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Red Hat Network for the Masses
Outland Traveller writes: "A few months ago I sent some feedback to RedHat concerning their then $30/month RHN subscription service. I asked them to consider offering a $5/month low end version more suitable for home users with multiple computers. I'm sure that a plenty of other people offered the same suggestion, but I was still surprised when I opened my email this morning and found that the exact service I asked for is not only being offered, but that fast access to iso images has been added as well, among other improvements. I guess I now have to put my money where my mouth is :) Seriously though, this should be good news for people who download RedHat's .iso images but want to financially support RedHat in a way that makes sense."
If I want fast downloads, I'd paypal them a buck or two for a day or two of access to high-speed servers with ISOs. But a monthly fee whether or not I get anything of use to me?
to debian's bug tracking system, and report a bug.
instead of those $5...
www.debian.org
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
was "Outdated Systems View". Looks cool, you hit a button and your floppy drive starts spitting out ticker tape and the screen shrinks and displays in monochrome "Insert card, face down, 9 edge first"
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Instead of a small LAN with a few computers at home, I have a Beowulf cluster. Would this service be of value to me?
Thank you.
Mandrake has something similar. It is called Mandrake Users Club and you can sign up as low as $5/month. I bet this is where RedHat got the idea.
http://mandrakelinux.com/en/club/
Why do slashdot editors feel the need to undermine the stories they post with comments such as "real-men-use-apt". If a user posted a comment with that title it would rightly be moderated as flamebait.
I don't know what the current costs of bandwidth are for RedHat, but assuming everyone who pays the $5 downloads all four CD iso's of 7.2, that's a good 2.6 GB. Sure, it's better than not getting anything for it, but the increase in traffic their going to have might hit them pretty hard. I've NEVER downloaded anything from the RedHat servers simply because the mirrors are so much less busy and a whole lot faster.
Personally, I'd much rather see the in-store retail versions of RedHat drop in price to the $10-15 range for the latest version. I'd be more than happy to pick up a copy (can't have too many Linux install CD's lying around). Most of the documentation can be found online, and there are probably a lot of people like many that just want the CD's and don't really care so much about support. Right now, the current list price for RedHat 7.2 is $59.95, and it can be bought for $48.95 at buy.com. This company really ought to think their strategy. The distro market is pretty competitive right now, and 59.95 is a hell of a lot of money to spend on a free OS.
The future isn't what it used to be.
I wonder when someone will reverse enigeer up2date and make an open source up2date server. So you could just pay $60 to redhat to download the update full speed, then turn around and at as a server to your lan to update all the others. The source is avaiable for rhn_register and up2date, both GPL, so it wouldn't be that hard.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
I use debian. I love apt. But I'm considering moving some of the machines I support to red hat. For $5/mo/machine, it is really nice to have a single place where I can check on the status of packages and patches for every machine I manage. I don't know of a way to do this (currently) in debian.
Of course, I imagine it's only a matter of time before someone writes a post-install plugin to apt that will allow for an installation update to be written to a db or web page. So it's not inconceivable that debian gets a similar feature. But for now it doesn't exist, and it makes red hat very attractive for managing a non-small numbers of linux boxen.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Well, both such. Slackware is dead, minor changes since 8.0, and Debian is a distribution for packagers AKA developers.
This seems like a very solid move on redhat's part. The RHN is a well run system that fits in perfectly with the open source philosophy, and the only thing that kept me from getting all my machines on it was the cost. But now, I'll probably go ahead and subcribe. Also seems like a good financial move, since locking people into a monthly subscription-for-service type contract is a great way to make a lot of money, and seems to be what most companies are striving for nowadays (especially MS). Hmmm, I wonder what kind of transfer rate I can get now on the ISO images from the T3 at work?
Seems Expensive to me. I've been downloading and installing Suse using FTP and floppy disk for my last few installs, getting all the support I need from newsgroups. The financial support comes in the form of the 3 distros I've bought from them over the years. (Total cost about 3 years subscription to a $5 a month service)
I know the various distibution makers HAVE to make money but I cant see that this adds any REAL value to the product by subscribing.
Im sure someone will now inform me other wise...
no flames, I love debian, but the stable branch is really too old (kernel 2.2, xfree 3, no kde, ecc...).
And everytime i tried to upgrade the testing branch, something went broken...
Bye
You hate M$, you love Open Source, you think Linux Roolz, you probably have $60 bucks somewhere. Just send them the money,
RH puts out a decent product and will probably be the last Linux standing tall at the end. Just give'em the $60 bucks and prove that you are more than a 1337 h4x0r and someone who actually cares about this whole Open Source, anti M$ thing.
