[H-GEN] which Redhat?

Robert Kearey mammal at optushome.com.au
Tue Apr 8 22:07:47 EDT 2003


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

[Russel wrote]

>   This is a reason Red Hat's
>   rpm format does not download and upgrade as easily as deb, and it
>   has nothing with "deb technically is better than rpm".  Technically,
>   there is very little difference between deb and rpm.  It is because
>   Red Hat does not want you to upgrade over the web, they want you to
>   buy Red Hat CD's, so they make upgrading hard.

Um, what? Do you mean upgrading the whole distro, or just packages? 
Installing packages via the web is easy enough - rpm -Uvh 
http://path/to/foo.rpm, and so on.

>   They do have the
>   equivalent of apt-get - up2date.  But mysteriously only Red Hat
>   seems to offer up2date servers, even though it is possible for
>   anyone to set one up.

http://current.tigris.org/ might be of use. Third party rhn-proxies will 
appear in due time, but remember that rhn-proxy does much more than just 
be a local mirror, so there's a business opportunity right there! ("Use 
JerichoHat's rhn-proxy, and for only $39.99 a month, gain access to 
JerichoHat's Custom Pr0n rpms!")

>  It looks like they will be charging a fee
>   for access soon (but the free will be included in the purchase
>   price of the CD's).  Up till now this is all they have done.

There's no plans for charging for RHN demo accounts, AFAIK - there is 
the obligatory survey, so it probably counts as nagware.

> - They can make it hard to get hold of the binary CD's.  They did that
>   the Enterprise edition.

RHEL also includes funky stuff like JVMs, which have their own 
redistribution agreements that make that problematic.

> In fact I am having trouble finding out just what Red Hat does produce
> "right now".  Their web pages have lots of fluffy words that describe
> their Enterprise releases, but no hard data.  Not even a version
> number.  I have not found any detailed information of what is actually
> in them.  Something as simple as the output of "rpm -qail" would
> suffice.  They are not even answering emailed queries.  I will have  to
> resort the to phone (shudder) soon.

It boils done to this:

Two product lines - RHL and RHEL. One's aimed at the hobbyist/consumer 
side of things, the other at big enterprises.

On the consumer side, you'll have RHL 9, followed by (probably) 10, and 
so on. This keeps the pot on the boil, ensuring that Red Hat can have a 
good comprimise between cutting edge tech and usability/stability. It's 
quite possible to run your big enterprise on the cheap this, but if you 
want to do that we're going to assume you have the wherewithal to 
support that yourself.

On the enterprise side, there'll be AS, ES and WS. AS is for Big Iron, 
ES is for the traditional DNS/mail/fileserver sort of thing, and WS is 
for the corporate desktop. RHEL will be pretty much cut from RHL as needed.

So, it's possible to think of it like this: RHEL is to RHL as Mozilla 
1.0 is to Mozilla 1.1, with some customisations for enterprise use.

There's also Red Hat Enterprise Network, which is service and 
infrastructure monitoring and management, and which also works with Red 
Hat Network proper.

-- 
Rob K - Ich mag Chips mit brauner Soße
http://members.optushome.com.au/mammal
Please abbreviate 'bandwidth' as 'bndwth'
thereby conserving precious bndwth.


--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.  See http://www.humbug.org.au/



More information about the General mailing list