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The Increasing Cost of Red Hat Linux?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a company with a large number of Linux servers in the data center. We're currently evaluating what distribution we want to use moving forward. Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise from 7.2 would cost ~$350k just for the systems we already have deployed. Due to the change in Red Hat's release policy, we either have to move to Enterprise, or change distributions. Also, we don't have Oracle on any of these systems, but we will need it in the future. This leaves us with rather limited options. I'm interested hearing what other Slashdot readers are running, and planning?"
Have you considered Windows? You can get it for free on kazaa.
Switch to BSD! I hear FreeBSD is nice. Also in the enterprise. And a license that does not make $neckties nervous.
For your Oracle instances, I HIGHLY recommend their Advanced Server. I've seen it in action and it is impressive. I would consider it to be worth the cost.
For everything else, CHANGE distributions. SUSE, Debian, Mandrake, ASP, Rawhide, pick one. Or ditch linux all together and use FreeBSD. If you guys are used to Solaris, FreeBSD will be a very simple transition. The other BSD's are good too, but Free is closer to Solaris, IMHO. I've found that my experience with Solaris has translated to it quite nicely. In addition, the documentation is fabulous.
HTH,
Queen B
Jimi
HDGary secures my bank
You can buy support for Debian.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Redhat is no longer going to be making public releases, thats the point. There wont be any RH 10 or 11. RH9 is it for the free distro's from redhat. They are moving to data center class high end stable stuff, rightfully so IMHO. Now they can compete with the big boys in the big boys playground, which can't hurt linux. There are plenty of free unsupported alternatives to redhat out there for the budget minded.
That's esentialy what you are paying for if you go with the RedHat enterprise. The assesment you need to make is;
1. Do you need that level of support.
2. Is there a cheaper way to achive the level of support you do need.
3. Dose 1 or 2 requiere switching vendors.
For the cluless. It has nothing to do with the software itself. I.e. You can download RedHat and install it on as many PCs as you like virtualy free.
PS: Support for large numbers of critical solaris and/or Windows servers costs just as much or more. I should know since I work for a company that makes most of it's money off this sort of thing.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The strategy I'm taking is to use the RedHat high end products for running commercial applications (like Oracle). For everything else, standard RedHat is fine. The developers like that RedHat keeps pace with the new stuff they're working on.
/etc/sysconfig, /etc/profile.d, etc... very modular.
The advent of http://www.fedora.us bodes well for the future. I expect to see more 3rd party support for the RedHat standard package. That's the nice thing about RedHat finally opening up their devel process.
At worst, you could just take the standard distro that RedHat bases their advanced products on and use the security patches from the advanced on the standard distro. For example, install RedHat 7.2 and install any patches from the currently support advanced product. The only thing is that you'll have to rpmbuild --rebuild the src.rpm's as they are released.
I really like RedHat's way of doing things. I like their python based configuration programs. I like
And who'd 've thunk... RedHat is basicallly IPv6 ready out of the box. I didn't notice that until recently. Very easy to setup 6to4, radvd, etc. Even Mozilla is compiled with --enable-ipv6. Thanks RedHat!
You want to run Oracle with Red Hat, period. (Well, you want Red Hat unless you want to pony up 250k for a sunfire box, or go back to 2003. Saving money is the objective, right?)
However, you can safely run other servers on GPL Red Hat, or Debian, or SuSe, or....
We moved to BSD for most of our Unix needs.
Amen! We used to be an all Sun shop and have migrated to FreeBSD on all of servers. The mailing lists have answered all the questions that the manpages couldn't, the hardware is readily available and we've saved over twenty grand worth of misc equipment in the last 5 years. We couldn't possibly be happier with our decision to migrate.
My company has hired a small independent Linux technical support provider to help with this.. They have a service where they create patches and updates for RH 6.2-8.0 when new security vulnerabilities are out. They test them, package them as RPM, and distribute. So when 12/31/2003 comes around, you don't have to upgrade to 9.0 if it isn't feasible.
Its kind of expensive and may not work for everyone, but its worth a look:
http://www.pantek.com/linux.php?subsect=rhupdates
In this economy when the "big" Linux players are worried about the "big" issues, I prefer working with a smaller company like these guys because they work harder to make their mark.
