Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed

viewstyle writes "eWEEK has got a review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Beta, code named Taroon. It now has the new Red Hat Bluecurve interface. New important stuff includes: logical volume management and access control lists in the file system. The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time. If you're interested, you can download it here."

Comments

Call that a review?

[kiltedtaco]

That was just a general list of features! Does anything there actualy even suggest that the author actualy installed the OS?

This is about as newsworthy as the "Top universities" thing.

Re:Call that a review?

[jbottero]

From the second paragraph: "The beta we tested, code-named Taroon..."

And later: "During tests, we were pleased with the feature's usability."

Sounds like they installed it...

LVM: article is wrong

[menscher]

It says "LVM first surfaced in the 8.0 release of Red Hat Linux", but I'm using it under RH7.3, so....

Re:LVM: article is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a little misleading, but not outright wrong. LVM was indeed included in RH7.3 (disc2), but I'm not sure if it was available during the install process.

Re:LVM: article is wrong

[justsomebody]

If I read it correctly, LVM was present in 7.3, but 8.0 was the first version that introduced autodetecting of LVM volume in booting up

In 7.3 you had to edit rc.local and add commands to scan volumes, 8.0 contains

# LVM initialization
if [ -f /etc/lvmtab -a ! -e /proc/lvm ] ; then
modprobe lvm-mod >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
if [ -e /proc/lvm -a -x /sbin/vgchange -a -f /etc/lvmtab ]; then
action $"Setting up Logical Volume Management:" /sbin/vgscan && /sbin/vgchange -a y
fi

in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, that's difference as much as I see it

ACLs already in SuSE ...

[Marcus Meissner]

ACLs have been in SuSEs Enterprise Server since end of last year, so they are barely news.

ACLs

[Plix]

The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time.

FreeBSD has had ACLs (in the 5.x branch) for some time as well.

fair warning

[jacquesm]

RedHats early stuff is not ready for prime time, usually that takes until the .2 release, so don't install this on anything mission critical (as in it's your living or someone will get mad at you if it fails).

Are you on the grapevine yet ?

Re:fair warning

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking about the regular Red Hat stuff. Not the Enterprise stuff. Their current version is 2.1. 2.1 is solid.

Re:fair warning

[Nighttime]

That was the general rule of thumb for the regular RedHat releases but this is the Enterprise edition we're/they're talking about. Besides, RH8 and RH9 have proven themselves to be fairly resiliant.

Eclipse + no JVM

[maharg]

Taroon ships with version 2.1 of the open source Eclipse Development Environment. Eclipse requires a Java virtual machine to run, but Taroon doesn't ship with one.

Huh ? Eclipse + no JVM seems a bit pointless IMO..
Eclipse is a cool IDE tho, and it saves a download..

Re:Eclipse + no JVM

[chill]

I had this discussion with the reviewer via e-mail earlier today. The website (http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2-1.html) mentions that the IBM JDK is delivered with the product. [Read it again Jason, it *does* refer to WS as well as EA and AS.]

However, it seems it wasn't either included or installed with the reviewer's beta. Hopefully, this will be fixed before the actual release.

Re:Eclipse + no JVM

[rkz]

Eclipse no longer needs a JVM to run.
They are using the GTK version.

I've been using this for a couple weeks.

[j1mmy]

Stable enough, though pretty haphazardly put together, even for a beta release. The distro is missing stuff like postgresql's server and pine. You can build these from source rpms or download them from up2date, but they're not available as binary rpms anywhere on redhat's ftp. Other than that, it seems to be pretty solid on my dual opterons.

Re:I've been using this for a couple weeks.

[fo0bar]

[Pine's] not free software, so RedHat won't ship it.

Close, but the reason is this: Red Hat CANNOT ship pine, techically. This is because Red Hat includes its own patches in nearly every RPM it releases. (This is usually to fix a bug in hardware X with glibc Y that only occurs Z minutes each year... you get the idea.) While Pine's license allows for the creation of patches against the product, it does not allow for distributing patches binaries, without prior approval from UofW. Whether those patches are available to the end user is irrelevant, Pine's authors don't like "modified" binaries to be released.

