Debian et al: was re: Mandriva

[Collins Richey]

On 5/19/05, Net Llama! <netllama at linux-sxs.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2005, Collins Richey wrote:
> >
> > > >
> > > > Good or bad, Redhat provides excellent support to its large
> > > > customers.
> >
> > Good or bad is not the question. It the other large customers are
> > anything like my employer, RedRat doesn't do diddly past selling you a
> > license. This is not to knock their distro, although I'm not too
> > pleased about some of their choices. Dropping LVM in favor of a not
> > quite cooked LVM2. Few filesystem choices.  Etc.
> 
> Your employer can't be large if all you're getting is a sales drone.  I've
> personally seen RH do back flips (throwing dedicated engineers) for large
> customers when they have problems.
> 

Maybe I should be more specific. RedRat doesn't do diddly because we
don't need diddly after install. The licenses are there (as far as I
can tell) because the company wants someone to fall back on if we (2)
admins get run over by a truck. RedRat has a pretty reliable distro.
Even with ancient RH9 systems I've only seen one bug, and that was
because we had to move up to an RHEL3 kernel to handle newer hardware.
The bug was with RPM and well noted (workaround and permanent fix) in
the bugzilla. We took the workaround because we're planning to abandon
RH9 as soon as practical.

RHEL4 would be better, but there are some problems with
OpenLDAP/OpenSSL and the b^^^^^^s dropped LVM in favor of a crippled
LVM2 (maybe fixed in update 1). Since we rely on LVM file extends to
add extra drives, that one's a showstopper.

-- 
 Collins
       Head teachers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but 
       the Start button.