server questions

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, May 12, 2011, John Voigt wrote:
>On Thursday, May 12, 2011, Andrew Gould spake unto the assembled:
>
><opinion>
>
>> Are Ubuntu or OpenSUSE easy to administer from the command line
>> without breaking the installed system configuration tools (yast, etc)?
>
>I've not used Ubuntu (yet), but certainly you can use OpenSUSE from the 
>command line without many troubles. After the demise of Caldera, I changed 
>to SuSE, as a lot of the Caldera engineers went to SuSE.

Like many on this list, I went from Caldera to SuSE Linux Enterprise, and
we were in the Novell "Partner" program for a while.  Unfortunately the
support from Novell was basically non-existent even though we were paying
them a fair amount of money, and their on-line updates were not always
useable.

We moved to CentOS about five years ago, and I've been very happy with it.
The centos mailing list has been quite helpful, on line updates have always
worked for us (we stay very vanilla so avoid problems with non-standard
things), and I don't remember any botched updates.  The CentOS distribution
updates trail RHEL by a bit as the CentOS team makes sure everything
actually works.

Command line maintenance is good, either using yum and the system-config-*
scripts, or simply editing files as $DEITY intended.

I am prejudiced towards RPM based systems, having been using them since the
mid '90s, and am very accustomed to developing and deploying RPM packages.

All the server software and our own maintenance tools are built under the
OpenPKG portable package management system (RPM based), and we don't use
many of the distribution's servers.  This allows us to use the most recent
versions necessary without waiting for the distribution to catch up.

On the other hand, I'm prejudiced against the gnu/religion that seems
prevalent in the debian/ubuntu world.

Bill
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