This
How could something named "Open Wall" possibly be secure?
Thanks in advance.
It's unfortunate that Red Hat has not offered this service sooner. I moved my home systems to FreeBSD only last week as it's much easier to upgrade to the latest release version (or even to the latest CVS version) or to get a package of a recently-released application. Similar benefits can be obtained from Debian GNU/Linux as well. Both can be upgraded at no cost.
From my experience of Red Hat, even if I did want to upgrade to a more recent version of Red Hat Linux, I wouldn't trust it to an automated system. I upgraded a Red Hat 6 production server to Red Hat 7 last year, and so many things broke I was quite disappointed.
I guess this service will be useful for those home users who want to automatically pull down the latest security patches, tho.
(For those who don't know, the quote is from Red Dwarf, a British comedy.)
1.Stick "security.debian.org" in your sources file
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
What's the problem?
Well the name is still better than Gaping Anus!
Keeping a Gaping Anus securely closed is almost impossible.
Just bought my subscription today, didn't even know about the recent price reduction. The system views are nice. One of the features I like the best so far is the ability to compare systems.
Update the dev server, test, compare with production, and schedule an update...
mmmm.. nice.
On the other hand, I haven't even been able to *start* a download from the supposed fast servers. I wonder if everybody is download extraneous isos for fun now.....
you are kidding right? who cares about the name baybe, openwall and lids, just try and hack my box!
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
The reason is obvious: dependancy hell. I've had enough of it. Any system which uses RPMs is simply too hard to maintain.
If RPM5 comes out in the next month or so and supports a high-quality dependancy resolution system I might still stick with RH, but I don't expect it to.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This is 49th post in this article. I claim it in the name of Donny Most.
Most Post, propz to Happy Days.
_________________
EBAY SAFETY TIPZ!
So what is the exact difference between the $5 and the $30 subscriptions?
Do the $30 subscribers get more bandwidth, faster access to updates, or even more stuff?
Redhat has to offer something to still get people to get the more expensive subscription
I`m using Ximian Red Carpet for almost half a year now, and I`m wondering what`s the difference between these. Seems to me that all the advantages (fast servers, package control,...) are also available in Red Carpet, for free. PLUS when you use RC, you don`t only have the RedHat Channel, there`s also Ximian Gnome`s own channel, Staroffice, Loki Games, Codeweavers, ... I`d like to support RedHat in some way, but there must be something I can`t get elsewhere.
I upgrade RedHat twice a year - I always run the most current. I look at the $60/machine as 2 purchases of a $30 edition (do they even make the $30 edition still). To have the machine update itself with a click of the mouse, even if I am away from the box out of town is a nice benefit as well.
Also the Instant ISO program. I hope they have the bandwidth, because I intend to take full advantage of it on release day. Saves me from a trip to the store, 2 or 3 weeks later.
I've come to love RedHat over the last 4 years of using it since switching from Slackware at RH 5.1. I'm pleased with the convenience this service offers, and I am quite happy to give them $5 a month to keep my server running well.
If you don't believe in paying for the products you use, you're either communist or a terrorist (maybe both).
You obviously have no idea of what you're talking about. Here's a hint: buy a dictionary, look up communism, L-E-A-R-N.
There's nothing un-American about wanting something for free or not paying for what you do get. If anything, it's probably more American to not want to pay for things that you get, hence this whole discussion. After all, people weren't willing to pay $30 to RedHat, so how is $5 any better?
I won't even touch your terrorist reference...honestly, if you wanted to be a troll, you could've done much better with your choice of words...
Anyway, who's to say that only Americans are on Slashdot? :-)
According to their site, the proxy caches updated rpms, and the satellite basically acts as a RHN server, serving up the web stuff.
Has anyone actually used these servers with the workgroup service? I couldn't find any reference to them in the Red Hat Network Workgroup User Reference Guide 1.0.
For that matter, has anyone used the Workgroup service? Opinions?
... but does anyone see anything about $5, or even any lowered prices at all? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what the poster is getting at, but all I see is $60/year for RHN, and $240/year for the new Workgroup service. Sure, there are improvements, but I don't see anything making this better for the home user...
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Open source is not about being anti-Microsoft (OK, for some people it is). I have no love of Microsoft but Open Source is more than that, it's a whole new way of doing things. I expect to see Microsoft and Open Source co-existing for quite some time yet. They are not direct competitors.
