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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....
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.
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.
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
You're talking about the regular Red Hat stuff. Not the Enterprise stuff. Their current version is 2.1. 2.1 is solid.
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!
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.
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.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
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.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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!
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.