[wellylug] Enterprise Linux

[Grant McLean]

On Fri, 2013-12-20 at 10:18 +1300, Neil Ramsay wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> At work, along with Active Directory authentication, we are talking 
> about moving towards standardising our Linux flavours.
> 
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is an obvious choice for paid support, 
> but we are also looking at a free options.

I'm not an RHEL user but I do end up providing support to people who use
my software on that platform.  The impression I'm left with is that RHEL
combines Open Source and "enterprise" in a way that seems to bring out
the worst attributes of each.

In the interests of stability, the software update rate is glacial which
means that security updates are backports of patches from much newer
upstream versions and often introduce new and unrelated problems.  Some
of these problems linger unfixed for years.

Presumably you have existing applications that you're running on Linux.
It would be worth looking at the languages these apps are written in and
what attitudes those language communities have towards RHEL.  For
example step one for deploying a Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP app would probably
be compiling your own build of a recent version of the language that the
community can support.  You'll then be left with the burden of
maintaining that build yourself and deploying security releases and bug
fixes as they become available.  At which point you have to ask what
exactly are you paying RedHat for?

I have a bias towards Debian as a Linux platform.  Although the software
versions in Debian stable are not the latest, they are also far from
ancient.  In my case apps tend to be written in Perl and the system
version of Perl is "good enough".  Vast numbers of Perl modules are
available from the Debian repos and where we need a later version of a
specific library it's easy to roll our own packages.

Some people like the Debian model but find the update rate too high.  A
compromise is to use Ubuntu LTS on servers.  One thing to beware of is
the potential for more and larger problems when it comes time to upgrade
(as opposed to smaller but more frequent issues with a more current
distro).

Cheers
Grant