Suck figs.
Done
350 machines. Need to track the package status of 350 machines. How exactly, are you going to tell me the status of 350 machines using that technique without going to each of the individual machines? Right now, you either:
The point is that the red hat network (allegedly) manages large numbers of machines better than debian. Of course, this is untested by me, right now. But it's an attractive feature.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
At home though, I have a 10 machine lab, most of which run Redhat on them. But still, if I want to get RHN, that's $240 per year. Like I told Redhat, I can get a Windows license cheaper than that, and that includes free use of the Windows update service. So if I have a two year upgrade cycle, I've paid $440 to Redhat, while paying about $200 to Microsoft. The difference being that if I remember correctly, that $240 annually to Redhat covers up to 10 machines, while the Windows fee only covers one. Still though, it's not like I grant myself a large IT budget for home.
Now that the cost for a home user to sign up has come down, I can definitely see myself using it. It makes updating much easier, and it allows me to do my part in supporting the Linux distribution that I prefer.
I finally managed to get to the Red Hat Network site, where it is described like this:
Red Hat Network is an Internet solution for managing one or more Red Hat Linux systems. All Security Alerts, Bug Fix Alerts, and Enhancement Alerts (collectively known as Errata Alerts) can be retreived directly from Red Hat. You can even have updates automatically delivered directly to your system as soon as they are released.
So this service does not actually offer the ability to upgrade to the next Red Hat Linux version; it only offers patches for your current version.
Does this mean Red Hat still has no upgrade facility other than rebooting the server and booting from the install media? If so, then despite the RHN being a useful service, it seems that Red Hat still doesn't provide the functionality I want.
If I could do a live minor upgrade (such as 7.1 -> 7.2) of a Red Hat system it would definately be a step in the right direction.
I also wonder how a major upgrade (such as 6.2 -> 7.2) could be made smoother, considering the substantial changes between major versions.
The Red Hat Network is a good start, but some more tools are needed to ensure that upgrades are easier to perform, and are more likely to succeed.
Our car-manufacturing company has developed a new revolutionary business model for making cars.
We give away the cars for free and then we sell services for those cars! If you want to we can clean your car, wax it or you can use some of our other services.
We get cash from a couple of VC's, the rest of them simple don't "get it". If we need more we just call "the suits".
Okay, besides the cost, and maybe not even that, what's the difference between this kind of subscription and M$'s ?
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
This works out to $60/year. Consider that a home user with a single computer spends about $90 every 2 years to upgrade his/her version of windows. That's buying very upgrade that comes along. Drop that to every four years, and a windows person spends about $20/year.
For these people, RedHat costs 3x more to keep updated than windows. Granted, more software comes with RedHat, even in the stripped down versions.
Still, I think more reasonable support contracts for individuals can only help these distro companies. I've been asking the same from Mandrake every chance I get, but to no avail.
I guess those "real men" don't have to work at a company that makes any money.
I sent similar feedback in response to an email from RedHat, with the same $5 / month idea. As you said, I have a feeling quite a few others had the same thoughts.
:)
I usually buy a packaged version when it comes out, it keeps me current, gives a little back to RedHat, and gives me the n days of support. But only one machine. With 2 at home (as I figure many have with one 'user' machine and a firewall) I could use RedHat Network for updating, but I had to keep switching machines in order to use up2date. For me, the $5 / month is worth the time savings in using up2date vs. doing the individual downloads of each fix. As someone else said, guess I'll now have to step up to the plate and pay it
I asked them to include the subscription in their "professional" edition, somewhat like they used to with their previous incarnation of RHN. I work at a business that a) doesn't have an account with RH (we buy from a vendor) b) doesn't have a business credit card. I don't want to use my own credit card and expense it, nor do I want to go through the rigmarole of setting up and account. This change doesn't impact me much.
Umm.. nobody does this well.
But if I was going to do it, I'd do it with debian.
0 4 * * * apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && upgradestatus
Where upgradestatus would be a perl script that takes the output of "dpkg -l" and formats it in some intelligent way, then uploads it to an SQL server.
I would think that would give you awesome centralized package management, and you'd immediately know when systems are out of date, or when they fail their upgrades.
You may be saying "well, I don't want to write it myself, it should come with the OS!" and that may be true. But if it did, do you think you would use it the way it was? Or would you customize it to suit your own needs?
Maybe theres a reason nobody has done this yet. Probably because everyone already does it in their own way.
