From: Alexei_Roudnev (Alexei_Roudnev_at_exigengroup.com)
Date: Wed Mar 07 2007 - 10:10:59 CET
Message-ID: <043d01c76098$85e4d350$6401a8c0@alexh> From: "Alexei_Roudnev" <Alexei_Roudnev@exigengroup.com> Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 01:10:59 -0800 Subject: Re: [suse-sles-e] W3M Browser for registration
If it could be so well! I have a permanent pressure from few sysadmins in
the company, saying _we do know RHEL, Oracle works on RHEL, we can find any
article about RHEL, let;s switch back onto it_.
I run SLES9 (many in the lab and development, and few in other data center
in production). SLES9 Release was not stable, SLES9 Sp1 was a very good
system, and SLES9 SP3 became very stable and compatible.
We estimated an option to switch onto SLES10, and dropped this idea -
moreover, it may became a last straw , why we can decide to switch to Oracle
or Redhat. Reasons:
- SLES9 is already outdated and is not wel supported (where is Sp4? Where is
heartbeat2? Where is support for the vey modern servers? Can you order it
with DELL server? Answers are _not_)
- SLES10 is too incompatible with everything (can you run PHP4 application?
Run Oracle 9? Run Oracle Application Server? Run application compiled on
SLES8?)
We use - Oracle (certified on SLES9, but only a very few versions on
SLES10), PHP4 (a little), Jboss, Tomcat, Asterisk, SipXchange. And here is
why some people want RHEL:
- yes, RHEL have not GUI (most X11 apps are broken there). But many peolpe
believe that GUI is evil (my experience shows opposite - good GUI eliminate
errors
and save a lot of time and money); RHEL had a bad packaging; you must do may
things yourself.
- but most products are compiled for it. Asterisk. SipXchange. Genesys Call
Center. CheckPoint firewall. etc...
- Most important. RHEL have much better roadmap for the versions. For now,
they have a _stable, mature RHEL4.4 - PRIMARY version.. RHEL5 is available
but is, de facto, kind of open beta / early release. So, we can select -
work with stable and robust RHEL4.4 (which we really need) or experiment
with RHEL5.
It is not a case with SLES - SLES9 development totally stopped since they
released SLES10, and SLES10 never had a stage of 1/2 - 1 year of _early
release_.
Result - SLES10 is not stable and compatible, while SLES9 is outdated (old
lvm, old heartbeat, old jboss, iSCSI is not aligned with LVM, you can't run
it on a very new servers, and so on).
The truth is that we dont need bells and whistles of SLES10. We dont need
zenworks. We dont need new GNOME (old KDE was exceellent, we use it on the
servers sometimes). We dont need php5 - need php4.4. We don't need gcc 4 -
need gcc 3. And so on. But I need heartbeat2, need clustered lvm (not evms),
need to see rpm's
from all major software vendors (can you simple install Asterisk on it?
SipXchange?). With RHEL, people have a choice (when SuSe jumped into kernel
2.6 and SLES9, RedHat released new RHEL4 but keep going with RHEL3 - and
this strategy paid off well; now they have the same 2 release strategy which
works very well). I want to have a choice with SuSe, too. System is better
in many ways. But errors, multiplied to the smaller installation base,
multiplied to the bad PR, multiplied to the Microsoft Deal (distracting a
huge number of people from SuSe) - all creates a problem.
I made a comparision between SLES9 and RHEL4.4 for our configuration -
clustered SAN system, lvm, ASM, Oracle. Interesting. RHEL have a poor
interface, have not yast, udev don't recognize iSCSI devices,
you must configure yum repository manually (but now SLES10 killed YOU server
and had the same problem). So, it takes longer to make things work on RHEL.
But then you discover that system is much better aligned. I turn on iSCSI,
multipath, LVM; I did not edit any scripts - and everything comes in right
sequence - iscsi, then multipath, then LVM. System have old (and stable)
php - but uses better lvm (with mirror support). iSCSI configuration require
hard job - but then it works better. SLES9 fail if I test multipath on FCP,
NetApp and old Emulex 8000 cards - I did not tested RHEL in such
configuration yet, but I am 100% sure that it wil work.
So, we dont ask for bells and whistles - we ask for STABILITY and QUALITY.
And for Consistency. SuSe9 was consistent - yast2, kde, reiserfs, YOU
service, AutoInstall service - all worked together and looked as designed by
a single strong team. SLES10 looks more like a big mixture of different
technologies, created without a central idea - new teams brought their own
style, broking old ideas (WWW registration is one example - why to run WWW
from yast, it broke the whole YAST idea!), making things slower and buggy.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gaël Lams" <lamsgael@gmail.com>
To: <suse-sles-e@suse.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 12:06 AM
Subject: Re: [suse-sles-e] W3M Browser for registration
> I've no idea regarding iSCSI or Oracle support but, to balance a
> little bit what Alexei said (and I don't work for Novell ;-), I've
> currently +/- 10 production SLES10 servers (not that much, I know)
> providing several services (apache, php, zope, mysql, posfix,
> spamassassin, horde, ...), with a local installation and update server
> and, well, I've had no problem for the time being.
>
> I feel so safe that I plan this year to start migrating my Lotus
> Domino servers and all the remaining SuSe Professional 9.3 to SLES10
>
> I've to say that:
> - I don't use yast that much (one of the first things I do when I
> configure a Postfix instance is to disable suseconfig ;-)
> - fortunately I never had to install X on my servers .-)
> - the first time I tried to register a system using yast I also was
> pretty upset :-)
> - I compiled a few softwares from source because I want to keep control of
them
> - I never tried SLES 9 so I've no idea how good it is/was
>
> The fact is that I've also heared several complaints from RHEL users
> in various mailing lists: no distribution is perfect but since I
> started using suse on my servers 6 years ago, well, I never had a
> problem (apart with a php security update on Suse 9.0 if I remember)
>
> Regards,
>
> Gaël
>
> PS: The idea of a service pack for a linux distribution frighten me
> quit a lot (makes me think to another operating system :-)
>
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