[Wiltshire] CentOS

[Barrie Bremner]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 02:06:44PM +0000, Richard Reynolds wrote:
> RHL AKA Centos are IMHOP a nightmare to manage.
> 
> I've used a lot of distros in my life and I'd rather use
> (Ubuntu/Debian/Gentoo) over RH 'esk' system any day of the week.
> Everything is done the 'Redhat' way which is the slightly confusing oh
> well it kinda works way.
> 
> Just my personal opion but I only ever use RH when I'm forced to.

I wouldn't say there's much to choose between Debian or RH based
systems - installing, configuring and removing software are basically
the same jobs, and there are distro specific files you need to be
aware of, but there's not that much in it.

I've been using Redhat based systems since 6.0 and Debian for about as
long and I'd recommend either. I'm afraid Gentoo systems (particularly
for remote production machines) make me cringe. Binary packages++.

The benefit of systems like RHEL or CentOS (which is, as previously
mentioned, basically repackaged RHEL), or Debian stable is that you
have a long maintenance lifetime (7 years - see
http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/) and a stable set of
applications. If something needs fixing then fixes are backported, you
don't suddenly get dumped with a new and possibly incompatible version
of the affected programme. You don't get that sort of stability with
Gentoo or Fedora, but that's not the focus of those distros.

As someone else has mentioned - if you need commercial support, or
expect to run something like Oracle, then RHEL is usually pretty high
on the list of distros to consider.

I've been using CentOS for my own local and remote servers for a while
now, as well as having to deal with a load of them at work (current
and previous employers). It does the job.

Cheers,
-- 
Barrie J. Bremner
baz-wiltslug [at] barriebremner.com 	http://barriebremner.com/