You can buy support for Debian, yes. But when the packages will be updated... that's another question.
:)
Now don't get me wrong, I like Debian, I use it on my personal servers. However I recall then whe last sendmail exploit came out it took a few days for the patch to be released. I tried to inquire when it would be coming out and was rudely told, "We don't comment on such things."
apt-get is a wonderful tool. But until patches are brought out in a more timely fashion I can't in good concience recommend it to any of my clients.
The other issue I've found, but I'll admit haven't put a lot of time into finding the solution for, is having a local mirror. When I build a server, if that server were to die, I want to be able to create the exact same version again of all packages. I have run into the situation with Debian of a package being upgraded and breaking things. Though as I said, this is something which is probably solved by now since I haven't looked into this issue in about 2 years.
Once these issues are resolved, go Debian go! I know we're facing the Redhat issue at the end of the year... upgrade all out RH7.3 machines to 9 by the end of the year... or risk not having security patches. I feel bad for the admin of the local 96 node beowulf. I'm glad I put RH9 on my new cluster....
There, my rant for the day.
I'm not saying it's the answer to your problem, I don't know, you'll have to decide.
Now, before we move on I'm going to tell you how Debian sucks. This is not to say that other distributions do not suck, or that Debian sucks more or less than the others - this is just something that you might run in to and should be aware of.
Debian sucks because:
Yet, we chose Debian because it rocks (and RH sucks) in these areas:
For a server you put in a data center and don't want to touch again unless absolutely necessary, I think Debian is great. It is extremely easy to stay up to date with security, and that is pretty much all there is to it. I still have nightmares from the days where I was mirroring entire RedHat distribution trees (or at least their massive update directories) in order to keep those systems up.
But really - in the end - it is not a few hundred bucks per server that should make the difference. It is my impression that if you pay for your RedHat, you can have a nice update service as well.
You'll be shelling out thousands of dollars per server for the hardware, an order of magnitude more (over the years) for support (eg. your time), so a RedHat subscription fee really shouldn't stop you from going RH.
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far.
I personally believe that Slackware is the best server implantation that you can go with. It's the most Unix distro IMHO. Also you deal with source files, not RPM's, personally I greatly dislike the use of binaries. The best thing is that Slackware is Free, and it's stable. I know a lot of different people whom have had problems with Redhat, switched them over to Slackware, which has a slightly higer learning curve, but, they were happy with Slack.
I don't think that RedHat said they aren't releasing new software ... just that they aren't releasing it in shrink wrap packages that they sell in stores. I have yet to buy RedHat from a store ... I download it from the website and burn it to CD.
... the next release Beta) is avialable right now for download.
RedHat Severn (9.0.93
I haven't read anything that says the next release will not be publically available.....
We have been using RH 7.3 for some time now in our cluster configuration.
Now we wanted to upgrade for various reasons and we really dont want to have to do the upgrade manually each time so we looked at RH. Damn its expencive. It's way to expencive when you have to pay a license pr. server, so we switched to SuSE Enterprise server (Oracle Certisfied)
Now we do automatic upgrade/patch of all servers using only one License. Also everything seems to be running much more stable. We have a FC connection to an external diskarray RH crashed several times using this array, also the webserver made some strange hicups from time to time (Also with RH9), but after changing to SuSE we're moved away from these problems.
Also.. when talking about support. RH is difficult since they only reply to web support, slow and it's very very hard to describe the problems for them. SuSE on the other hand replies to mails, are fast and very helpful and service minded.
Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. Red Hat is usually pushed by corporate types to whom the illusion of support is more important than any actual support given.
Speaking as a system administrator who has had the occasion to contact Red Hat support, in my experience, Red Hat support was worse than having no support at all. They only support what they distribute, as it interacts with the rest of what they distribute.
Eg., want MaxClients of > 256 with Apache? If you build your own Apache to get around the compiled-in limit of the one bundled with Advanced Server 2.1, then run into a kernel issue, Red Hat will not support the kernel issue.
The reason it was worse than none at all? Being sent on a goose chase by support, spending 4 days waiting for support to help, and only then being told "not supported." Not "this is a known limitation", or anything to that effect. Only "not supported." At least without support I would have contacted a mailing list where it's likely someone would be interested in the problem.
The moral of the story: If you're paying for support, make sure up-front that what you'll be doing is supported.
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There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
...you really need to be careful about which distribution you choose. Officially, Oracle will only support their 9i Server product on RedHat Enterprise and SUSE Enterprise. It would be really bad to call Oracle for support only to be told you are S.O.L. because you're not running on a supported platform.
That being said, you can run Orcle 9i Server on other, less costly distributions. Personally, I run a development Oracle 9i server on debian 3.0 (woody).
The trick to Oracle compatability is the gcc and glibc versions. For Oracle 9i, you need gcc-2.95.4 and gblic-2.2.5. This happens to match exactly what debian 3.0 currently supports. Unfortunately, most other distributions have long since upgraded to gcc-3.x series and glibc-2.3.x, on which Oracle will not install or run.
To verify what versions of these packages a given distribution supports, you should use Distrowatch.com.
You are high, or highly misinformed.
RedHat continues to develop a public release
the beta for the next release (redhat 10) is available right now for public consumption. The simply aren't providing shrink wrap at compusa anymore, I think what the original story is referring to is the fact that each public release is only supported for 1 year, which is unacceptable in a corporate environment, to have to upgrade the OS of production boxes every year is not acceptable, and therefore requires that people move to ES, because it has 5 years of support.
Keeerist. Everyone bitches about the "Gentoo Zealots" but the damn debian zealots pull this crap EVERY SINGLE TIME someone asks or doesn't. Debian is the LAST thing these people need.
It's an annoying fact that you have to run AS if you want to run an Oracle DB on it or a BEA JVM. You can't get Oracle to install on RH8/9, and BEA will blow up on you with either of those distros. But you can get around this by running RH 7.2, which is was AS is based on. Oracle will install fine on that, and BEA will not blow up. Obviously you're not going to get support from Oracle/BEA if you let it slip that you're not running their software on AS. Oracle in particular is notorious for this.
What's even worse in some ways is that you have to use a two year old kernel. Thus you're stuck with inferior threading (among other things.) I've read a lot of this about how AS contains other "optimizations" for running things like Oracle that makes up for this. I think it's a load of BS. You do get built-in clustering (piranha), though you could get the RPMs for that.
At my company we run AS on our Oracle db in production. It's one of about 20 Linux servers we have there, and the only one not running RH8. In our dev/qa enviros we run Oracle on RH 7.2. We do not run BEA becuase we didn't want to run AS on our app server farm.
Care to back that up with some evidence? $dudeWhoAnsweredThePhone at Red Hat a while back told me they were still going to release the free stuff, just not support it for nearly as long as they have been.
> Of course, the nice gui installer is not free
Sure it is. It's called Anaconda, and everything you need to make your own customized version is included in the anaconda package in Red Hat, licensed under the GPL.
You're probably thinking of SuSE's installer.
I can't comment on the exact situation (I don't pay attention to sendmail exploits since I don't use it), but that is highly unusual for Debian; security patches are normally very prompt (on stable and unstable, on testing you're on your own).
On stable? That should never happen on stable.
Yahoo and Microsoft's own hotmail run on FreeBSD. Also the apache team uses FreeBSD as their os choice on their servers. FreeBSD handles large amounts of i/o and tcp/ip traffic and that is its strength's. SMP support and threading are its weaknesses.
Just my two cents.
Also you can run Oracle if you install the Linux abi package on FreeBSD.
http://saveie6.com/
Remember the ep where Homer goes aboard a shuttle? He breaks an ant-farm, causing the ants to fly about. Kent Brockman, who's about to perform a live interview with Homer, is suprised to see footage of an ant that's really really close to the camera. "The ship's been taken over by giant ants! I, for one, welcome our ant overlords..."
I'm sure somebody else can fill in the rest of the quote. The only reason I'm bringing it up is I've heard it 5 times in 24 hours, all at +5 funny.
Hello, enterprise Debian user here. :-)
.deb packages of our applications.
