[ILUG] Flameware material : Fedora

[Dave O Connor]

Bryan O'Donoghue said on Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 02:25:50PM +0000:
> I'd be interested to hear some advice from houses with lots of Red Hat
> systems in operation... are you going with Fedora, (another Red Hat
> flavour), chucking Linux for *BSD (if so... what sort of upgrade plan do
> you think works well?), or using Debian. Basically what is the
> consensus?
> 
Personally, from what I've seen and heard of Fedora, I wouldn't put it on the
seat of me bike, let alone a production server. What we arrived at in my place
is that Fedora is nothing near a mature system, whereas RHEL was. And, in
general, RHEL has worked out okay so far (since we run mainly cluster systems,
we're going with WS, which works fine for most everything. The only thing we
need ES for is Oracle). In general, I'd be very reluctant to go with AS for
any reason, unless it was absolutely compelling. The thing with EL (and why I
think it's a good thing!) is that Redhat has moved on from being an OS you
need to hire a person to look after, to being an OS a person who'd not know
'in-depth' what a linux system is all about, and who can call support for a
problem. Not necessary a good thing in everyone's book, but there you go.

(For the uninitiated, WS costs 180e, ES costs 280e, and AS costs a grand or
something. Chack out redhat.com)

I wouldn't give much stock to the idea of people abandoning it in favour of
windows for cost-related purposes. Any manager will tell you that the initial
cost of the OS doesn't even come into things if you're talking about a large
installation. I wouldn't worry about your linux systes being thrown out for
windows because windows licenses are a little cheaper from the outset. Chances
are, folk will go with the right tool for the job. (And yes, sometimes that's
windows).

>From my experience, if commercial support is the silver bullet of the
decision, then EL is the only thing out there anyway? (Correct me if I'm
wrong).

	- DoC