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Red Hat Releases RHEL 6
alphadogg writes "Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues."
RH6: software you can weigh...
Chrome will be up to version 783 (beta) in 10 years!
Does this include the directory server that mac's and windows machines can work with ?
Anyone know when we can expect CentOS 6?
At my workplace, Red Hat server licensing is pricier than Windows Server licensing. I'd love to move servers off Windows, but it'll be hard to justify if it costs more.
I tried CentOS about a year ago, and the big problem I ran into was that the OS had so few packages. I am a Debian user and I really like having over 20,000 packages in the official repositories. I rarely have to go somewhere else to download software.
Mailing list story is that "I believe that a beta will be available some time after the RHEL 6 production release.", http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2010-November/006005.html
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
CentOS usually releases 1 or 2 months after the RHEL release.
If you mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux, yes. I know that my last companies used them for their Linux machines. Red Hat has many customers some of them big names like Qualcomm and NTT Telecom.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Red Hat server licensing is pricier than Windows Server licensing.
At first, I guessed that it might have something to do with the common conception that one can run more things on a single Red Hat server than on a single Windows server. But a couple Google searches later, I found this Microsoft white paper claiming that Red Hat doesn't charge for client access licenses for RHEL.
According to ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ , the included version of PostgreSQL is 8.4.4. I know that PostgreSQL was released about a month ago and that this is an enterprise release subjet to more tests... but this new version has important features (Hot standby, Streaming replication) for a production environment.
Does anybody know if RH will update the PostgreSQL version as a manteinance package?
Now there's something they could trademark!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Yep. Feed the trolls.
It's about time they released RHEL 6, RHEL 5 has become outrageously crusty in the almost 4 years that it's been out now. Nevermind that it's a mediocre distro with virtually nothing packaged in the base repository, $dayjob forces a lot of people to use RHEL, and it'll be nice to have something that isn't quite so crusty.
Anyone know why RHEL 6 took so long? Previous major releases were 2 years or less apart from eachother, 4 years is a really long time...
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
RHEL provides a 7 year lifecycle, which is unmatched by the other major distributions I know about (even Debian). This is crucial for the enterprise; I know of a number of systems which are still running RHEL3 after 6-7 years. Upgrading production computers is not a trivial process, and 2-3 year lifecycles just don't cut it in some situations.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I distinctly remember when a lack of bloat was one of Linux's bragging points. What happened to Red Hat? Time was they were also once cheaper than the windows servers they lampooned.
You trust the server hardware after 6 years?
Rotating out hardware is essential, virtualization makes this far less of a chore.
CentOS is a server platform. You run databases and web servers on it. Don't put it on your desktop, that's not what it's for. The lack of desktop support is intentional, it allows them to focus on server performance and quality. My CentOS machines have less than 800 packages installed and they still feel bloated
Maybe you can run it on a desktop if you load it up with EPEL and rpmfusion, but at that point you are probably better off with something else.
... that Duke Nukem Forever would ship before RHEL 6! ;-)
But seriously, congratulations are due to all the Fedora and RedHat folks who made this happen. This opens the door to a modern package set for many, many organizations.
It's certainly not always the administrator's choice about whether hardware gets replaced. Besides, there's a long history of UNIX hardware being around forever (well over a decade, sometimes two).
On a personal note, I just retired my 12 year old P166 desktop which was functioning as a router/firewall. It had been running the same install of Debian, suitably upgraded, for 8 years. The only components I had to replace in those dozen years were the CPU and PS fans.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I have machines like that at home. I still use an old ultrasparc 5, but in production at work things are a little different.
Also, RHEL != UNIX
My ultrasparc running solaris 10 is UNIX. For the record, I prefer GNU/linux or what ever you want to call it. So much so that any solaris machine I touch gets the GNU tools installed.
Dammit, Sun Ultra 5 is the name of that thing. The CPU is an ultrasparc.
I even have it maxed out with 512MB of RAM, had to harvest 4 machines they were tossing out to do that.
How long before there is a new Oracle Linux based on RHEL6?
Laugh all you want, but their kernel is much more stable and solid than RHEL, and has better network performance too.
