietRiot ( 16908 ) <cyrus&80d,org> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:24AM (#11675640) Homepage Journal
      If you can answer "yes" to any of these questions, you're probably already running FreeBSD [freebsd.org] : )

      • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:0)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:43AM (#11675682)
        WTF, willis?

        FreeBSD has almost zero "enterprise" users. Fucking mcchrist, it doesn't even have focking production level Java support! Not to mention Oracle, applicaiton servers, messenging or any of the other shite that goes into enterprise applications. What in fucking hell are you going to do with it, run flaming fagot shite like fucking sendmail? Motherfucking Windows is 100x more suitible than fukig FreeBSD for these apps.

        (And no, Yahoo's shitty collection of low-tech web pages running on FreeBSD 2.x is not "enteprise", retards.)

        • fukig FreeBSD (Score:1, Troll)

          by QuietRiot ( 16908 ) <cyrus&80d,org> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:05AM (#11675734) Homepage Journal
          ... Oracle, applicaiton servers, messenging or any of the other shite that goes into enterprise applications. What in fucking hell are you going to do with it, run flaming fagot shite like fucking sendmail? ...

          I'd say about 8 times out of 10, if it'll run on Linux, it'll run on FreeBSD. Nothing to do with "fucking hell." It's actually quite nice to use. Postfix rocks and can replace sendmail with probably less than 25 keystrokes.

          Motherfucking Windows is 100x more suitible than fukig FreeBSD for these apps.

          You got the first part of your sentance right; "100x" I'd say is a stretch. Thank you for your comments though.

          Coward.

          • Re:fukig FreeBSD (Score:0)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:23AM (#11675775)
            > Postfix rocks and can replace sendmail

            Way to fuking entirely miss the point, fuck-o.

            • Re:fukig FreeBSD (Score:2)

              by QuietRiot ( 16908 ) <cyrus&80d,org> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @09:04PM (#11684524) Homepage Journal
              I totally see the point. It's not currently used in a lot of enterprise situations but it sure could make a great mail server, NFS point for a workgroup or even a large SMB server. It can handle huge Apache loads and costs much less than Red Hat. It's all very open and very stable. It scales and it can handle significant loads for long periods of time without getting crushed. I'm not saying RHEL can't do that. I'm just saying, admittedly in a *wink-wink* manner, there's other robust platforms available that have not been fully exploited.

              My point in posting was to inform others about another choice available. Red Hat's got a big name, and that's what most Enterprises will go for. Many smallers businesses, however, don't need "all that." Obviously, IT managers need to make their own decisions.

              What's more valuable than choice when making important decisions? I'm not claiming to be an authority. I'm not saying - "Use FreeBSD instead of Red Hat." I'm just saying, "Here's a link. Check it out. Do what you will."

              I think it's very nice to use and I can see many people currently on Red Hat systems falling in love with FreeBSD [freebsd.org]. It doesn't get in the way and is extremely capable. Maybe not RHEL capable, but in many cases, worth a look.

      • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:2)

        by Quill_28 ( 553921 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:19PM (#11681784) Journal
        Just in case you are wondering QuietRiot, the mods are on crack to putting you at -1.
        • Oh well.. Thank you.

          I'm sure RHEL is nice and everything. I'm sure RH has changed since using it back at version 7 or so, but FreeBSD is just so refreshing to use. The RPMs were a huge hassle and configuration was just kludgy. I just have a few FreeBSD machines myself, and run a small hosting biz. It's nothing but a joy to use.

          The comment was somewhat trollish, but I guess that was intentional. Anybody clicking on "the Red Hat article" might come across my link and check it out.

          Commercial supporters can't help but move FreeBSD forward. I'm happy if even a few see the comparison between FreeBSD and Red Hat and, at least for a moment, consider it's usage.

          It's really a wonderful platform on which many, many businesses could build extremely stable servers. Don't want to pay Red Hat for a licence to run a SMB, NFS, or Apache server? Check out FreeBSD [freebsd.org] and thank me with a +mod :)

    • Comment removed (Score:2)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:46AM (#11675686)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:01AM (#11675720)

        What does red hat do to make that same kernel so much more stable than kernel.org? If an application is screwing things over, logical step is to drop it.

        RedHat does the kind of stress testing using common usage patterns and edge cases, and on a scale that loosely organised volunteers currently don't. I'm not saying that Debian (for example) couldn't come up with a project that does this kind of thing, but this is the area that RHEL appeals to (non-pointy haired) bosses.

        The conservative release cycles of RHEL are because the users can't afford the downtime required by the frequency of Fedora upgrades (and Gentoo is a non-starter for enterprise users unless you're a masochist who likes getting ragged on by your boss when the system crawls during an emerge).

        Well that's f*cked off the Debian and Gentoo amateurs ...

        • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:1)

          by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:15AM (#11677320) Journal
          Well that's f*cked off the Debian and Gentoo amateurs ...

          In the case of Gentoo, though, you have the same reply to "It's the kernel. What does red hat do to make that same kernel so much more stable than kernel.org?" Gentoo provides several patched kernels in addition to the vanilla kernel, with gentoo-sources the norm. Pretty much all distributions do the same. (I forget what the stock Debian kernel is.)

          So, yes, an RHEL kernel is a very different thing than a kernel.org release.

        • heh. (Score:0)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:36PM (#11680271)
          If you're not an amateur, and deploy Gentoo in the enterprise, then I seriously doubt you'd be compiling packages on the same server your boss relies on. Better to build binary packages on a central server and distribute them from there.

          But hey, if you had any experience with this, you'd know that, right?

        • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:0)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 17, 2005 @02:09PM (#11702184)
          ..and Gentoo is a non-starter for enterprise users unless you're a masochist who likes getting ragged on by your boss when the system crawls during an emerge...

          Well if you are a complete moron you might run an emerge on a live system. I thought we were heading off the kiddies here? Any sane individual will compile AND test ALL of their apps/patches/configs off the production servers FIRST. An then you just move that good ol' binary over...

          Or do RHEL admins just install shite at random? Hmmmmm....

          Let us use our heads!

          • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:2)

            by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Friday February 18, 2005 @09:27AM (#11710691)

            To reply to both people saying they would compile for Gentoo servers elsewhere, it's still a pain in the arse. I don't have the time to compile my own packages, and I don't see any signed and checksummed packages for Gentoo from sources I can trust. I want to be able to install a set of packages that I am confident have been well tested on a base operating system that doesn't differ from my own. RHEL is a win here, because the slow release cycles are partly down to a thorough QA process. I'm also more confident that when I go to Oracle with a problem, I'm going to get serious consideration whereas Gentoo users are more likely to get the brush off because of the wide scope for tweaking their system.

      • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Erik Hensema ( 12898 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:36AM (#11675806) Homepage

        It's the kernel. What does red hat do to make that same kernel so much more stable than kernel.org?

        Red Hat properly tests the kernel and patches problems they find. Also, they add features which may be too intrusive for a stable kernel. Not because of code stability (as in: crashiness), but as in interface stability. But it's mostly the far better QA. Sane people don't run vanilla kernels on their production servers.

        If an application is screwing things over, logical step is to drop it.

        Now that's a innovative way to make your distribution stable! But what if said application is critical to the buisiness, like Oracle?

        I'm thinking you are a red hat fan boy?

        Red Hat has no fanboys. Fanboys are exclusively found on Gentoo, Debian and some on Slackware. All nice distributions, but all lacking good QA.

    • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Quattro Vezina ( 714892 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @08:53AM (#11676298) Journal
      Seriously, if you can't answer "yes" to all four questions, perhaps you should just keep your opinions to yourselves.

      Seriously, if you have to be a self-important elitist, perhaps you should just shut the fuck up.

      Asshole.

    • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:2)

      by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:08AM (#11677251) Journal
      Interpretation: All attacks on Red Hat go here.

      The hope is that Red Hat is driven by the same blood curdling fear of disaster to thoroughly test every release that drives sysadmins to want to spend 4x as much and set up every server with dual redundant power supplies and battery backed hot swap scsi drives in a raid 1 or raid 5. If someone is badly bitten by an "enterprise" distribution they'd be more apt to let everyone know.

      But for the most part, when it works it works, no matter what distribution. Always do your homework to make sure it'll survive a crash with minimal loss, and perform some benchmarks after setting it up. I've seen driver problems (on FC2 and CentOS, both RH based) cause significant slowdown and packet loss.

    • Comment removed (Score:2)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:11AM (#11677272)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:48AM (#11677667)
      Er, where I work, we have multi-thousand servers, and in general it is RHEL or Debian stable. RHEL is the main choice of our sysadmins, however, there is a lot of caveats to that. Debian is generally easier to admin, and more stable, however, deb-stable is out of date, and RHEL is more compatable with proprietary software.

      RHEL also has kernel stability issues. RH's nonstandard kernels have caused many issues. We had a major BIE (Business Impacting Event) due to kernel/iowait bugs in the ES3 kernel on our main database server.

      While RHEL is one of the better distros for enterprise systems, there is trade-offs to it. Debian, and SuSE are reasonable choices, depending on what you are doing with the system, it's not a cut-and-dried choice. And distro snobbery is not a very successfull attitude in an enterprise environment either. We use whatever best meets our business goals.

    • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:1)

      by toddbu ( 748790 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @01:39PM (#11678898)
      This is the same kind of argument that people use to justify overpriced hardware. I've seen roomfulls of expensive Compaq hardware because it had all kinds of wonderful features and was supposedly the "best". The problem is that you could engineer a fully redundant solution for less than 1/2 the hardware cost, and maintenance would be way fewer $ too. (Maybe you can ask Carly about this.) We run Mandrake for mission critical stuff and have very few problems. We occasionally get bitten by new bits, but then we just don't push the new release until it's full baked.

      I stopped running RedHat when they dumped the old pricing model. I didn't mind paying them $, but I'm not a large corporation with money to burn either. Mandrake offers the same patch support that RedHat does and I've been running the 2.6 kernel for a very long time now.

      If RedHat is so great, why this [msn.com] versus this [nasdaq.com]?

    • Re:Just to head off the kiddies.... (Score:-1)

      by Sharp Rulez ( 799059 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:40PM (#11685604) Homepage
      Yes, ive more than 5 years of experiece yes, we have more 100+ users (20K) yes, more than 10+ servers Yes, we run solaris.. 24/7 support from Sun

  • Question (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:51AM (#11675567)
    Is this as bloated and slow as FC3?

  • I think it's still premature (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trevin ( 570491 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:35AM (#11675663) Homepage
    I realize that Enterprise Linux is geared toward a narrower market of server-class computers than the multitude of desktop PC's, but it seems like they still need some bugs worked out.

    Personally, I have been using Fedora Core 3 (on which RHEL 4 is apparently based) for several months now, and I'm seriously considering downgrading to a more mature release the next time I replace my hard drives, and then just installing piecemeal upgrades of various applications as needed. Most of my trouble with the 2.6.x kernel comes from poor driver support: I haven't had accelerated 3D graphics or been able to record CD-R's since upgrading, VMware takes at least ten seconds to set up its dynamic virtual device nodes every time the system boots, and I recently discovered that the driver for the RAID controller I was going to buy has had some serious stability problems (NOT good for a RAID array!).

    The company I work for has around twenty licenses for RedHat Enterprise Linux, and I know they're not going to adopt RHEL 4.0 anytime soon. Half of their servers still run RedHat 7.1, due to in-house application stability problems with Apache 2.0 and Perl 5.8. The other servers can't even install anything later than 3.0 update 1, because installs are done over the network and update 2 introduced problems with the ethernet driver our servers use.

    As much as I'd like to have leading-edge software and all the latest security patches, as administrator of a network that has to maintain at least 99.5% uptime (and preferably 99.99%), stability is the top priority.

  • RHEL4 v Fedora3 ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by slashmojo ( 818930 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @08:45AM (#11676263)
    Is there anything/enough in rhel4 that isn't in fc3 to make it worth the upgrade? I'm using fc3 on a file server at the moment (switched from centos3.3 after endless problems with a 3ware9500 which fc3 only partially solved).

    Anyone know if they fixed this rather serious problem [redhat.com] yet?

    • Re:RHEL4 v Fedora3 ? (Score:2)

      by HTMLSpinnr ( 531389 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:25AM (#11677433) Homepage
      Yes - a 12-18 month release cycle. For enterprises deploying linux - I couldn't fathom considering Fedora Core - it becomes legacy much too quickly. For admins where importance on keeping patched to avoid exploits, this is very important.

      Fedora Legacy has done an okay job at keeping up with some of these, however Red Hat seems a bit more responsive w/ their Enterprise line.

    • Re:RHEL4 v Fedora3 ? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @11:52AM (#11677693)
      I run rhel3 on my servers and fc3 on my personal machines. There are unfixed bugs in fc3 that are driving me nuts (memory allocation). With rhel3, I've had zero problems. I'd assume those bugs aren't in rhel4, since it's billed as Enterprise, but you never know for sure. Anyway, the web management stuff from rhel is nice. You don't get that with fc.

  • 4 not 4.0 (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @10:01AM (#11676648)
    RHEL 4 , not RHEL 4.0

  • New advanced server, new advanced problems ... (Score:2)

    by Pegasus ( 13291 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @10:03AM (#11676668) Homepage
    Really, RHAS/RHEL distros were the ones i spent most of my time just making it work properly. Who knows, maybe it's just because i expected too much from them ...

  • why not get fedora instead (Score:1)

    by newker ( 855332 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @10:10AM (#11676726) Homepage
    i hate to say this but i prefer fedora over redhat, though same company but still the basic functions is the same.

  • Looks like Fedora Core 3? (Score:1)

    by linuxbeta ( 837266 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @10:49AM (#11677089)
    I wonder if RHEL 4 looks like Fedora Core 3 [osdir.com]?

  • Anti-RedHat bias? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @07:27PM (#11683481)
    RHEL is the leading enterprise Linux distribution and RHEL 4 release is a _big_ news for most RHEL users but somehow Slashdot editors didn't deem it to be important enough to put the story on the slashdot front page. Coincidence? I think not..

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