Journal Nidhogg's Journal: Dilemma 17
Alright gurus I have a little dilemma.
We need a server at each of our branches (I work for a Caterpillar dealer with 8 remote branches by the way) so we've decided after talking to another dealer to go with Dell servers with Red Hat Pro pre-installed.
The decision to go with Linux was based on a few things.
1. These are remote branches. I don't want to have to drive 120 miles just to reboot a forkin' box.
2. Stability. Enough said.
3. I don't want to have to give these things a great deal of attention like I have to do to the Windows farm. According to Cat all I need to do is install the application, set up a Samba share, make a DNS entry for each box according to the branch and I'm done. I'm willing to take their word on this but if it turns out to be true then it'll be the first time they've been right about pretty much... anything.
So anyways the dilemma.
I don't know a damned thing about RH. Nothing.
I've been a Slackware guy since the 3.x days. And I say a Slackware guy but really my experience with it has been to install it, configure it how I want, and then leave it alone with the exception of security patches that Volkerding releases. I'm not the kind of guy that sits and tweaks a box for weeks on end just to get some small percentage of performance increase out of it. My last Slackware box had an uptime of 19 months before some suicidal squirrel fried itself on a pole transformer.
And that's what I'm looking for. I know Slackware can do it but I don't know about RH never having tried it.
But I don't want to condemn RH Pro and remove it simply because I'm not familiar with it. There may be advantages to it that I'm not aware of and I'll lose those plus waste a lot of time changing distro's when I don't need to.
Opinions?
Well... (Score:2)
I guarantee you you'll be able to do everything you mentioned. Simply cd
Re:Well... (Score:2)
I don't doubt that RH can do it but I'm more than a little concerned about what's going to be running on it out of the box. Telnet for one like you mentioned.
Which is why I like Slackware's minimalist nature. I know how to install only what I want with it. I don't know how to do it with RH.
Thanks again.
Some good friends... (Score:2)
Sorry if I'm missing the point as to what you're getting at.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I mostly have RH experience (Score:2)
Package management doesn't concern me since the onset of swaret which is a godsend.
Thanks for the reply.
In great slashdot tradition: (Score:1)
I have never used RedHat either (well, yes, once back in 1995 or so). Anyways, if you feel most comfortable with Slackware, then take that. I for one know the slackware config files quite well, and anything like SuSE, RedHat, Debian just confuses me. If the machine is on a separate network, well protected from the internet, you can set it up and even don't worry too much about secur
Re:In great slashdot tradition: (Score:2)
You really want Windows 2003 Sever, it is so much more easy to manage
Sever? Is that some kind of slip there JtS?
And it's not.
I've already moved us to a 2003 native AD domain and it's already bit me in the ass. Cat wants a one-way trust setup between us which I don't have a problem with except for the fact that I moved us to a *.local domain name. Cat's still on a 2000 AD domain. Wanna guess what their DNS can't resolve?
Bastards. Now I have to rename our domain.
My boss won't have a problem with givi
Re:In great slashdot tradition: (Score:1)
Re:In great slashdot tradition: (Score:2)
Slashbots don't bother me. I believe it was Em who had a rant containing the phrase "never spent in a minute in the business world". Pretty much summed it up for me.
Terminal services isn't that bad. I've got two servers running load-balanced Citrix Metaframe on top of it with 100 users connected at any one time on average. Once you get the profiles configured
Re:In great slashdot tradition: (Score:1)
Well my nick is so easy to guess that it isn't funny anymore (okay, I really did some brand-recognition marketing on my nickname). My company email gets forwared to an addres on jawtheshark.com, so some people must know about that nick. Also, I have a shark tattoo on my left arm, and many people know about it. Besides, my affinity for sharks is widely known in real life (hey, I'm wearing a tshirt with sharks on it right now).
This coupled with a
Re:In great slashdot tradition: (Score:1)
I've long been a Red Hat user (Score:2)
I loathe SuSE -- or at least I loathe YaST and SuSE.Config, which irritate the hell out of me, and they tend to choke if you fiddle with conf files in a way that SuSE doesn't like and be resource hogs.
Nicest thing about Red Hat is, as far as Linux distros go, it's one that (relatively) tends to "just work" for me. I c
Re:I've long been a Red Hat user (Score:2)
That's one of my concerns too. If we were getting Enterprise with it then this wouldn't be an issue since support would more than likely come with it. I know I won't need support with Slack simply because I've used it for so long.
Other distro's and variants really aren't an option here. It's either RH or Slack. And if I stick with the pre-installed RH then I'll just have to tell my boss that I d
Re:I've long been a Red Hat user (Score:2)
Pros: if the RH install dies and goes to that great big /dev/null in the sky, you can always CYA and blame Red Hat. RH is more or less stable and easy enough to deal with (up2date works pretty well, though still not as good as ports; it uses xinetd for services; it has a fairly consistent, if technically non-standard, directory structure).
Cons: RHL does not like having stuff installed from source over its RPM dependencies. You can, if need
Re:I've long been a Red Hat user (Score:2)
Because seriously... I want to set these things up, send them with one of the Help Desk guys to a branch, have them turn it on and not have to worry about it. Ever.
And for a RH user you're talking me into my beloved Slack. *sniff* Thanks brother...
Re:I've long been a Red Hat user (Score:2)
Well...in terms of kernel panics or other serious problems, I've not had many to speak of. My main webserver (RH 7.x) has an uptime of 362 days, and even then the reboot was only because the server had to be physically moved; before that it was around 240 days IIRC. OTOH it did get hit with the SSL worm, and I have not had the chance to go re-install it, so I had to use Band-Aid-and-glue r
Linux from Scratch (Score:1)
Both RH and Slack have problems. Slack's init style is particularly annoying to me. Ok, I take that back, Slack's init style is completely and abysmally stupid. However, you can compile things from source with Slack easily instead of it being like pulling teeth.
Redhat has this recent annoying habit of EOLing their products faily quickly