Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch 129
Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have
liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial
Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March
14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will
better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as
Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years
and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen
hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's
high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand
with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."
Re:The wait is almost over? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:crash dump (Score:4, Informative)
RH5 Looks good (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When is Ubuntu Going to Compete with RedHat? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:R Hell (Score:5, Informative)
That seems a bit off. By early 2006 any current Dell would have been certified for RHEL4 (which itself was released early 2005). As a aside, license for RHEL are valid for any currently supported version, so even if it came imaged with RHEL3 you had right to install RHEL4.
It's fair enough that they focus on rock solid stability over new packages. However, it's a bit disappointing that my employers were still paying a support contract on this box but the package updates that were part of this contract were more than 3 years old.
The updates are not three years old. There was a new update published this morning. The base versions are old, but that's a feature, not a bug. When you're running production systems you want a stable platform with a reasonable deployment cycle, which is where RHEL excels.
I don't think it's too much to expect a little flexibility when you're paying for it.
When you pay for one of the enterprise platforms you're paying for stability not flexibility. It's actually more work for them to backport fixes to older versions than to blindly package newer ones, but new versions mean new bugs and incompatible changes. Some of us pay good money to avoid it, and RPM is flexible and easy enough for the few cases we actually need a newer version than what Red Hat ships stock.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:crash dump (Score:2, Informative)
There is both netdump (dump to a remote host, via ssh), diskdump (dump to a partition) and the new to be in RHEL5 kdump (which does all kinds of neat things).
and re: debuging tools:
Its not for kids, but check out andersons paper on debugging vmcore files.
http://people.redhat.com/anderson/crash_whitepape
I've traced down a few causes of bugs with this, One might argue it might not be as point and clicky as other crash debuggers, but I'd rather have a skilled coder fixing bugs than someone who feels uncomfortable at the commandline.
Re:Red Hat doesn't matter anymore (Score:3, Informative)
I think you need to learn your IT history a bit better. Unix has had single sign on capability since NIS (formerly Yellow Pages) was created back in the 80s (I believe version 2 was 1985) and linux has had it since pretty early on in its history. As usual Microsoft were last out of the stalls but made a big song and dance about it and pretended they'd re-invented the wheel yet again.
Re:Er, why didn't you try CentOS? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't feel bad; it's hard to find a free version of RHEL, though Centos is the current leader. After a while, you understand why vendors support it or SuSE's equivalent. This is one of those cases where sighing and signing the check really would have been the right answer.