BTW, instead of pushing the status to a central server, I push out all my changes with an expect script. Even with 650 machines, I'd rather watch them as they get upgraded to make sure there isn't a failure. If theres too many machines, then you can devide the work up between several people and have them all watch upgrades.
But thats just me.
I purchased the 7.0 boxed set some time ago and originally the service was supposed to be offered for a limited time. RedHat then decided to give the service for free to one system if you bought the boxed set. I still have free access.
Are they still giving the service away for free if you purchase the official boxed set? I've used Caldera 2.4 and Debian 2.4, but I came back to RedHat because of the RedHat Network service. I did use apt-get extensively when I had Debian, but I found RHN easier to use. Just my opinion. This is the right price for this service, and I posted this opinion to RedHat's feedback form. I'm going to get my brother and sister to sign up, as I got them to start using RedHat some time ago at 7.0. Of course, my brother still uses Windows for Everquest.;(
I would really like to subscribe to RHN. But if I ever want to cancel this subscription, I have to call RedHat in the U.S. by phone. I live in Europe, so they are not in my time zone and apart from this, english is not my native language. So while the offer is interesting and the price is fair, the cancel policy is probably unacceptable for most european people. Seems as if RedHat wants to leave the european market to SuSE:-)
I've used both Ximian's redcarpet updater and RHN. Ximian's client is very slick looking, and I like how you can subscribe to different channels. I also like you there's an option to install RPMs from a directory- this makes Redcarpet useful as a general RPM frontend.
Red Hat Network doesn't look as elegent, but it has more functionality overall. RHN gives you emails of critical updates and errata tailored to your actual systems. It gives you a single point of management for multiple computers. One thing that I tried yesterday was to schedule the install of new RPM packages on one of my tower systems from my laptop. It worked great! Also, I love how you can exclude packages from being upgraded. It's very annoying to have to click on every individual update manually in red carpet just because if you hit "update all" it will update a package you want left alone (usually replacing a more up to date version with a downgraded ximian version).
I'm used to periodically checking for updates manually, and then pushing them down to each system as needed. This saves a lot of time if you can spare 60$ a year for each additional system (you get one system free).
The problem with what you suggested is that dpkg is inherently interactive. I don't believe that there is a way to get it to not ask questions, at least at the "critical" level, nor would it even necessarily be a good idea not to.
I believe that the purpose of a service such as redhat's is that you answer all of those questions once for your 300+ machines and then it goes and does all of the installation, with those answers.
it would be nice if debian supported such a thing, but I don't know of any particularly good way to handle it.
Of course, for a single machine, if you're decently stilled, debian is an absolute dream.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
"I'm a 40th level Zealot with the staff of ESR and a hair from the beard of RMS, I'm gonna kick your ass"
Seriously though, accountants love this "constant revenue" model. That's why you'll see it take over. A little money now, and a little money forever!
"Seriously though, this should be good news for people who download RedHat's .iso images but want to financially support RedHat in a way that makes sense."
I don't know about you guys, but isn't the best way to make money to offer a service or product that people are willing to pay for because it's good; rather than hoping on donations because people like the company?
That said, I have no clue wether this service is worth the money or not, I am merely reacting to the wording of some of the posts. To me it sounds like some of you are looking for an excuse to donate money to RH. They should be able to survive without you being kind to them. That will never work out in the long run. So, I hope that those of you who will pay for this will be paying for the right reason; because it's worth it, not because you want to be nice to RH.
Oh. I guess this is troll -1.
The issue of debian/redhat is not at issue here, since there's an apt-get for redhat systems.
What is at issue is that one system administrator wants tools that make it *really* easy for him to upgrade and install systems. And currently, if you want to push out 25 new software packages, that's non-trivial even with apt-get. You even mentioned something to this effect by writing an expect script.
If you come up with a point/click solution which scales to over a 1000 boxes, regardless of the distribution the site currently uses, my job has
just become 10 times easier.