Finally. I've been running RHEL6 Beta on my new work laptop and was about to give up hope on this and literally was going to install Fedora 14 in the next few hours.
I will be installing Fedora 14 for my personal laptops (two down last weekend, two to go. We're a family of 4 kids, 2 adults).
But, instead I will be installed RHEL6 tonight for my work laptop and Friday for my work desktop (currently on Fedora 12, which is pretty much on par for the versioning as RHEL6). We've got spare EL licenses for server not yet deployed, so I'll use those until CentOS 6 ships. Once it does, I'll side-grade and free up the EL licenses.
Interesting, I've never heard of RHEL referred to as "RELL" as they do in this promo video: RHEL6 promo video
No official link given in the OP, but here's the Red Hat blog post, titled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform", which gives a good look at some of the changes.
The less-interesting press releases are here (Red Hat Enables Expanded Deployment Flexibility and Application Portability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) and here (Red Hat Sets a New Standard for the Next Generation of Operating Systems).
5 years is generally the limit I will push, since I can buy 5 year support contracts (and did with our most recent SAN purchase since year 4 and 5 can be outrageously expensive if bought after the fact) I feel I'm well enough protected. Also as you pointed out virtualization means that an OS install isn't tied to any particular box so it can live on well after the host has been retired. Since it generally takes 6-18 months to really get comfortable with a new OS, then 6-18 months to bring any new large scale project to production on it you're already up to 3 years into an OS's lifecycle before you have anything critical on it and add 5 years for hardware lifecycle and you are at 8 years, a year longer than RHEL's support lifecycle which is why the other major vendors offer 10 or 12 year support lifecycles.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"Upgrading production computers is not a trivial"
Correction: it is not trivial for unmaintained, closed source software. Upgrading maintained, open source software is a breeze, as any Debian user can attest.
You trust the server hardware after 6 years?
What does that have to do with the OS install? You just use dd to copy the file system to the new drive and your new hardware is up and running with no need to worry about getting the software config right.
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Having had a single Debian install for 8 years, I can attest that it works remarkably well, but it is not always a breeze. And over the course of 5+ years, there are major revisions to software like Apache which require new configuration. The backported security fixes in RHEL allow users to keep a very consistent system for a very long time.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I always wondered about that. What do you do in the enterprise? I would imagine the point of support is help relating to say installation and maintenance on included Sendmail, PostgreSQL, etc. But if you rip it out and install a new one from scratch, which is necessary because the packages are really really old, they can't or won't support it. What do admins do?
There has to be an answer, otherwise why would anyone in the entire industry use Linux?
HP is still supporting VMS on VAX and Alpha systems. Yes indeed there are VAX clusters out there, still working great after all these years.
They also still maintain and update Tru64 on Alpha systems.
Now THERE is long-term support for you.
It's not like MS Windows in that the machine owns the licence and not you, plus if you put the old hard disk into something with vaguely similar hardware it will run. The server might still be called psiduck but it may not have an original part from six years ago in it.
Plus I do have some six year old servers - they just are not doing anything important these days and have had the original disks swapped out. I've got a sixteen year old machine for specific jobs but it's only been on for a few hours this year. A newer one can do the same job (format 42" plots) but it does better text formatting.
This project I'm working on has the worst timing. The need this server (CentOS 5) up and running by the end of next week. I'd love to wait for CentOS 6, but it looks like that won't be possible. On a positive note, I suppose I get to test a 5 to 6 upgrade.
Now they provide 10-year lifecycle instead of 7. Though the last 3 years (year 8-10) is much more expensive. I've received quotes on that from resellers and decided to upgrade our EL3 installations anyways.
In reality a 5 year old kernel may well not support the new hardware.
You run new stuff if you need it without support, or old stuff if you have to have the support.
In reality Postgres has their own repo and you can buy support from them if you wanted.
Code doesn't always run on the same box.
If you have something in prod on a certified OS with a certified install environment, if the hardware dies you re-install the certified OS ecosystem on the new hardware.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
If you run commercially sourced software on linux and find a bug and try to get a fix the Indian guy on the phone (who cannot from his script without losing his job) will blame the OS for any problem unless you run on RHEL or whatever else is on the list. That's why I run it , and although I run other stuff as well I can honestly tell vendors that their software is fucked up on any platform because I've tested it on the one they recommend.
