"Enterprise" Linux?

A

ameoba

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 9, 2001
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So, I'm sitting here at my new job, evaluating what it'd take to upgrade our server. Somebody hands me a SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 box and says "put it on that machine and see how it works". Unfortunately, our primary application relies on PostgreSQL and 9.2 no longer has that (8.2 did). This makes sense, as this is a workstation version of the software. To make things worse, I looked at:

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/comparative.html

...and realized that there are no security updates made for the OS (Let's not even talk about the server running a 2yr-old unpatched distro). I'm going to kick it around for a bit and then talk to my boss and let him know that we really need an updatable Server OS. The way I see it, there are only 3 real options :

SuSE Enterprise Server
RedHat Enterprise Linux
Debian GNU/Linux (stable)

I'm a big fan of Debian, but see how, as this place has no real full-time admin (I'll probably only be here for the summer), they might want to go with SuSE or RedHat for the user-friendly admin tools and support options. Mandrake has a corporate server edition as well, but I'm kinda fuzzy on their future & long-term viability.

Does anyone have anything to say about SuSE or RedHat? Most importantly, I'm interested in what their admin tools provide, ease of upgrades and quality of support services.
 
ameoba said:
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Does anyone have anything to say about SuSE or RedHat? Most importantly, I'm interested in what their admin tools provide, ease of upgrades and quality of support services.
Click to expand...

I contract with an employer of mine who's had me deploy both. The IT department there is pretty free-wheeling and they don't have a full time *N*X admin (aside from what I do there).. I'd have to say I kind of prefer RedHat.

As far as desktop vs. enterprise, the only difference is the crap that comes on the CD and the support you get. You can pretty much download everything they include on the CDs. In SUSE's case, you may need a Novell login to do some of the downloads. As far as support, I've never had a need to contact them. (But the IT director has.) He mentioned he liked Novell's support a little more than RedHat. But it might be because we're a NetWare shop and have premier support.

The things I don't like about SUSE are some of their unorthodox ways of doing things. IE: defaulting to ReiserFS for filesystems among a few other things. Both have the very-useful "chkconfig" utility. Updating is kind of annoying though with RedHat. They usually want you to setup an account or something. SUSE's unified YaST interface to manage the box is a nice feature. Like your coworker said, throw it on the box and play with it. Give it a few weeks and try to do actual work with it. If you have time, give RedHat a try.

Personally, I don't really have a preference. I just like lean installs for headless servers. (Ie: No X, no graphics utilities, etc. YaST is nice for management in that it has both X and an ncurses interface.)
 
RHEL is very expensive, depending on which version you need. Give a RHEL clone a try, the ones mogman suggested, they will probably suffice.
 
Ahh. Yeah. I forgot about price. We always order it with new boxes, so copies were usually readily available...
 
"Very expensive" is a relative term. To a business that actually uses the support, $350 or $800 a year is a great deal for a machine that is mission critical (I'd go so far as to say that this system -is- the business). At first, it might take a bit of convincing since they're buying a SuSE box ($100) every other year but, if the price difference is enough to make or break the company, I probably don't want to be working here.
 
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