[Sussex] Upgrading from RHEL to Fedora

[Paul Tansom]

Chris Jones wrote:
> On 6:09:56 pm 31/08/2005 Paul Tansom <paul at aptanet.com> wrote:
>>Video yes, network and sound no :( On the commercial support side of
> 
> Ah, the nforce nonsense. I always go for an intel network card and an
> sblive to avoid support issues. Also, without wanting to sound harsh, you
> should have checked the supported hardware lists.

I may not have emphasised the point in this thread, but the machines
aren't mine. If they were mine compatibility would have been checked,
and I wouldn't have purchased or installed Red Hat - and if for some
reason I had I would already have switched to Debian!

>>based) are not on the Red Hat supported list therefore they are
>>reluctant to talk to you and even suggest switching to Fedora or using
> 
> That is pretty poor and I have to say that my brief encounters with RH
> support have been pretty useless.
> 
>>That's as I understand it now. Not sure, as I say, whether the first
>>impression was a misunderstanding or a poor choice in the first
> 
> It's the way Ubuntu has been since the first release - I've been using it
> since the warty preview and the sudo plan was in place then.

Probably a wrong post on a website or email list that I read then,
combined with lack of time to actually follow up on it. Either way it is
still on my list of distributions to try (I have an outstanding 'todo'
of testing a selection of distributions to ensure my bias towards Debian
is still justified - I don't like not having more recent experience of
other distributions when I state a strong preference for Debian).

>>I have done, and the configuration is very nice. Functionality wise
>>I've not found any strong reason to upgrade, although I will be.
> 
> For me it was the ACLs, I can now reject malware and other undesirable
> emails during the SMTP session, so there is no bounce mail to generate.
> This combined with sender verification during the SMTP session cut out the
> spam related overhead on my server by a huge amount.

Not looked into that. I don't bounce SPAM, just bin it (well, file
pending check if someone claims they've sent me something I've missed,
then bin). I plan to investigate the extra features of 4 further once
I've upgraded another 3 servers (not all mail servers, but I need my
intranet box, firewall and extranet box rebuilt before I start looking
at changing my platform too much - just need the time to sift my bits
box and put the new hardware together!).

>>Because post release unstable becomes less stable. Testing at least
>>has a period of testing in unstable before a package moves on down
>>the chain.
> 
> An enforced period of testing, which can leave you broken for days, weeks
> or months after the fix is in unstable because the package is churning
> there and never lasting long enough to be pulled into testing.
> 
> I would always advise those looking to step outside stable to go for
> unstable, upgrade sparsely and check the BTS/ml regularly to spot any major
>  problems.

Possibly true, as I may have mentioned already my Evolution is broken
and I'm not entirely sure whether it is a Debian issue or my machine. I
backed off to testing the new stable was released so I could let
unstable settle a bit. I had been running on unstable for some time. If
I have two Linux boxes handy (with my dual boot one) I may move back,
but I never kept that up to date with unstable anyway (due to lack of
time to update) and ended up with quite large updates when I did. I've
got listbugs installed so get warned of any known issues on install when
helps (Samba updates stayed off my machine for a long, long while as a
result).

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/