Of course, source-based ports systems like Gentoo or *BSD are fine, due to their nature, but distros like Red Hat don't want to go through the hoops involved with Pine, so they just choose not to.

RHAS 3.0 Beta and Oracle 9iR2

[MmmmAqua]

For anyone who's interested...

I run Oracle 9iR2 on RHAS 2.1 machines at my work. Generally, I have been very happy overall with the performance and stability of Oracle on Linux (though, for home use, certainly not - Oracle costs an arm, a leg, and both of their respective prosthetic replacements). There are a couple of things that RHAS 3.0 does much better than 2.1 (that I've noticed, and these only relate to Oracle on Linux, so this may be completely irrelevant to you). All tests were done on a Dell PowerEdge 2650, dual 2.8Gz Xeon, 6GB RAM, a PERC3Di RAID controller driving a five-disk RAID 5, and dual gigabit ethernet controllers.

First, the inclusion of the hyperthreaded scheduler. I run dual Xeon machines, and enabling HT on the 3.0 beta allowed the machine to handle 10-12% more load than with HT disabled. Enabling HT on 2.1 incurred a performance penalty, as the scheduler would tend to starve one CPU.

Second, you can now use bigpages with a shmfs large SGA (SGA > 1.7Gb). My production servers have a 3Gb SGA, and using 4kb pages is painful. I don't know what the problem was with 2.1, but this is a big fix for me, as it means I don't have to lower the mapped base address for all of my Oracle binaries anymore. Woohoo!

Third, LVM is nice. You can use LVM with 2.1, with a little doing, but in general it is a pain. Being able to create volumes at boot time is nice, and then later on, when I decide to hang a PowerVault enclosure off the PowerEdge, being able to just toss that large pool of extra storage into the volume is nice, too.

Lastly, if you are using Java in your Oracle database at all, then you will see a big benefit from NPTL. At least, I am assuming it's NPTL, but my Java stored procedures which spawn threads to parallelize some heavy lifting are executing much faster. I'm probably jumping to the wrong conclusion, but I don't care. Some of my extproc .so's are threaded, and they're running better, too.

I don't really care about Bluecurve, because I never use X on the Oracle servers. The only reason X is installed is because Oracle has no command-line installer anymore, so I have to do a remote X session for the installs. That's Oracle's fault, though, so no digs on Red Hat for that. I also really, really wish that Red Hat would include some more filesystems. Ext3 is okay, but for larger database files, I would much rather be using XFS.

All in all, I think RHAS 3 beta is a significant step forward for Red Hat, at least for Oracle users. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the hanic (High-Availability NIC) daemon from Oracle runs better on 3.0 beta than 2.1. It's cool to be able to yank one of the ethernet cables out of your machine during heavy traffic and have everything keep running.

Useless Review....

[ElGuapoGolf]

This is not so much a review as a rehash of the feature list. I don't care about bluecureve or the wonderful interface on an advanced server product.

As they're not shipping a JDK with it, it's hard to know if their kernel modifications will break whatever JDK they do ship with (like the last RHAS did). Or if they only let you install to ext3, unless you feel like playing with command line install options.

That java thing was a horrible mess, and was why we ultimately went with SuSE. Don't bill yourself as an OS for running those java application servers unless you test. Hopefully RH has fixed their issues this time around.

Logical Volume Management

[Yonder Way]

It's been shameful that RHEL customers have had to do without official LVM support while the retail users have had it for some time.

I'm using it presently on RH 9 and found that Red Hat's implementation of LVM prevents snapshots from working properly. That is, you can create a logical snapshot, but you can't mount it. I downloaded the latest kernel source from kernel.org, copied the .config file over from the RH kernel, but didn't apply the Red Hat patches. Not only does the system work precisely as expected, but LVM snapshotting actually works just fine. I'm now able to properly back up my desktop machine.

That Red Hat has known about this problem for ages and neglected to fix it is shameful. LVM should have been a priority all along for RHEL.

Re:Logical Volume Management

[Oggust]

Well, as I see it, the two main advantages for running at home is:

One. You don't have to allocate your storage at install-time. I always screw up and make some filesystem too small, and end up wth a maze of symlinks after a while. With LVM, just make some volumes, add enough space to install and then some, and grow them as you need more space.

