[OT] Linux distributions

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Tue Aug 24 21:05:31 UTC 2004


This is very off-topic, I know, but we just went through this decision
process at Stanford and I have pretty strong opinions about it.

Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> writes:

> Didn't realize they had an enterprise release... or any supported
> release. The justification for RHEL is 7x24 support and backported
> bug/security fixes for five years (rather than having to go to new
> versions).

Debian's security fixes are considerably better than RHEL's in my
experience.  The time frame in practice right now is at least two years,
which is long enough for us, but may not be long enough for other people.
Debian is *excellent* about only fixing the security vulnerability and not
making you upgrade to a new version.

Plus, even if you do have to go to a new version of Debian because two
years wasn't enough time, note that, unlike with Red Hat, Debian's stable
upgrades actually work and generally don't break things.

We recently went through a pretty extensive review internally, and our
conclusion is that we got better support from Debian for free than we got
from Red Hat paying for RHEL.  Our experience with Red Hat's technical
support is absolutely horrendous; we got significantly better software
support from Sun, and that's saying something.  Having 24x7 commercial
support doesn't mean much when the commercial support is worthless.

There's also the fact that Debian is simply a better distribution in
pretty much every respect, technologically, stability-wise, and
configuration-wise, than Red Hat.  Not to mention that Red Hat keeps doing
idiotic things, like putting init scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d or putting
Kerberos headers in /usr/kerberos/include instead of /usr/include where
they belong.

The only reason why we run Red Hat on anything is that there are
occasional vendor applications (Oracle) where the vendor won't talk to you
unless you run Red Hat.  Everything else is going to Debian.

That being said, INN should work fine on either.  :)  (Debian's native INN
packages are far superior to Red Hat's, though, based on prior discussion
on the list.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.


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