Most of the time I don't need anything new on the servers anyway.
Actually some of the commercial linux software is badly broken or effectively abandonware (flexlm from Macrovision is the most evil and pointless waste of time designed to punish the innocent) and will only work easily on something like RHEL that includes a pile of legacy libraries. It's a lot of mucking about to get another distro to do the same thing versus a fifteen minute or so install from local ftp.
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
10 years these days.
If the kernel was updated accordingly and the OS is still under support, that's not going to be an issue.
Naturally, you've checked the supported hardware list of the OS before purchasing it.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
I think if you break it you own it. I think the point the above poster is making is that if you are going to change something enough that you are going to be looking after it yourself then you may as well use something else.
There may be problems if somebody from a specific RHEL background takes it over instead of a more generalised *nix background, but most people will be exposed to at least a couple of other linux distros and hopefully solaris.
If the system hasn't broken after 3 years, what would you expect to go wrong in the next 4?
That's why some people pay extra for "Enterprise" hardware. Basically the vendor keeps old stock/parts around for years so they can fix/replace the old hardware.
:).
Then you can run your old software on it for years without rocking the boat.
Even if companies start virtualizing stuff, VMs might not work so well when your new virtualizing software doesn't provide the same virtual hardware. So you'd have to run old virtualizing software on new hardware
Some hackers might find security holes in the software you use (e.g. apache, bind, php etc).
Then if Redhat still supports it, you get your RPM updates from them.
Saves you the hassle of getting RedHat's SRPMs, backporting the patches, compiling, testing, fixing/working around any probs, rolling out the RPMs to your internal RPM updates repo.
My web server has been in production for 5 years now, no hardware failures at all. A Dell Poweredge machine. So yeah, having an OS on it that has at least a 5 year support period is pretty important.
Are you implying that the CentOS is just a copycat distro? What is their motivation or business model? Could somebody elaborate for people that know nothing about this?
>Also, RHEL != UNIX
Correct.
RHEL = Linux &
Linux = Unix thus
RHEL = Unix
Linux UNIX, however
Drat, bitten by the in plain text. Try 2:
>Also, RHEL != UNIX
Correct.
RHEL = Linux &
Linux = Unix thus
RHEL = Unix
Linux != UNIX, however
Alas, right now I'm moving many services from RHEL to Windows 2008 Server.
Why? Group Policy, and Volume Shadow Copy Service.
I cannot overstate the importance of Group Policy in simplifying the management of a client network. Especially when combined with Windows Software Update Services, it's been wonderful. I've been a Linux guy since forever, but I'm really being swayed against my will toward the Windows server stuff for managing Windows clients.
As for the Volume Shadow Copy Service - it's all well and good to have 10-minutely Bacula incrementals thoughout the day, but nothing beats near-zero-cost snapshots that automatically age out when space is exhausted and that are very space efficient because they're done at the file system level. No, LVM cannot do this, it's block level and thus wastes a lot of space snapshotting changes to "free" space etc. Additionally, snapshots must be mounted, and old snapshots age out rather ungracefully. I've had a server fail to boot because of a broken LVM snapshot multiple times, and it's a major piss-off. It can't touch versioned files in NTFS. Maybe BTRFS will be there in 5 years.
Truly, though, it's Samba's quirks/limitations, and the lack of Group Policy, that's driven me to drop Linux for managing Windows clients. This isn't surprising, as Microsoft doesn't want to make it easy to manage Windows clients with anything other than Windows servers, and while the Samba folks are doing a heroic job there's only so much they can do.
or are we supposed to hate Oracle more now? I haven't looked at the scorecard recently.
for people that know nothing about this
Not to worry; you're already on Slashdot.
The OS has also been future-proofed, in the view of the Red Hat executives. It can support up to 16 terabytes of working memory, even though no physical system could now actually run that much memory under a single server.
