production server

[Pedro Fernandes Macedo]

WipeOut wrote:

> -{snip}-
> Next I tried Debian.. The "Stable" version its too old and the 
> packages are outdated.. There are offspring sites that are providing 
> packages from the "unstable" branch to try and bring "stable" up to 
> date.., I moved on and tried the "unstable" version.. This installed 
> and has a much better installer but I could not see how to setup 
> software RAID during the install and I didn't have even the faintest 
> clue how to do it after the install so this was a problem, also I 
> wanted to used LVM so that would have been another issue all together..

This makes me remmember the problems we had some time ago.... We used 
debian everywhere , from desktops to servers.. then , someone hacked one 
of the labs available to the students , hacked our machine that was 
running snort ... luckly they didnt do much more...  When we started to 
analize the invasion, we came to conclude that debian was not the right 
choice for us... as an computer science college , we need to have good , 
stable and new software.. debian was giving us only stable and good 
(sometimes , only stable)... So we went for redhat 9 ....

> I looked at SuSE, its nice enough but it is really far more aimed at 
> the desktop area (something I think Fedora may also end up as!) than 
> at being a server.. Probably becasue they rae commercial as well so to 
> get a sever you have to buy a server, also there are no ISO's avalible 
> for the free version..

After the change of policy from RH , we had to find a new way... my boss 
decided to use Suse... And I have to tell you...  I still didnt accept 
this decision...
 From my personal experience with suse , it's good as long as you use 
yast to do everything.. if you try to do things your way , then you'll 
have a rough time... and also suse likes to do what it wants.. for 
example , it didnt add the default route.... there are also other issues 
, but I dont remmember them all now..

> 1) Redhat being in control of FC's destiny may force it down the path 
> of becoming a home user desktop more than a server platform because 
> they want people to buy RHEL which IMO is just way to expensive and we 
> just could not afford it.. The RHEL WS is more expensive then Windows 
> XP so I am not sure what they are going for there..

I dont think this may happen.. If the guys at redhat are smart enough , 
they'll realize that there'll be always people that will use fedora as 
servers... So I believe that they'll use fedora to test new things they 
want to put in their enterprise line , because they know we'll test it 
for them in a real production environment...
One thing I dont like is the prices on the RH products... It's not 
reasonable to pay $2691 (about R$7100) on   RHAS Premium or even $491 on 
RHEL workstation.  Considering that the kind of pcs we use as servers 
cost around $1600 , it's not reasonable to pay so much for a distro... 
Specially considering that we have a very thight budget....


Pedro Macedo