We manage consistant, reproducable server installs by NOT using the Debian installer. We install it once, and then make tarballs of the install, which we untar to install the server. We have it all scripted, so we can boot a machine off of a CD, run a script, answer 5 questions and have a server ready to go in about 10 minutes, and have the applications working (also script-installed) in another 10 minutes. We maintain our own OS release numbers (versions of our base tarball), and our own
For mirroring: We use debmirror. (It's a Debian package, of course.)
When upgrades fail: Go into aptitude, find the package that the upgrade broke, scroll down to the bottom, and highlight the old version, hit + to install it. It'll gracefully downgrade for your convenience. It's a hell of a lot easier than downgrading on, say, Solaris.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
I believe the issue here is with RedHat Advanced Server, which supposedly has been tested far more and has a longer release cycle. In fact, I believe it's basically RedHat 7.3 + bug fixes. "Consumer" RedHat is released more frequemently, but it's still free. (I haven't paid for it since RedHat 2 something)
Gentoo and AMD rulz! Intel sucks and so does windows!
Hey, have you ever tried System Installation Suite? IBM really pushes it for clusters and large installations.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Basically earlier this year Red Hat announced a fork in their product line. They now have Red Hat Linux (the open source distro still freely available) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The current version of RHEL is 2.1 which is based on Red Hat Linux 7.2, but there is currently a public beta that people can register to try for the next version of RHEL.
RHEL comes in several flavors, WS (workstation), ES (Enterprise Server), and AS (the old Advanced Server). RHEL software will be maintained for up to 5 years from it's release and telephone and other support options are available for it. I don't remember the cost per box, it varies based on the product you buy but you can find the most current pricing at Red Hat Ordering Site . Notice that RHEL ES is $350, this includes a 1 year Red Hat Network subscription to get your updates.
Now the weird thing is the license. Basically Red Hat only distributes open source software, we all know what that means, but the Enterprise line of products come with a license agreement that is written to cover the product, not the individual pieces of software. Every RHEL box that you have installed MUST be paid for. If you install 2 boxes off the same set of software with out purchasing a RHEL license, it invalidates all RHEL licenses at your site. However, I know that there are dispensations made for development vs. production machines. A Red Hat salesperson explained it to me once, but the knowlege has been displaced by something more important.
All the while the Red Hat Linux product line will also be freely available. The difference between the two is basically support and lifecycle. The Red Hat Linux product is not supported outside of the software being maintained for up to one year after it's initial release. The Red Hat Linux product will continue it's 4-6 month release cycle while the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product is every 12 to 18 months.
Someone in an earlier thread made the comment that now the Red Hat Linux (free) product would now be an unstable platform, that Red Hat was now making every product a major release. Yes every product is not versioned as a major release, 8, 9, 10, etc. However, the beta for 9 was actually called 8.0.xx and the beta for 10 is called 9.xx which leads one to believe that in the early stages of Red Hat Linux 9 that it was actually going to be called 8.1!!! Perhaps there was some versioning decision made in the marketing/management ranks over there. Either way, outside of a little gcc kruft which was not Red Hat's fault, Red Hat Linux 9 has been rock solid for me, and I should continue to expect a STABLE product coming from them in this area. New features will be made in the Red Hat Linux platform first, then they will be pulled into the RHEL product as it evolves.
Anyway, that's my understanding of how it works after talking with a bunch of people over at RH.
--Runz
Actually, you could only hire about 2 $70K sysadmins for that money. An employee usually costs close to 2 times his/her salary.
ok, I have to call you on this. The last vulnerability that affected both RedHat and Debian's sendmail was fixed on the same day by both. (3/31)
Please point out a specific case that is actually true before making inflamatory statements like this.
one command:
dpkg --get-selections > list_of_packages
it's right there in the documentation. Yes, even though it is mean some times to tell people to RTFM, it's not always a bad idea.
-Mark
I'll second that!
Our production servers run Debian stable--granted, there are only 3 of them, but they're rock solid. Also, there's a package called cron-apt (I think?) that we use to keep everything up to date. It doesn't do the upgrade automatically (by default--you can change this), but it does download them, so that all you have to do is run something like 'aptitude' and hit 'g' (Go) an it's usually done in seconds.
If you have many servers, there's a package called apt-move that will maintain a local mirror of the distros/archs of your choice. Download once, update many...