Two. One day, you're going to run out of space on your disk. So you buy more. For old-style installs, moving all the data around is a problem, but with LVM you just add the new disk, tell the system to use it for Physical Partitions, and grow your old volumes.

And if you have hot-swap disks and a growable filesystem, you don't even need any downtime! (Note: RH9 does not support growing ext3 filesystems online, so you need to umount the volume to grow it.)

Also, I like to tell it to allocate some of the volumes (the ones I really care about) on both disks, so they get mirrored.

/August.

Re:Logical Volume Management

[random_static]

maintainability. granted it's not as big a deal as it is with production servers, but with your home system, you probably don't want to spend any time dicking around maintaining it if you don't really have to, do you? there's beer to drink and late shows to watch, after all - i know that's what i'd rather be doing...

as a home user, you're probably not finding yourself having to expand suddenly-too-small filesystems very often. (although if you are, you want LVM.) but you might occasionally find yourself wanting to move all your filesystems over to that brand-spanking-new harddisk you bought, no? easy enough with LVM, just migrate the LVs to the newly-added PV, then delete the old one.

snapshots might be useful, too, if you do backups like we all really ought to. no worries about files changing on you in the middle of the backup process when you're backing up a static snapshot.

my only gripe with LVM: if you've got a configured and running "regular" setup with (say) three or four partitions, and migrate it the "easy" way to LVM, you'll be left with three or four unused partitions "in front" of your LVM PV, and deleting them is a minor PITA because your next boot is gonna choke on the VG activation so you'll have to fix it by hand. that's life for ya, i guess, i'm just hoping the device mapper in 2.6-to-be is gonna fix that...

Re:Logical Volume Management

[_|()|\|]

explain to me the benefit of LVM to a home user

LVM makes it practical to use separate file systems, and it supports snapshots. Since you've already got a separate /home file system, you may not want to bother migrating to LVM until your next full install.

Before LVM, I would just make /boot and / for maximum flexibility. With LVM, I can make /boot, /, /home, /opt, /var, /tmp, /usr, and /usr/local.

• /usr and /boot are mounted ro
• /var and /tmp are mounted noatime
• everything but / is mounted nodev
• everything but / and /usr (and possibly /opt and /usr/local) are mounted nosuid, for what it's worth

If one of the file systems gets too full, I can resize it. Ext3 has a nice tool called e2fsadm, but without on-line resize you may have to drop to single-user mode. XFS and JFS support on-line resize, I think, but can only grow. ReiserFS supports on-line resize (although the journal is a bit big for /tmp and /boot).

Snapshots make backups easier. It's not a cure all, but it beats backing up an active file system. Unfortunately, Red Hat has scarcely acknowledged a critical snapshot bug. To get a clean snapshot, you need to temporarily lock the file system. Red Hat's LVM doesn't do this, so you can't mount the snapshot. (Snapshots are read only, so you can't replay the journal when the snapshot is dirty.) You may be able to dump or dd the snapshot, but you can't mount it to use tar or cpio.

LVM makes me a little nervous, because it's one more thing that can go (and has gone) wrong. All in all, though, I'd hate to do without it.

Re:Its things like this....

[MmmmAqua]

Well, RHAS is pitched to enterprise applications, and one of the biggest enterprise applications is Oracle. You are supposed to have installed both Sun's 1.3.1 JVM, and Blackdown's 1.1.8 JRE on RHAS machines which are intended to run 9i.

So, at least as far as a JVM goes, the author has a valid bitch.

Re:Doo?

[chill]

No, the software is all FOSS. You just don't get support for it.

Also, don't go buying one copy, installing 10 and wanting support for 10 on the price of 1. THAT is a no-no.

"The term "Services" as used in this Agreement means, collectively, the Support Services and RHEN, each as defined herein."

On the other hand, if you install 100 copies and later want tech support for just one then you must buy tech support for all 100 before you get help. :-)

Re:ACLs in Linux is new?

[buchanmilne]

Just not a lot of demand, since the standard unix ownership/permissions bits work fine for 99.99% of the imaginable needed scenarios.

I don't quite agree, unless you think that group permissions and a limit of 32 groups total, and 15 over NFS is enough to have sufficiently fine-grained access controls. We don't, so we have been running Mandrake on XFS for 2 years.

