Debian Niches was [Gllug] Traceroute query

[Dean]

On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 11:05:16AM +0100, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> As I understand it, the support requires you to be only running Redhat
> RPMs and Redhat kernels.

Depends on the type of support and who its from.
 
> Does using, for example, your own version of apache invalidate
> your support contract?

Dell will certify the hardware with redhat kernels and will guaranty
their own monitoring tools will work, they don't really care about the
other userspace stuff. At least they've never asked me about any of it
when processing queries. So far the only problems I've had have been
hardware ones so userspace stuff has been irrelevant to the problem.

While on the subject of Dell support if you have to speak to them its
worth noting that they have a Linux team who are pretty clued up,
getting to them on the other hand isn't easy. Once the first line
support have made you go through the motions (they seem to like to get
boxes taken down no matter what the problem is) they go away and get
instructions from the people that have actually used Linux.

Oracle on the other hand was (not done any Oracle for a while) more
restrictive, i remember it being very version tied to glibc, kernel and
even certain shared memory configs on some machine / distro configs. The
DBA wasn't a happy puppy.

As for the custom apache on the same machine to be honest the idea of
running anything except Oracle on the box worries me. The beast doesn't
play well with others.
 
> Redhat kernels are relatively untested* with stuff backported from 2.6
> - on a production box? no thanks.

The flipside is that for certain configurations Redhat will end up being
better tested. My current employer has about six racks of Poweredges,
almost everyone on the Dell Linux Poweredge list is running Redhat.
Between them and Dells internal testing (which they have to do before
they'll make it as supported) it gets decent testing. Also to stay
supported you do move at their speed when it comes to new releases so
the backported 2.6 features haven't really reached us yet ;)

Anecdotal evidence points to me being safer running Redhat on them. If
anything goes wrong i have a community to draw upon and can smack Dell
with a stick, as long as i stay within the given parameters.

Although looking at it maybe i see no Debian people because they don't
need help as it all runs so well. Maybe ;)

  Dean
-- 
Dean Wilson             http://www.unixdaemon.net
Profanity is the one language all programmers understand
  --- Anon
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