Also, I have to say that I have yet to seriously break a debian box--even with building my own kernels and such (another package, make-kpkg (that's the program anyhow--the package name may be kernel-package?) makes building your own kernal packages fairly painless.)
Finally, I'll mention Mandrake. I've always found it to be a good choice for desktop use, but in a recent comparision, InfoWorld (or some such) has ranked it higher than both RedHat and Suse as a *server* OS...
If a giant oil company wanted an abortion, would W's head explode?
What the hell are you smoking? Why don't you actually READ the license?
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1
How exactly does the license prohibit free copying or redistribution of their product? As far as I understand, if you don't want support, you can just buy one copy and use it on all your computers. Or use somebody else's copy on your computers. You can even redistribute it if you remove redhat's trademarks. This is way, way, way better than what SuSE offers.
BTW, Mandrake uses a practically identical license for their server products.
Oops... fucking slashdot stripped the link. Here it is. License
I first want to say that I think Redhat is insane with their new pricing. I understand that they want to make money, but they need to make some serious changes to their current model.
Next, what you said about email support only isn't true for the Enterprise version. You get to call them, and their support is good.
I am in the exact same boat as the guy who posted this, and considered SuSE and RedHat. Here is how it broke down for me. I also need to run Oracle...
RedHat
$350 / server without phone support or upgrade protection, but you get up2date for a year, and some basic (email) install support. In my opinion it makes no sense to buy this version, given that 3.x of their product will be out this year, and that version will offer things like LVM install built in (and a lot of other things), and you would be forced to buy that version for $350.
$800 / server with "Normal business hours support" and upgrade protection for one year. This version is limited to 2 processors and 4 GIG of memory.
RedHat had more expensive options but these two covered my company needs.
SuSE
$700 / server per processor. Support included. Also Opteron support.
With both products the cost seems to be for support and you will need to pay them EVERY year some amount of money. I would put that amount down, but my belief is that it will change given market demand. Also it must be noted that neither one allows you to load a copy of it on a "test" or "development" box! You must plunk down the $350-$800 again!
What I wish RedHat would do is allow you to download the Enterprise edition and install it on as many machines as you want for a nominal price. Say like $300 / processor. (NOTE don't limit processors/RAM ect) but pay for Up2date and then offer a support packs. Specifically they need to offer like 10 calls to them for $5,000. Novell and Microsoft currently offer agreements like this and it works well. They could then offer a pack of 50 for a discount and so on...
When I approched RedHat about this they seem to believe that their competition is Sun and even with this pricing they are still cheaper than Sun, so it makes sense to them. I don't agree with this! They may take away 10% of Suns business, but they WERE taking away more than 1% of Microsofts business, and the fact is that 1% of Microsoft's share is a heck of a lot more than 10% of Suns.
Now one last point in favor of RedHat. Oracle DB Standard Edition charges $15k/cpu + support + maintanence. That comes to around $22k/processor then you have to pay support + maintanence EVERY year. That comes to around $5k EVERY year to Oracle. If your company can handle that, then throwing RedHat a bone every year shouldn't be too bad. It just seems extra bad because it use to be near free.
Also, DB2, Websphere and other IBM apps have the same requirements as Oracle in regards to Linux distros, so it appears that the "big business" has kinda dictated what RedHat and SuSE will do.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I say go with SuSE Enterprise Server.
It has some nice features like remote auto install and YaST for a very nice system installer and maintainer.
SuSE Enterprise also supports x86, IBM mainframe, I/P series IBM servers, Itanium2 and AMD Opteron processors. This gives you a lot of flexability to add new hardware to the network to improve performance and the knowledge that the new machines will run perfectly with exsisting servers.
SuSE also has great tech support services at a much lower rate than redhat. You can feel confident that your server software is also run by the German Government and praised! by them.
SuSE's max turnaround time for support is just 2 hours!
SuSE is also United Linux Compatible and LSB compliant.
Suse Prices are not too bad either:
x86 single server 749USD$
Itanium Single server 448USD$
Opteron Single CPU 448USD$
Opteron Dual CPU 767USD$
Opteron Quad CPU 1405USD$
Opteron 8 CPU 2585USD$
These include 1 Year Maintainance and Service.