First off, I don't think RHN was ~ever~ $30/mo. They may have new services at $30/mo (which I didn't find) but it was $19.95/mo (~$240/yr) and gets discounted significatly at 5+ systems until it drops a bit more than 50%. 2nd, those who don't want to pay just don't understand what will happen. There has to be an OSS company to progress at any reasonable rate (and some people would argue the rate of progression has been slow). I'm not just talking about Linux but the companies that support Apache, Perl, etc. Whether it's Mandrake, RH, SuSE, Connectiva or whatver.. support them financially as best you can. Drop a few bucks in the PayPal accounts of those OSS developers who post the link. Buy 'em a beer or a CD. If you can, throw a bit of money at the EFF, FSF, Perl Foundation, etc. OSS and digital rights organizations. Every little bit helps... and that is just financially. If you can dive into code, submit proper bug reports, thanks the developers on occasion, educate yourself beyond the meaningless banter on boards, IRC, USENET.... (It's not all meaningless but the signal to noise ration is getting worse.) Just go out and support these companies and organizations or eventually, they just won't be there for us. Sure the software, as is, will always be around but the number of active projects, the support of HW, etc. will just fall off into nothingness if we're not careful. And it isn't spectacular now as it stands... Best wishes, -Pk
There's really no need to pay for this sort of thing. Searching for "redhat update" on Freshmeat reveals 5 GPLed update tools. I even wrote one myself to meet my university's specific needs. Download it, run it with -writeconfig, edit the config file to point to your favorite mirror, copy the script to /etc/cron.daily, and you're set for automatic update retrieval.
Beyond basic "rpm -Fvh" functionality, it can be configured to send mail to a specific address when updates arrive, ignore certain packages (with regexp support), and write a script which performs the updates when run.
It's called HURL (Hurl Updates Redhat Linux), and you can get a copy here. Drop me some mail if you like it or have suggestions.
I think that both of these products are great but i can only subscribe to one of these products. I use red hat linux 7.1 and live in the uk. What does the slashdot community think which is the better product for the home user .I use gnome and a few other products like star office. what does everybody think is better?
what's the difference between this kind of subscription and Microsoft's ?
If you don't pay Red Hat, you can still use the software you have, and you can get new software off rpmfind. If you don't pay Microsoft, on the other hand, you lose your right to use the software because under a rental agreement, you are not the owner of a copy, and in the United States, 17 USC 117 states that the owner of a copy can dictate terms of use.
Will I retire or break 10K?
FWIW, I recently upgraded a RH6.2 machine to 7.2 (actually 7.2.x, since there are several packages that have been released since 7.2) using up2date and had no problems. up2date finds all the dependancies and gets everything you need. Granted, I did have to reboot when it was done in order to load the new kernel, but it was much easier (and had less downtime) than upgrading from the CD.
Enigma
I would plop down some cash at Best Buy if Red Hat would offer less expensive retail shrink wrapped CDs on a regular basis. Just the CDs and a bumper sticker or something. I can see it now, Mandrake Cooker at Walmart?
Seriously though, a company can save money on printing, materials and bandwidth. Hell, send me a CD monthly by mail. I'm gonna burn one anyway, might as well save me some time.
1) RHN would NOT store my machine configuration on their servers. I see no reason this can't be stored on my machine.
2) Red Hat would coordinate with Ximian so that their releases coincide. Let's say $9/mo for Red Carpet and RHN combined. This would cover all system and basic desktop updates; both RH and Ximian might want to keep a level or two of premium service beyond this basic service.
Maybe even offer different desktop subscriptions, so that $9 might get you RH+GNOME, or RH+KDE.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
It would be really cool if the Redhat Network supported the Content-Addressable Web so that we could automatically download our ISOs from the closests avaliable mirrors, and even download from multiple mirrors in parallel.
Stay tuned for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference where we will be unveiling a companion set of technologies to the CAW that will change distribution of open source content forever!
If anyone wants to know more about CAW before the conference, please contact me at justin_at_onionnetworks_dot_com
--
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks
Have 350 Deb machines to manage? Check out FAI. We're using it with about 20 machines, and it works OK. Initial setup is a pain, but once that's done, it's quite powerful and flexible.
If you have apt4rpm installed (apt4rpm.sourceforge.net) you can just type:
apt-get distupgrade. It worked fine going from 7.1 to 7.2, but I don't know about major upgrades...
Sigs are against my religion
Mandrake has done something similar. The download version now no longer comes in a box, it's just $5 per cd. It's simply not worth the effort for the distro companies to make these cheap versions, which is why they are now making various types of subscription services.
Red Hat has never (okay, I take that back, maybe at some point they did, but not for very long) expected to make money selling their distro to consumers. Where they make their money is selling to corporations, and the home version is basically just advertising.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
redhat is teh piece of shit!!! my kernal keeps oopsign and tehn it brakes!!!!11 i think it is permentantly borkened now it wo't even restert!!!!!11 lunix fag0rts@!!!!!1
Here's a better idea: fuck the dictionary and read Marx...