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/
"SGI Altix 4700 incorporates the shared-memory NUMAflex® architecture, which simplifies software development, workload management and system administration. It supports up to 1024 cores under one instance of Linux and as much as 128TB of globally shared memory."
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/uv/
"Altix® UV scales to extraordinary levels-up to 2,048 cores (256 sockets) with architectural support to 262,144 cores (32,768 sockets). Support for up to 16TB of global shared memory in a single system image, enables Altix UV to remain highly efficient at scale for applications ranging from in-memory databases, to a diverse set of data and compute-intensive HPC applications."
"This infrastructure is supported by a complete HPC solution stack running on industry standard Linux® operating systems with the choice of Novell® SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Advanced Server operating systems."
Someone didn't do his research before spouting off. This is odd considering he simply regurgitated the information Red Hat fed him. I guess the press guy at Red Hat didn't know they already had their OS running on 16TB capable SGI monsters?
it's like 8000 packages full of all your base jokes and infinite basic loops. These monkeys been chuggin too much Red Bull!
--hongpong.com
CentOS is based upon RHEL's open source codebase, which you can get from Red Hat's FTP server. it's really just a repackaged RHEL, without Red Hat's branding. The primary users are those who want the benefits of a proven, stable distro without having to pay a subscription.
Its biggest shortcomings, however, are the lack of support and that it can fall pretty far behind RHEL in terms of updates and patches, even critical ones.
AFAIK, you could get some services and support from the community itself and some small companies, but most of the time (and you'll see it repeated many times in their forums) they will tell you to buy a RHEL subscription if you really want professional support and timely patches.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
They do not have a business model. Its a group of redhat users who use the GNU freedom to view the source and strip the Redhat copyrights and recompile it. They do not even mention Redhat at all on their site. I believe there maybe a few non free components in RHEL like updates that they can not include but they include the Fedora Yum packagekit with mirrors to their servers for updates to fix that.
You get no support but it is RHEL for all intentions and purposes and it is way to use it.
http://saveie6.com/
It is also trivial for maintained, closed source software, and not trivial for unmaintained, open source software.
Whats your point?
Linux != unix though. So all findings from that assumption are wrong.
RHEL6 is so yesterday - Some of our systems are running Red Hat 9. Oh, wait ...
Its a group of redhat users who use the GNU freedom to view the source and strip the Redhat copyrights and recompile it. They do not even mention Redhat at all on their site.
IIRC the consistent reference to Red Hat as the "upstream provider" is at Red Hat's request (presumably to avoid any mistaken assumptions of support or approval).
What?!
Why wouldn't we? With the exception of hard drives and noew requirements, you shouldn't bother for some things.
Firewall? File server? LDAP? They don't need that much power.
True, it may be cheaper to replace, still, you may just wanna image the HD and replace it into the new machine.
how long until
It seems bizarre that someone would complain that an enterprise level OS has to version chase packages and is therefore "crusty". Remember that it's newer than Windows Serever 2003 and less than a year older than Windows Server 2008 and yet does anyone complain that either of those OS'es are "crusty"?! The poster also conveniently forgets:
* RHEL 5 is now on version 5.5 (March 2010) with a 5.6 release just gone into beta, so it's not like it hasn't moved on version-wise and isn't stuck on what was released 3.5 years ago (though - because of its enterprise nature - only minor updates tend to be applied).
* If you run the CentOS 5 equivalent, you can enable the "CentOS-testing" repo if you want even newer versions of packages - they won't be as stable though, but it will update packages like PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
* You can enable EPEL and third-party repos like RPMforge to get hold of packages that aren't in the core release.
* You can roll your own RPMs - I do this for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey for example to keep our CentOS desktops up to date (not needed on the server side of course).
We run CentOS 5 on both servers and desktops - it's really nice to have the same OS across all your equipment - CentOS is one of the few OS'es where you can pull this off. It can't be done in Windows or Mac OS X!
Don't forget about SLES, it has the similar support models. Maybe it's not as "cool" as Redhat but it is the only other enterprise Linux distribution (if you care for support contracts, OLA's and the like). And this is cool only because it is good to have choise (even between enterpri$e distro's) And to speak in favor of SLES, the latest version (11) is really cool and their newest release 11SP1 is even better. Most issues from the new release are worked out so I guess it is the most stable enterprise Linux distro in the kernel era: 2.6.32 (for enterprise that is)
In reality a 5 year old kernel may well not support the new hardware.