Right now I am writing this on Slack 9, I agree with you but the average Linux sys admin has trouble even comprehending how to recomp a kernel! The problem is db apps like Oracle! It still uses the 2 series gcc and won't work on Slack 9 unless you back compile a separate kern yourself, you can install both 3. series gcc and 2.95 the problem is linking them to the glibc right! then you need to forget your XF86config 4.3 alltogether unless you check out which X version you need for 2.95 gcc, and run a separate X with it (in general a can of worms) It will work if you do it right but then you need to use X with some of the Oracle guis! Catch 22. The Oracle library deps are out of date! You are screwed if you make even the simple mistake of not installing X quite right. I am sure that there is someway to build Slack to run Oracle but this is a little bit of a long way around. Might be a good idea to document the process! I love Slack also for its transparent in your face approach, you even need to enable permissions so users can burn cds, or access /dev/cdrom for that matter! It is a great way to force people to learn real unix style security! A little draconian but I sure love to be able to easily take a pico at my security logs without using an X gui first! I am not up to speed yet on VI and Emacs, so pico is a God send! Maybe thats why redfat nuked it, to make it harder for sys admins to run without their versions of guis, hey that almost sounds like a MS trick. Nah they couldn't be that stupid, could they?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
FUD, Wrong Assumptions, Wrong asserted conclusions. Lot's of rude and incorrect accusations flying around. First, go read the section in the link below about "roll your own"
h tml
http://www.redhat.com/advice/ask_shadowman_may02.
Then set up a mirror of the RedHat Advanced Server Source RPMS, and a mirror of the Source RPMS of the RedHat Advanced Server Errata. Now, go read
http://current.tigris.org
Now, take a redhat 7.2 server, with minimal install and kernel dev bundle, do "rpm -qa --last" and then build the AS packages in the order they were installed on a 7.2 server. Installing each one after you build it. Put the binaries into your own CURRENT server. Now, go read
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6473
You can create your own Linux distribution with the same updates that RedHat Advanced Server has, and it will have the same lifecycle that RedHat Advanced Server has.
The only thing you don't get is RHN, Support from RedHat, and "certified" compatibility and support form RedHat Certified ISV's like Oracle, BEA, IBM, HP, Dell, Netcool, BMC etc.....
Also, your costs are out of whack. RedHat Edge Server Basic subsciption
only costs about $350/year per dual proc server.
At my company we "rolled our own" distribution based on RHAS Source RPM's and we maintain our own CURRENT server with the errata. But we still buy RHAS licenses for servers where we are running 3rd party software that offers RedHat Certification.
-Ben.
With that many machines, you'll get better pricing. The organization that I work for (which is huge, but has about 200 linux boxes) pays approximately $200/box.
For us, it was worth it because we are guaranteed a supply of patches & support for a minimum of five years. Red Hat public releases churn every 18 months or so, which is too much work to maintain.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
listen, let's remember here people.. redhat was one of the first linux distrubtions, and they lost a lot of money & market share because they supported GNOME rather than the 6-12-months-ahead KDE project, all because they wanted a completely GPL'ed solution. They sued SCO first, so don't forget, they are in this on the politics side, not just for the money.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
...But why doesn't he just upgrade to RH9 for his Oracle app and run another distro for the other stuff? Certainly, many data centers carry a variety of OS on their servers... Even in our (mostly) Windows back room, we have a couple Solaris machines and a couple Linux boxes and everything works out just fine. (Except for the Windows stuff which present constant niggling, unexplained/undocumented problems. Exchange server? What a nightmare. Thank god it isn't the actual external mail server or the real relay.)
Anyway, this is a bummer, because I certainly do appreciate what RedHat has done for the comunity. I know MY first box ran RedHat. It is too bad the prices are so high, but if you run a business critical app, it is almost neccessary to have 24x7 support available. Even though you'll use it two or three times in your whole life, when you need it, your ass will be saved. I've called MS support one time and only did so after a lot of work...But finally, we had no choice. It was get the thing up or we're out of business. OK...We'll call Microsoft. They did suggest a lot of things we had already tried, but ultimately did help us. We had to pay something like $300 for the call, in addition to our enormous annual Microsofft budget, but we got it running.