As an added bonus, read Mao and Lenin, and see if you can understand why the dictionary picked a bad source....
Or just create your own deb mirror for your network and have 350 machines sync to it auto-magically and use a pilot machine to test updates. Then all you have to do is manage your master mirror since all it's subordinates would be identical, or nearly identical in theory. Export current package information with various permutations of dpkg and mangle it so it looks pretty on the intranet. Granted this is probably more difficult than paying redhat to do it for you but in the long run it's probably more cost effective. Wasn't progeny supposed to be doing something along these lines with NOW (network of workstations)?
...is their insistence on making FAM and sunrpc portmap *ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY* to run KDE. FAM (File Alteration Monitor) is a daemon that monitors files for changes. I guess that the "logic" behind it is that it's less cpu-intensive to have one daemon constantly strobing files on your harddrive than half-a-dozen programs doing it simultaneously.
/etc/fam.conf, and have it readable by any programs that want to talk to FAM. Or howsabout a sunrpc clone and FAM that bind to interface lo, rather than eth0 ? Make it secure and closed to the outside world out-of-the-box, and force people to port-forward via ssh if they *REALLY* want the rest of the planet to be able to monitor their file activity.
Since FAM is not a "well known service", the only way for the system to work is to...
1) fire up ye olde sunrpc portmap on port 111 listening to the whole world (ARRRGH!!! Hello Lion/Ramen) and have FAM register itself with portmap.
2) FAM is then assigned a random port (could be above or below 1024) and listens to the whole world (ARRRGH!!!) on that port. Other programs can query portmap to find out which port to talk to FAM on. Oh yeah, the "-L" (local listen only) commandline option *IS IGNORED IN THE DEFAULT LAUNCH MODE* (i.e. xinetd). So *OTHER COMPUTERS CAN MONITOR YOUR FILE CHANGES*. ARRRGH!!!
Linux users have long laughed at Windows where *DESKTOP CLIENT PROGRAMS* are security holes. But here comes Redhat with a "feature" that, out-of-the-box, makes your filesystem activity viewable by the entire internet as well as exposing two open ports. WTF were they thinking when they did that ? More succinctly... were they thinking when they did that ? Planet earth calling Micro^H^H^H^H^H Redhat; isn't it time your boss man sent out a memo telling his programmers to put security ahead of features ?
How many newbie end-users are going to know how to properly update portmap and hosts.deny and hosts.allow and iptables to protect themselves? Redhat should've set the port number in
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
No, real men use cat <<EOF | as > application . Why would you ever want to save your code? If it doesn't compile, you obviously need to rewrite it. :-)
I *nearly* going to open a Paypal account, when I found this website: http://www.paypalwarning.com/.
I know this is seriously OT for this thread, but I would recommend anyone using Paypal to read that website.
An idea I think would be cool is to offer some kind of diff or something to patch the ISO and offer the new checksums to the ISOs. That way, you could have your own updated redhat ISO's without pounding their ftp servers too hard. they could even put the updated ISO's on there a couple weeks later just so that ppl would go for the diffs first and not destroy redhat's bandwitdth like what happens when they make a new release. :-)
I wonder how well xdelta would work for 600+ MB files?
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Why pay even $5/month for a second rate product like RedHat, when you can get access to Debian for free?
For minor version upgrades (7.1->7.2) you can usually just put the CD in, mount it, change to the RPMS directory, and type "rpm -Fvh *.rpm"
You can try this for major upgrades, but I suspect the chances of it working are slim.
Your best bet is to just get debian, of course.
With Microsoft you have no word processor, spreadsheet, image editing, personal organizer, let alone the server products.
How is it then cheaper? I could understand you if they where shipping Office plus the expensive version of XP.
Oh, wait, maybe you just pirate the rest...
unfinished: (adj.)
Would these 350 machines in your network be workstations or servers?
If they are servers and you want some form of security, you shouldn't have some outside source knowing what insecure packages are on your servers. I'm not sure how RHN works, but it sounds like in order for RHN to be able to "manage" all the machines in your network, that RedHat's servers would have to make some kind of active connection to your machines to install the software. This sounds very dangerous too me. What if someone reverse engineers the protocol and starts installing hacked packages onto the server. If all RHN does is notify you of security alerts you can get this similar service from Debian by subscribing to the debian-security mailing list. Of course the alerts won't be tailored to exactly what packages are on your servers, but I don't think that is too hard to keep track of. If you want automated security updates? put apt-get update && apt-get upgrade in cron and there you have it. Security updates will be automatically installed every night.
