[Gllug] CentOS and RHES

[Karanbir Singh]

Simon Morris wrote:
> Starting to look at CentOS for a company that needs Enterprise level 
> support from Red Hat on a few servers but wishes to have the "free as in 
> beer" benefit of Linux on other servers.

Sounds like a perfect case for CentOS :)

> However CentOS claims to be 100% binary compatible with a "prominent 
> North American Enterprise Linux vendor."

CentOS is 100% compatible ( we even go down to the level of check lib's 
being linked against, size of binaries and ldd compares between CentOS 
builds and Redhat's builds etc). But, there are some changes made to the 
distro, including removing Redhat [tm] and [c] stuff ( logo's etc ), and 
adding in the yum package manager.

Take a look at the release notes for CentOS4/i386, they have the details 
for all changes from 'upstream'. ( 
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/RELEASE-NOTES-en.html )

> Are they similar enough that for day to day maintenance they wouldn't 
> know/care which distribution they were working on?

Yes, they are similar. For most functional issues, you would need to 
look at /etc/redhat-release or something like that to check what distro 
you were on.  Something interesting : at LinuxWorldExpo, london - I 
counted 9 people who came to us and said that they prep'ed for the RHCE 
exam on Centos, and passed the exams never having used the Redhat 
product. How is that for an indicator as to how functionally similar the 
two products are ?

> Is the lack of software from Red Hat in CentOS enough to make 
> administering these servers wildy different from one another.

I am not sure what you are pointing at here ... no s/w is removed from 
CentOS when compared with RHEL, only the package manager ( yum ) is 
added and logo's branding changed.

The one component of RHEL you wont get access to on CentOS is the Redhat 
Network. But then if you have a large number of machines ( > 4 ) it 
makes sense to run your own local repository and just update / manage 
pkgs from that repository.

And you always have the #centos @irc.freenode.net channel and the 
mailing lists for help / info if you need it

HTH

- KB
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