My urge is to move everything to something else, but our CIO lives in the dark ages and won't listen to any suggestions that aren't Windows...Our two linux boxes function as load balancers for...IIS. They exist because our Win NT 4.0 balancers were choking and we didn't want to spend $25,000 on new Windows hardware to cover the same task. I weep because I know that the two balancers would serve the site better than the six win2k boxes which do the same job now. The Sun boxes were installed with the phone system. Same weekend, we put the Exchange 5.5 server in. You can guess which has gone down more times since.
Right now it is Exchange seven crashes, Sun ZERO. Not even a reboot in the last 12 months! And the last one was because of a wide-scale, longterm power failure that outlasted our UPS and generation capability.
Who did what now?
So I haven't really given you any answers, but I hope I've offered some good points to consider.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Actually Microsoft is still gaining share. Other Unixes are losing share. Get your facts straight.
In other words, you agree to pay money for each installation you make. That license also gives Red Hat the right to audit your "facilities and records" for a year, but that's another topic.
...responsible for several Redhat servers and workstations, I can tell you that we're beginning the process of switching to Debian.
Stable (if some of the software is a little outdated), easy to maintain and upgrade, no registration required to use apt (see how far you get on RHN without that), and far cheaper.
Ever looked at Mandrake ? It usually is rated better than RedHat on the desktop (and servers) these days, besides it is the closest to RedHat of all other distributions. And of course, if you're now willing to pay, just download the CDs and do it all by yourself.
As far as I remember, what was different about RHAS compared to normal Redhat is that the AS version supports Asynchronous I/O, which standard versions of Linux don't have.
Asynchronous I/O allows the Oracle server to hand off disk writes to the OS, without having to hang around to find out whether it wrote ok. If your OS doesn't support asynchronous I/O, you have to simulate it with I/O Slaves, which is much slower.We are looking at Linux at the Co. I work for with over 60K users.
My issue with RH is there per-seat license for "EVERYTHING".
They have a per-seat cost for support of the os then there is a cost to have an internal Eratta server and a per-seat cost for each machine that you want to get updates from the Eratta server...
We had RH and SuSE flyout to out World HeadQuarters and give us their presentation of who they are and what they have to offer
The biggest issue I have with RH is they are not completely Open-Source... By this I mean that we asked them "What if we choose RH and pay for everything we need for say 5 years, then we decide we don't like RH supporting us and we want to pay someone else or do it ourselves, What can we no longer use that RH makes?
They didn' tlike this question at all
Their answer was that we could not use Eratta for our updates. We would have to remove and destroy the code for eratta.
We asked SuSE the sam question and their answer was "You lose nothing. You can use 'EVERY' piece of software that SuSE makes and distributes on their Distro ... Forever no matter who supports you."
So for me and the company I work for, I don't want to get stuck with a particular vendor cause they say I can't use a "VERY IMPORTANT" part of the updating of systems especially supporting over 60K desktops.
It seems RH is trying to get some sort of "Lock-In" with their products instead of trying to win loarg companies with their "excelent" support.
I thought Linux was about "No Lock-in" and otal freedom?
JasonWe use RedHat Enterprise Linux ES or AS for machines that "need it" or for customers who request it. Machines that "need it" are typically those running ColdFusion and/or Oracle. We try to use FreeBSD for all other machines.
:)
As for RH's pricing, you can get an ES license for $350. That gets you access to RHN and a year of patches. The $700 (or whatever) option just gives you more phone support, the media, and some manuals. It wouldn't be very cost effective to purchase tons of those.
Patches come out super-fast for their Enterprise line of OS's, which is a real plus. Also, RHN makes patch management really easy if you register all your systems under the same RHN account (which we do). So, at a glance, you can see what machines need patches and which ones they need.
Another thing you get with their Enterprise stuff is a longer life-cycle. They are going to stop rolling out patches for the regular OS's after 1 year. Enterprise OS's get 5 years, but you have to renew your subscription to RHN yearly.
- G!mpy
Why would this make the GPL people mad? The GPL is about Free Speech, not Free Beer. Try calling debian's tech support line before you start complaining about this.