OS choices

[faris]

In about 40 days my subscription to Red Hat enterprise will expire.

I've never used it. I was going to migrate from RH9 to it but never got round to it -- the security updates provided by fedoralegacy.org kind of made the hassle of doing so redundant.

If I renew I'll get my next year at half price (My first year was at half price too because I was a RHN subscriber).

My question is should I renew?

RHE 4 is on the way any moment. This may have some interesting security additions. But I doubt it can offer as much as the grsec kenel patch can?

Then there's Centos, which I hear a lot of people using very happily as an alternative to RH ES.

Or I could stick with RH9 for now, until the last possible moment.

I never contact RedHat for technical support. I don't need it. What I do need is a relatively secure, compatible OS where I get plenty of security updates and which Plesk will continue to support for a reasonable while. RH9 gives me this - sort of -- and at a guess I'd expect Plesk to continue to support it for another year. I hope.

I'd appreciate people's suggestions and feedback.

Faris.

 

[hardweb]

If you can afford to renew the license, I should do this:
1. RHEL is a good, supported OS and maybe you will install it because no one will support RH9 forever.
2. You support the open community because Redhat supports a lot of developers.

 

[Spyder]

Plese with out flames

Another option is FreeBSD ]

 

[Griffith]

I have been testing CentOS 3.4 and it seems very nice.. the same as 3ES, at no cost, but the updates is released 1-2 days after Redhats releases...

 

[atomicturtle]

All my 3ES rpms Ive been creating under white box linux, which is another 3ES clone. Ive also heard good things about centos, and I know Cranky has mentioned hes been running a number of them for a while now.

In terms of demographics, looking at my archive logs (about 7000 servers currently using ART) the vast majority, about 50% are running rh9. The second largest group is 3ES/3ES clones at around 30%, and the fedoras making up the rest. Growth across the distribution really hasnt favored anyone, yet, largely due to 1&1 supporting rh9 I suspect. At any rate, I plan on supporting all of those distro's going forward. I probably wont drop rh9 support until 3ES is end of lifed, since they're so close together in terms of build environments.

 

[sieb@]

I have ES3 servers that have been running for over two years now (as in not needing reloads). I am seriously considering moving to bsd as my contracts run out. If I don't do that, then I am looking more towards white-boxing and picking up on ARTs channels for it.

Looking back, I rarely see anyone complaining about problems with PSA on their FreeBSD box.. hmm

 

[faris]

Thanks for everybody's input. I have to admit I still don't know what to do though.

I wouldn't mind if it was just one machine, but there are two of them. Then there will be three. And in a year I'll have to pay the full subscrition. If I recall correctly they are $500 per subscription normally? So that's $1500 per year on the OS.

I don't mind paying that if it gives me significant benefits over a whitebox option (whitebox or centos or whatever), but I can't see any real benefits. OK, so updates may take a day or two longer to come out, but that's no big deal (normally). Or am I missing something?

And as Spyder says, there's FreeBSD, though I don't think I want to go that path though. I'm used to the redhat way of doing things, so I'd prefer to stick to things I know about. I guess Suse or Debian would also be out of the equation for the same reasons..

Hmm....

Faris.

 

[atomicturtle]

I think some of the hosting companies include the 3ES subscriptions in the cost of the hosting plan. Ive got a 3es box at rackspace that came with the subscription for example.

 

[Spyder]

"I'd prefer to stick to things I know about. I guess Suse or Debian would also be out of the equation for the same reasons"' t

his is a god point of view....

We run FreeBSD from last 10 years... and love this...ours servers runs like charm some machines with 2 years of uptime.

The problem is always the masse fo developing people to Linuxes... and no support some times, but the comunity resolve this problem.

Probably I will need to put some RH9 (payng for licenses to AS is not an option) therefore some tools of the sw-software alone has support for this platform.

Still I did not try to run some tool of the sw using the native way of the FreeBSD, but this is the next step before falling in the same doubt of this topic.

RH/FC1/FC2 or same white box (and as to proceed in this case) rpm functions simply without jugglings?

TIA

 

[sieb@]

RHES3 is like $400 for the license, then $195/yr for RHN support. Or you could just keep your current ES3 installs and just use ARTs Yum Repos. for updates. That would save you paying for RHN and you would know your updates won't break PSA.

IFAIK you don't have to keep paying for the OS, just support.. Not sure though, I will find out in a few months.

 

[faris]

I don't think it works like that. You pay an annual lisence and that's it. There's no separate RHN sub.

I've just checked and at the 50% discount that I'll get this one last time, I get two subs for a total of $445. Then, next year, I'll have to pay full price, so $900 total for two machines (but I'll have three by then).

It doesn't seem worth it to me, even if you remove the $96 per year per machine for the Management option which I think is included in the above prices (i.e. it actually costs $349 per year per machine, not the $500 I mentioned previously).

Faris.

 

[atomicturtle]

Yeah forgot to mention that, I run a free 3ES/clones update archive

 

[faris]

The more I look at Centos, the more I like the look of it.

The problem with things like this is that the project can die, leaving you high and dry. I don't know if things have changed or not, but for example from what I can see on the Internet, White Box seems to have ground to a halt, or at least slowed down considerably.

I get good "vibes" from Centos though. It looks like it is has a lot of community support, and a lot of users. I've downloaded the ISOs and I'll play with it in a VPS over the weekend to see how I get along.

Faris.

 

[sieb@]

There's not that much development of ES3 either, just patches.

 

[Griffith]

Well, I like CentOS alot to!! I hope plesk will "support" it, though it works fine with the 3es rpms! Only "problem" I've noticed is that one can't use autoupdate (unless you edit the release file I hear), but I don't use the autoupdater anyway.. but always nice to have it supported!! I was told from plesk that they might support it, but no guarranty!

 

[Bishop4351]

RHEL is great for psa. I've played with the rhel4 beta and I got psa to work on it (there was some fighting but it did work). It's a matter of what you're running the server for too. If you've got a bunch of high end customers and want to focus on stability then I'd highly recomind RHEL to anyone. But if you're trying to do thinks on a non-profit budget then you might look in to Fedora or some of the other supported OS's. I've never been such a great fan of bsd (I'll be expecting flames here). It's also nice to work your os over without having to compile a lot of stuff. This is the advantage to having an rpm distro. We get updates quick and in place and for the most part they work.

So in summary until psa goes for debian or gentoo look in to RHEL.

 

[atomicturtle]

You can always use yum

 

[Spyder]

Please, No flames... We are all big boys

Like some one said before .. the OS question is where we are confortable (and run out of problems )

Some one runnig win version

Tia

 

[hardweb]

We can hardly call Centos a different OS, it a non-branded RHEL. If there are stability differences beween RHEL and Centos these were most likely introduced in the debranding phase Fedora is a separate OS with its own life and developer community.

 

[Bishop4351]

I've heard good things about Centos too. but never invested any time in using it.