If you're actually running a five year-old kernel, you have another problem -- security. The point of RHEL's long-term support is that you get updates and fixes, but they don't break your apps.
In any case, for server-type hardware this is rarely an issue. Sometimes new network cards or disk controllers come out that an old kernel might not have support for, but it's usually very easy to either (a) avoid buying such hardware or (b) add the necessary drivers. Neither option should affect your application functionality.
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Thanks for the info.
Believe what you like. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, acts like a duck, then it is a duck. UNIX (all uppercase) is a trademark. Unix (not uppercase) is a concept.
I remember when we got our first Ultra 5 at SEI, with 256MB. I could not envision ever needing more than 512MB. Now that seems light for a handheld and I'm starting to run out of headroom in 4GB on my desktop.
I love progress, but I wish it were cheaper.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You use dd? I use tar, so I don't have to grow partitions.
Sometimes vendor tar fails this test, or did in the past, but gnu tar is a peach.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its biggest shortcomings, however, are the lack of support and that it can fall pretty far behind RHEL in terms of updates and patches, even critical ones.
Critical patches are usually out within hours, this is usually not a problem.
...can use a package database that is 3 years behind everything else, starting today.
Back in the bad old days when I was a ScumOS and Slowlaris sysadmin (better any amount of that than any amount of Windows of course, we had like four windows PCs and they were on corporate desktops) and all these package repositories simply didn't exist we used to actually build software. Then we got repos of GNU tools which we could use to build the other tools. And then those repos grew...
/usr/local is your good and personal friend. You only need to preserve one per operating system and architecture pair. Put them on nfs or similar and use an automounter to put the right one in place automatically, and build the same software for all your architectures.
Now you, too may have the benefits that we had back in the nineties, of having a stable operating system with a live and rotating pool of software atop it.
Perhaps what these long term support release operating systems could benefit from most is a return to the model of a repository of software added to the base, not replacing it. Disk space is cheap these days.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On a side note, RedHat is changing its RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) to RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator).
I just got an email this morning that they are retroactively giving me the RHCSA for my RHCT that I just received a few weeks ago.
The keyword being "usually".
There has been multiple incidents in the past year where updates have been missing for months not to speak of the fact that *NO* updates are released at all while they work on a new minor release.
Ie. CentOS 5 updates was on hold for a month or more while they worked on 5.5 in the mean time upstream released updates marked 'critical'.
CentOS is great, and I love CentOS very much. I run it on my own server and my laptop at home, even run it on quite a few internal servers at work.
But for internet facing systems and other "high risk" systems you should seriously consider using the Real Thing (tm).
So, forget their 'improvements'. How about 'fixes' - specifically, NFS (due to nfs-tools?)? All throughout 5.x, NFS performance has been atrocious - despite any attempts to tune it. We're talking a 5th of the throughput that should be realizable.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Guess what, many do. There are so many shops still running RHEL-3 and paying Red Hat extra money to support them in doing that:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/extended_lifecycle_support/
A bit of history... supposedly these guys were one of the founding members of CentOS so they could adapt it for use in Linux clusters.
http://www.caoslinux.org/
There were some other efforts to repackage RHEL according to their terms for redistribution, such as White Box Linux, but I think that one was run by librarians and eventually petered out.
Interesting to note that the CaOS people have started to migrate their newer Perceus development to Debian lately, though RHEL / CentOS is still supported.
Also, since CentOS aims to be binary identical to RHEL, a lot of shops tend to do all their development and testing on CentOS machines, then shell out for the full RHEL when they deliver to customers.
I use either dd or tar, depending on the situation.
dd is faster if the disk is close to full -- no seeking is required, so the copy runs at the maximum rate the system can sustain. Of course, if there's a lot of empty space dd wastes time copying unused bits, and if the partition structure is complex and the last partition isn't the one that needs to grow, then dd just won't work well.
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