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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."
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?
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.