Re: RHEL 4 DVD ?

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage peaknet net>]

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 13:32 -0500, Joshua Jensen wrote:
> Yes, we've seen these scripts flying around.... my question was why
> isn't a DVD image officially produced by Red Hat?

Joshua,

I can think of three good reasons:

1. Disk space at RHN is not a trivial matter. Using soft links you can
populate separate download directories for each variant (WS/ES/AS) in
less than 10GB of disk space (only binary CD#1 is different in each).
Every update release needs an additional 10GB. Official DVD images would
consume another 13GB for each update, yet add no new content. Remember
that everything has to remain on-line for five years.

2. An official DVD image would be a nice to have, but there are many
proven installation alternatives (hard drive, NFS, ...) that don't
require you to burn and jam individual CDs, and those methods offer
essentially the same functionality and speed as an install from DVD.

3. If I want or need a DVD, I can use Chris Kloiber's mkdvdiso.sh script
to build an image a lot quicker than downloading even the smallest CD#1
image -- let alone a 4.2GB behemoth!

-- Doc
Robert G. (Doc) Savage, BSE(EE), CISSP, RHCE | Fairview Heights, IL
RHEL3/ESu4 on Tyan S2468UGN w/3G, dual Athlon MP 2800+, 1.1T RAID5
"Perfection is the enemy of good enough."
                         -- Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov