Red Hat EL 4.0 Released

diegocgteleline.es writes "As it has been noticed by some news sites, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 has been released. RedHat's web site doesn't seem to have any reference, but with Red Hat being probably the most used distro in the enterprise and featuring for first time a 2.6 kernel, this is a major milestone for linux in the server arena. There're already some reviews."

Comments

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[Meetch]

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion.) If you're building your own box for your own purposes, and expect to be able to fix things yourself based on google/forums/friends, then don't go RedHat. It's too limited in scope for that. FC gets good support from their development framework, but again you don't need it. From what I see on a daily basis, RedHat's big plus is it's heavily certified with Oracle (and I'm not sure what else, because that really doesn't concern me in my work). There's only a few distros that have this support advantage, and RedHat was one of the first there. I'm fond of SuSE myself, but we can't justify going that way with the local support we can get if we have to.

As for making the jump from EL3 to EL4, well the main reasons IMHO are to dump all the backported patches made since EL3's inception first, going with packages a little less off-the-beaten-track, and then a few updates of things that help the job for frustrated admins. Little things like installing on logical volumes at the outset (long overdue!) and the nature of LVM 2, which allows taking multiple read-writable snapshots of any logical volume, and if lvcreate's usage is to believed, at some point we will be able to take snapshots of snapshots.

By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for. I like having a filesystem that genuinely allows for atomic disk transactions without any noticeable performance hit. But as has already been stated, RedHat aren't interested in supporting it. It's a real shame, but something we have to live with for now.

Just to head off the kiddies....

[menscher]

Every time any /. article mentions RedHat, we get a bunch of kiddies attacking it. So, I propose a new rule: before attacking RHEL, please consider a few points:

• Do you have 5+ years of sysadmin experience?
• Do you have 100+ users?
• Do you have 10+ machines?
• Do you have to support enterprise applications?

Seriously, if you can't answer "yes" to all four questions, perhaps you should just keep your opinions to yourselves. The other distros are great for your mommy's basement, but in the enterprise, there are serious support/stability issues to consider.

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[sbennett]

By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for. I like having a filesystem that genuinely allows for atomic disk transactions without any noticeable performance hit. But as has already been stated, RedHat aren't interested in supporting it. It's a real shame, but something we have to live with for now.

And they're not supporting it for good reason-- its extended attribute implementation is horrifically broken, and so it won't even mount on an SELinux system. IMHO (and a great many people share the same view), the increased security from SELinux is more important than the slight speed gain, especially at the expense of much higher CPU usage.