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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."
I was under the impression you had to buy a support-license to be able to use RH Enterprise?
Have I been smoking something, or is there another explanation for this?
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.
It says "LVM first surfaced in the 8.0 release of Red Hat Linux", but I'm using it under RH7.3, so....
Well, this review has no screenshots at all for the Bluecurve or anything else! The review didn't also evanglize KDE over Gnome or vice versa!! Now that's rare Anyhow, We demand screenshots!
Does anyone know if ACLs are included in the Red Hat 10 Severn beta or is it strictly for Enterprise?
That's not a review. That's just a list of features copied from the README file or something.
And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?
ACLs have been in SuSEs Enterprise Server since end of last year, so they are barely news.
We are currently looking at 2.1 vs SuSe enterprise for an upcoming application so I though this would be worth a read, not. Looks like a local review is in order.
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.
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 ?
MP3 Search Engine
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..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Taroon.. Hmmm... Taroon.. Aha!!!11
...i'm not cray.. i'm not crazy... *sits in corner twitching*
If you reverse Taroon you get "Noorat", Right?
Okay, now... tihs is clearly ROT-14 encoded so decoding it you get "Zaadmf" uhuh? stay with me here... Now reversing that gives "Fmdaaz" Yes? Good...
Now... md clearly stands for "Must Die" and F is clearing code for "SCO". (or "Fuckers" if you prefer) Finally I have also uncovered through unrevealed sources at Red Hat that "aaz" is special inhouse code for "(sponsored by IBM)."
So Taroon is actually code for.....:
"SCO must die! (sponsored by IBM)"
DARL WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!!11!!!11
. Red Hat officials said they plan to ship RHEL 3.0 in October. As with Version 2.1, the new release will come in workstation, departmental server and data center server versions, with the high-end version priced at about $2,500.
Ummm who thinks this is a little expensive even for big organisations? Also..
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!!!
You have to pay for support even if you don't need it on a development server:
- 1.html
4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System.
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2
You have to abide by the above agreement if you buy a server. So this means if you install it on additional servers, you have to buy support even if you don't need support for a development box.
That sucks. This is even ok with GPL
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.
For anyone who's interested...
.so's are threaded, and they're running better, too.
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
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.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
CON: Distribution channel for vital, for-cost add-ons such as Java virtual machine and Flash Player remains unclear; on the desktop, lacks range of application availability enjoyed by Windows.
Please correct me if im wrong but the Red Hat Enterprise releases are ment to be used in the server environments, I couldnt see but a very few cases were a workstation might need an enterprise version.
Assumming im correct its statements like this that really get to me --
CON: Distribution channel for vital, for-cost add-ons such as Java virtual machine and Flash Player remains unclear; on the desktop, lacks range of application availability enjoyed by Windows.
As a server it dosnt NEED this range of application, i would wager that if theres some kind of strange deamon you need that linux dosnt have available, windows definatly wont have one available.
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.
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.
.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.
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
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.
Noone said you should. This is being released so that people can install it on test machines, put their software on it, see if/how it works and report bugs back so they can be fixed before the final release. I doubt RH would sell you a copy of the beta even if you asked them too.
Aren't the file systems long out of the beta stage? It's not like their using newfs0.0.1b to format the disks. I'm sure that a *huge* portion of the OS, is in the "it's been stable for years" end of the spectrum.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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).
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.
Let's assume that you want to eliminate ACLs but still need to implement fine-grained access control (like, you want to give Ann access to payroll records, but not to bank records, while giving Barry access to the bank records but keeping him out of the payroll.) You can do it in Linux without using ACLs: you simply set up a bunch of groups for things like 'payroll' and put Ann in payroll, but not Barry, etc. If you want to make it finer-grained, you could give Ann access to payroll for hourly and Amy could have access to payroll for exempt -- you now need groups 'payroll-hourly' and 'payroll-exempt'.
Pretty quick, you have something like
in which every file has with it a group, and each group has the name of the user permitted access. In fact, since it's usually a few people, not just one, who has access, you will end up with a list of people who have controlled access.And all without access control lists. Except for the lists of people who are allowed access.
What an advantage!
ES is not included in the beta but will be in the final release.
But I'd trust my data on a beta OS before trusting the worm infested nightmare unleashed by some multi-billion dollar software company. It's a matter of perspective, but the order goes like this:
- Alpha - We know it's got problems, but the concept seems sound
- Beta - If it has any problems, we haven't been able to find them.
- Commercial/Final/Stable - We can't find any problems, and neither could our beta testers, so it must be your fault.
Many times, beta passes directly into the third stage without modification, but it's a crap-shoot no matter who you trust.On our campus, Red Hat is the most common Linux distribution in use. Hardware is currently being certified to run it as a production platform within the main data center.
However, everything has been roiled by their pricing and End Of Life announcement to the point that an exit strategy is being crafted.
The problem is the 1 year End Of Life for desktop products. Production systems cannot be built on a platform that will lose support within a year -- it takes 4 months just to certify that the build is good, leaving only 8 months of production. Turning over the OS every year is a non-starter.
The $2,500 price tag is also a non-starter. The data center is manned by UNIX professionals, several with RHCE certifications. Yes they need support, but they don't need $2,500 of support for every machine. The entire Solaris support contract for the data center covering dozens of machines, running "free" Solaris, is $3,000.
The allied agency, NCSA, has already abandoned Red Hat because they couldn't get a reasonable price for their Beauwolf cluster.
The problem is exemplified by one UNIX group that supports Departmental and Faculty machines on a contract basis. Red hat has been, and is, the most installed version. However, this customer base won't install $400 to $2,500 Red Hat to get the longer support life-time, they'll only go for the free/cheaper version with a 1 year EOL. The problem is Departments and Faculty also don't want their machines turning over every year (worse than Microsoft). To ameliorate this problem for the short-term, this group is getting ready to take over creating security patches (i.e., making RPM's) for 2 years after the official EOL for desktop versions. This will allow them to service existing and new customers. To solve this problem for the long-term, this support group is actively working to find another distribution that can offer a better EOL and pricing point. Currently, SUSE, with all of it's weaknesses, is the favorite candidate. This Fall, the group plans to learn SUSE, then shift the Linux Administrators course they teach from Red Hat to another distribution (possibly SUSE).
Unless Red Hat realizes they need to site license to Educational institutions, this will be the year they lose most of the Educational market. They'll still have a few contracts here and there for data center installs, but the vast masses (Computer Science Departments, etc.) will be encouraged to move to another distribution that can be supported for a reasonable cost.
Two years from now, unless Red Hat wakes up, they won't have significant penetration in the Educational market.
Folks aren't necessarily asking for "free," but they are asking for some reality in pricing. Currently, Red Hat turns a deaf ear to any criticism that their pricing structure is not appropriate. They can can continue to turn a deaf ear, but soon they'll find no one is bugging them anymore because we'll all be running another distribution.