Looks like the vendors finally decided to add it officially to satisfy bureaucratic checklists.

s/vendors/Red Hat/

SuSE and Mandrake have shipped supporting ACLs in an increasing number of filesystems for thier past 3-4 general releases (Mandrake for 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, kernel update for 8.1 supports ACLs).

Doesn't look compatible

[etymxris]

From the GPL FAQ:

Does the GPL allow me to require that anyone who receives the software must pay me a fee and/or notify me?

No. In fact, a requirement like that would make the program non-free. If people have to pay when they get a copy of a program, or if they have to notify anyone in particular, then the program is not free. See the definition of free software.

The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits people to use and even redistribute the software without being required to pay anyone a fee for doing so.

So if customers of Red Hat are not allowed to redistribute the GPL portions of ES to either themselves (additional servers) or others without additional restrictions, then Red Hat is violating the GPL.

Basically, it seems that Red Hat is selling their ES software only if it is coincident with a support contract. That is fine. But to restrict in any way redistribution of the software is not allowed. So the support contract cannot say anything about "additional servers", if it is to be compatible with the GPL. Of course, if the support contract was not tied to the distribution of ES, then I think it would be fine, since they would not be sold as a single product.

Re:The review

[justsomebody]

Yeah, right. And then you'll probably ask for a review how good is RH Advanced Server for desktop.

Just like people were reviewing M$ Server 2003

Server is SERVER, but if you expect some fancy tools, you're wrong. Differences between RH AS and Desktop are mainly for what purpose it was compiled together, and for what services, oh yes and RH AS 2.1 has Java server.

Re:duh look at the price

[stoolpigeon]

No - I work at a small business. My boss priced a low end dell server (like $6k) - then he had to pay the license for win2k and SQL server- I think it ran somewhere around $10k- four thousand dollars more than the server.

We went with PostgreSQL on Red Hat. It doesn't do everything SQL Server does out of the box- but we didn't need everything SQL server does. $25,000 is peanuts.

Re:ACLs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know but I assume so since the betas for 8 and 9 included it (removed due to "stability problems").

Re:WS, AS.. hey where's ES?

[Wesley Felter]

ES is not included in the beta but will be in the final release.

Re:Doo?

[chill]

I believe the GPL only requires that the sources be available on request. I saw the sources (SRPMs) for the ia64 version of 2.1 AW at ftp.redhat.com.

Red Hat doesn't have to make binaries available for download.

However, if you have an RHN account, you can get priority access to most files (200+ Kbps download speed as opposed to 30 Kbps from ftp.redhat.com). Right now I see the following available:

RHL 6.2 Normal, Power Tools and Enterprise Edition
RHL 7.0 Normal, Power Tools
RHL 7.1 Normal, Power Tools
RHL 7.2 Normal, K-12 LTSP
RHL 7.3 Normal, K-12 LTSP, Educational Software
RHL 8.0 Normal, K-12 LTSP
RHL 9 Normal, K-12 LTSP

RHL 9.0.93 Beta Normal
RHL Enterprise 3 AS Beta 1 & Updates
RHL Enterprise 3 WS Beta 1 & Updates

Most, if not all, seem to be there as .RPM, .SRPM and .ISO images.

By looking at "all channels", I also see versions of most of the above for SPARC, Alpha, ia64, pSeries, zSeries, S/390 and the newer ones for x86_64.

2.1AS for i386 is available at:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterpr ise/2 .1AS/en/os/i386/SRPMS

2.1AS for ia64 is available at:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterpr ise/2 .1AS/en/os/ia64/SRPMS

2.1AW (for ia64) is available at:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterpr ise/2 .1AW/en/os/ia64/SRPMS

However, 2.1ES doesn't seem to have SRPMs online, nor does 2.1WS (i386). Hmmm....you can send a request to RedHat.

But, if you're looking to eval WS then I suggest 3.0 (based off of RHL 9) and not 2.1 (based off of RHL 7.3). Download yourself some beta .isos. If you can't do that, let me know and I'll burn you a set an send them out. I just d/led binary disks 1,2 & 3 off of RHN.