If these are workstations and you have 350 or 3500 of them I would hope they are running identical hardware and identical software. Or at least within each department or something. Obviously developers need different hardware and software than the sales staff. What do then is have a "master" (for lack of a better term) workstation for each class of machine you have in your network. No one actually uses these workstations. They are clean systems with only the software installed that should be installed for those particular workstations. Then you have a cron that runs on all your other 350 workstations that rsync each night against the masters. Anything extra that was put on the workstations some how by an employee is removed. Anything added or updated on the master image (such as security updates) gets copied over to all the workstations. Go so far as putting the cron on the master machines to install security updates each night and you have a fully self updating network that you hardly would ever need to touch.
All thanks to the power of Debian and all totally free.
>I also wonder how a major upgrade (such as 6.2 -> 7.2) could be made
>smoother, considering the substantial changes between major versions.
>The Red Hat Network is a good start, but some more tools are needed to
>ensure that upgrades are easier to perform, and are more likely to
>succeed.
>
>
>
Back up your home directories and other data,wipe 6.2 off your hardrive,install 7.2 and restore from your backups. See how simple things can be?
Moreover, capitalism is about supply and demand and prices. Some stuff is free because offer is infinite or can't be apropiated or is a common good. Red Had changes a service, it's scare and it's good and has a marginal cost (each new download costs them).
OSS in the other hand is a common good because it allows big corporation to improve it at least cost while at the same time they can profit for using it. It's a common ground to do bussiness where nobody can have a monopoly. After all, it's it GPLd, then you can make money but can never monopolize it.
Monopoly, on the other hand, is the enemy of capitalism. Oh, wait, didn't the court ruled MS was a Monopoly and has abused it's position?
unfinished: (adj.)
Try rhupdate: http://www.jjminer.org/rhupdate/
Hey Fuck Head everything redhat does is GPL and they support many open source projects besides "redHat linux". So how the fuck is redhat not a real open source organization.
You bratty debian users suck moose cock. Enjoy your 1% of the linux market.
Dick
Up2date keeps breaking. It's been awhile since it actually damaged my system (that was an early version), but it's currently (after only a week or two) gotten to the point where I can't use it because of segment violation. This isn't the first time, either.
Red Hat is a basically quite good product, and I like it a lot. But based on past experience I wouldn't pay a nickel for up2date. (Ok, maybe I'd pay a dollar [but NOT a dollar / month!].)
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
$5, no hassle, peace of mind... .NET as a milch cow.
Sure the stingo's can get it for free - so what.
But Microsoft now has a problem - everyone is going to $5, and in time some nasty comparisons will be made, and I feel MS wants more than $5.
In the meantime RH's base grow's , with all-you-can-eat.
That will really externalize
I don't know enough about this, but it seemed to me that Ganymede could be extended to manage everything, not just directories. Ganymede 1.0.9
Bush's education improvements were
Why would people pay $5/month per machine to keep software updated when a well-designed free solution already exists? "What's that?" you say. (Oh no.. another Debian zealot..) Just consider this a moment:
1.) As a sys admin, if you're smart and value your time, you'll be using mostly diskless workstations to begin with. No, I don't mean what Sun calls diskless workstations. I mean ordinary full-featured PC's with no hard disks. Or if they do have hard disks, it's only for a cache of the networked filesystems. So there, right off the start, you don't need this RHN silliness because by very nature, diskless workstations don't need updated, only the server does.
2.) So lets say you're a home user with only 3 machines, making it silly to set up diskless workstations. There's still a better way. First, you use Debian. One machine is your 'test box.' Use both the Debian testing and unstable sources. (unstable is rather misleading if you think that implies the kinda useless mess that is Mandrake's 'cooker' tree. Debian unstable is quite stable enough for all but heavy production systems) So anyways, once a week, on your test box, you do:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
This will upgrade *everything* installed on the machine as packages. Most likely everything is fine, but if you're worried, use the test box for a couple days to make sure everything is stable. All other machines should have a weekly cron job that uses your test box as a package source and performs the same operation.. but 2-3 days after the test-box upgrade, just in case something broke.
It's that simple. The RH people need to wake up and realize that they need to sell an actual solution if you're going to make money. Repackaging free software is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Jon, earlier you told me that Ganymede could not easily be extended to manage software configurations, because of its lack of ability to cause execution.
