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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!
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.
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.
RedHat eventually added PostgreSQL 8.4 as an option for RHEL5, so it wouldn't be surprising to find that eventually they decide to make 9.0 (or 9.1) available for RHEL6. This really isn't as big of an issue as people think though. One of the PostgreSQL core team members is employed by RedHat, and the updated PostgreSQL packages available from their yum repo are extremely close to the RHEL builds. The same group of people is involved in the packaging and version updates, and the PostgreSQL yum repo is kept as current with security fixes as the RHEL releases of that same version are.
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!
In my not so humble opinion 389 is by far the best LDAP server. http://directory.fedoraproject.org/
389 is based on the old Netscape directory server (AKA NDS/IPlanet) code.
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.
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.
Often times they will not even update featuresets for certain packages at all, they will just backport any security fixes that come out. This is both good and bad, good because you don't have to worry about updates breaking anything, bad because you may not be able to use the latest and greatest software packages out there. Whether you should be using bleeding edge at all for "enterprise" is another debate altogether.
Monstar L
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.
In reality a 5 year old kernel may well not support the new hardware.
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!
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.
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.
16 or 128TB of ram, I would call those java ready platforms.
Got Code?
I call bullshit on Fran. I work with OEL and RHEL everyday at work. I have done a bunch of installs of RAC on both platforms over many years and support many clusters both in house and at customer sites. There is hardly a difference between the two distro's at all... the main difference is some tweaked entries in /etc/sysctl.conf and their "custom" kernel, which will more than likely turn out to be a tool they use to lock you in to their hardware/software stack even more. Oracle software itself isn't terrible, RAC is a nice, speedy database but as a company they're despicable. Before we made the giant, multi-billion dollar enterprise wide switch to OEL, they blamed any issue on RHEL even when RHEL support could prove it was Oracle's code that was fubar. Literally a day after the contract is signed... "oh yeah, there's a problem with our software code, it wasn't a RHEL problem after all... sorry about that, here's the fix". Even to this day with all their supposed hacking of their kernel and uber-custom sysctl.conf entry, they still blame every goddamn problem that we or a customer has on something else... hardware, network, the moons gravitational pull, etc... Their support is atrocious, filled with people who have no interest in actually fixing your problems and quite frankly are well... idiots. If I ever have a hand in any future business decisions for my current company or any other company I ever work for, I will always vehemently recommend against Oracle because their business model is a nasty mix of vendor hardware/software stack lock-in and extortion.
Fuck Oracle. At least RedHat appreciates your business, is uber-helpful if you do have a problem and really quick to fix things if you can prove to them through kernel dumps or some other means that the OS is having an issue.
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
Does this include the directory server that mac's and windows machines can work with ?
Windows machines have poor support for "directory servers" compared to most other OSs. If you mean an Active Directory replacement, no, because Windows machines expect that Active Directory has LDAP, Kerberos, CIFS, DNS and a few other services *all* running on the "directory server" (where other OSs allow these to be separated and/or scaled differently). If you need AD support with GPOs etc., you can consider trying samba4, but it's still in alpha (although some sites are running it in production). If you just need to authenticate Windows desktops, and don't need GPO-only features (but user/group policies are sufficient, if crufty), samba-3.5 as provided in RHEL6 may be sufficient.
The OpenLDAP included with RHEL6 is good enough for all other operating systems with support for "directory servers", including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris, AIX etc.
Of course, RH would prefer to sell you RHDS subscriptions ...
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