Disclaimers and cautions: I respect whatever you say. You certainly know more than I about management of large networks. I know that it is possible that I could be wrong because of insufficient appreciation of how things work.
Now that I have said that, I have an opinion:
I think that we should want only ONE repository of information about each computer. I think that, philosophically, a repository should not be anything else than a repository. We don't want the database of information to go out and start changing things. We don't want this because of a realization that the program that takes action based on information should be different than the program that contains the information.
I think it is far better that each supplier of software write a configuration routine that queries the Ganymede repository and makes the necessary changes. This routine would be a plug-in to Ganymede. Potentially there would be thousands of plug-ins.
This, to me, seems like the only sensible division of labor. The software supplier has his or her own preferred language and ways of accomplishing things, and the configuration repository should not interfere with that.
Once software configuration is managed by Ganymede, it is only another step toward using Ganymede to manage pre-installation information.
What attracts me to Ganymede is that there seems to be very high quality of infrastructure. Ganymede has the extensibility to thousands of machines that is necessary. If we get started down a road toward improving open OS management the new methods must be extremely extensible.
Conceivably, a software installation routine could do anything it liked, any way it liked, but it would not get started until it had queried the Ganymede repository and would not be considered completely finished until what it did was entered into Ganymede.
There needs to be ONE place for ALL information about each computer on a network. There needs to be a GUI tool for having a quick look at this information. Is there a better infrastructure already available than Ganymede? Ganymede may not be very close to being able to do this, but can you mention a better starting point?
I think modesty is fine, but not when it becomes misleading. The facts seem to be that Ganymede is an excellent start on something that needs to be everywhere.
To make all of this work, Ganymede would have to be such that it could easily manage any number of computers, from 1 to 100,000.
Is anything here in error?
Bush's education improvements were
There needs to be ONE place for ALL information about each computer on a network. There needs to be a GUI tool for having a quick look at this information. Is there a better infrastructure already available than Ganymede? Ganymede may not be very close to being able to do this, but can you mention a better starting point?
Michael, if you want to see a system designed more along the lines I think you are suggesting, do take a look at Caldera's Volution network management product.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Jon, I know you might think I am being hasty, but I had a look at the Volution web pages. My strong impression is that this product is going nowhere. Those people are not up to the considerable intellectual challenge of making Volution popular. Also, there needs to be a free product that is shipped with every distribution of Linux.
Bush's education improvements were
Maybe this explains why Red Hat Network released a bucketload of new RPMs for RH 7.2 last week (it was KDE 2.2.2 + Xfree86 + a new kernel - more than 50 in a day) ?
This duly overloaded RHN for free users and, voila, I get an e-mail from RHN a day or two later saying "pay us and you'll not be locked out". Hmmm....
Note that use of up2date for a single registered machine is free (it's only multiple machine configs that you have to pay for), so what's to stop someone downloading the RPMs that update the one (master) machine, putting them on an NFS disk and then installing them on the other machines on their network for nothing ?
There's nothing un-American about wanting something for free or not paying for what you do get. If anything, it's probably more American to not want to pay for things that you get
Yeah, and you probably use gnutella to pirate illegal software. Jackass.
This is probably OT, because there must be something I'm missing since I really cannot understand what this fuss is all about?
/pub/linux/distributions/redhat or alike from any of your nearby university ftp site and get overwhelmed with the bandwidth)
:)
The RedHat ISO images have been available for downloads for years. Numerous ftp sites around the world mirror them. (check
I understand the interest for 'update -u' (which is the RedHat equivalent of the Debian 'apt-get upgrade'), but that's been also running for over a year now and having used that on a dozen or so boxes I've never payed a dime for that.
Besides, the rpms and srpms are always available on numerous ftp mirrors in the redhat directories, and will continue doing so. After all they cannot charge for the software, only for the service. And ftp mirrors around the world is also something that they cannot charge for, which actually is the kind of service I'd be willing to pay for...
For the record, the RedHat up2date service has been well worth the $5 a month, even $30 for a bit older (i.e. working) users.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
RedHat contains plenty of non-GPL software (e.g., BSD games), GPL-incompatible software (e.g., Qt, until recently), and even some non-free software (e.g., Netscape). There are distributions which contain only free software, like Debian (Debian also distributes a non-free archive, but keeps it separate from the free software). There are other operating systems that are entirely free (e.g., NetBSD). I'm not sure that there is any OS that is entirely GPL; even a true GNU system would probably still include some things that are LGPL-(or even are BSD- or X11-)licensed.