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Red Hat Aims at Big Business with New Server Product

Time: 08:29 EST/13:29 GMT | News Source: Reuters | Posted By: Robert Stein

Red Hat Inc. , a distributor of the open-source Linux computer operating system, on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new server product aimed squarely at the large enterprises that the company sees as its market sweet spot. Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat is hoping its new Advanced Server will offer enough computing power to convince more large companies to switch their corporate networks to Linux. As so-called open-source software, Linux is freely available and can be modified by users, unlike proprietary operating systems like Microsoft's Windows or various versions of the UNIX platform, such as Solaris by Sun Microsystems.

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#1 By 2960 (156.80.64.134) at 3/26/2002 8:42:15 AM

Nice, informative review there #1. You should start a web site!

TL

#2 By 61 (65.32.169.133) at 3/26/2002 10:01:00 AM

#4, the real cost is not the licensing, but in the cost of deployment and maintenance.

Why are you rebooting your Exchange server every week, I would say because of complete incompetance of your admin, who then goes and blames on it the products because the guy really has no clue what he/she is doing, and needs to keep his/her job.

And really, comparing your uptime of an Exchange server to a firewall is totally unreal and shows just how little you actually know.

#3 By 4209 (163.192.21.3) at 3/26/2002 10:13:34 AM

#4, I re-boot my Exchange server only when I add hardware or do an update, which is infrequently. It had been up for over 200 days when I re-booted last. That was to add a Gig of Ram to it. Go look at your Admin, not the Exchange product. Maybe you do not have a good enough server for it or the Admin is a moron. Maybe you or he should go take an Exchange class to learn how to Administrate and Maintain the product before telling us it sucks. And comparing it to a firewall, that is ridiculous.

#4 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 3/26/2002 11:03:51 AM

MrJ412 - The reason you have to reboot your Exchange server system each week is because you don't know enough about Windows to figure out the actual problem.

A frequent "solution" in the Unix/Linux world is to write cron jobs that restart daemons every morning. BIND is one of the top culprits for this. Isn't this the same thing, if not worse?

#5 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 3/26/2002 1:46:14 PM

JD - You don't have to restart the Windows server either. It's just the easiest way you've found to solve the problem because you don't know what you are doing.

As far as patching. The other day I upgraded to MDAC 2.7 from v2.5 without having to reboot. This worked because the install program correctly recognized that certain services were running and had to be shut down. This is possible, it's just again Microsoft has frequently chosen the easiest way to solve the problem... i.e. a reboot.

Since when can you patch the kernel on a Linux box and not go down? I have heard you can do that with AIX, but Linux is not nearly as advanced an OS.

#6 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 3/26/2002 4:09:24 PM

JD - Really? So basically you are saying you don't know what you are doing with regards to Windows?

I can do an install of Win2k with at most 2 reboots. Win2k fresh with SP2 slipstreamed in results in one reboot to bring up the system. Patches installed on top of that with qchain result in a second reboot. Depending on the system, we may have a 3rd reboot for driver installs, and also depending on if those are integrated into the initial install.

Now why did it take you 5? Probably because you don't know how to slipstream SP2 into the Win2k source, or how to install multiple patches at one time. Why don't you take the time to learn these things so you can do your job easier? I get the impression you don't want to because you want to convince yourself that Microsoft sucks, and this is the easiest path to that damnation.

"I'll admit it depends upon the patch, but we're talking about the kernel, not an application which can require a Windows reboot. I don't think I've ever had to reboot Linux because of a package upgrade."

But you just admitted that you do with a kernel upgrade. As I stated, most application upgrades on Windows take rebooting as the easiest way to solve the problem. That doesn't mean it has to happen, or that a little understanding can't help one get around this.

Your argument is mostly irrelevant because you obviously do not know enough about Windows to argue from an intelligent basis.

#7 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 3/26/2002 4:27:31 PM

JD - Another point. OS Zealots like yourself frequently like to point to some little feature to nitpick on. You've chosen reboots. When I was an Amiga zealot, we used to complain about Windows 3.1 because you couldn't format a floppy disk and do something else at the same time, as if this was really important. I think I also used the size of the floppy 720K versus 880K as a major issue as well.

But is that truely the most important thing to me as a consumer? Not particularly, it all depends. It may be an inconvenience, and it may be more than made up for other features.

I used to be a Unix admin, and I still maintain a Sparc 10 at home to run Oracle 8i on, just for kicks. One of the things that used to frustrate the hell out of me back in say 1995 was just how bloody difficult it was to share a directory off one machine to another. Go change some config file, kickstart the daemon, test from the other machine to see if it worked... damn, it didn't... go figure out why. Not to mention the prehistoric security model surrounding NFS dependent solely upon the IP address in a world which was moving towards dynamic addressing. AFS from Transarc was another solution we used, but it was unreliable. [Which brings up another point... I used Unix back in the days when it was unreliable and buggy, and realize that even today it still has issues. I'm familiar with X11 crashing and taking your work with you, etc.]

Now it's quite possible the world of Unix has changed substantially. I haven't bothered to keep up with it since abandoning it. But the occasional comment I hear indicates to me it has not, that the fundamentally poor architecture and design is still there. Certainly no thought has been put into changing that in the Linux model, because they are still having difficulty catching up to the functionality of the commercial implementations. The few visionaries in the community, like Miguel are ridiculed.

I guess the point being, that I will use Unix where I think it works well. I've commited myself to learning more about Windows since around '96, and I have watched it progress by leaps and bounds since. In '97 I would have hesitated deploying DHCP and DNS services on Windows, today I would not because I find the Microsoft solution to be more robust than that provided on Unix. Things progress, things change, but one thing which will remain constant, at least for me, is I do not wish to go back to the world of Unix.

I guess maybe my point is, I think it's really silly of you to try to argue with me that Unix is somehow better, because I know better.

#8 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 3/26/2002 5:43:46 PM

JD - "So great...you can install Win2k with 2-3 reboots. And this is progress? "

Is it? I don't know, you were the one complaining about 5 reboots. But you ignore one other point, that Suse releases new CD distributions about once a quarter which include all the patches and such. Maybe Microsoft should do that too, I don't know, but I do know if they charged $40 every six months like the Linux vendors do there would be an awful lot of whining.

I'll tell you what, why not try an apples to apples comparison. I have a copy old copies of Linux around here... Redhat 5.2, Yggdrasil, even some Caldera release. Want to try to install those on a new computer and then document the process needed to patch it with recent releases of stuff? Obviously since Linux is sooo much better, you shouldn't need any reboots, or to purchase any other CDs. Just download the packages right off the internet and install. I wonder just how much work that would be... Honestly I doubt either of them would even install on a modern P4 or Athlon system.

"It just seemed to me that this board was lacking some level headed debate from the Linux side..."

I've never seen level headed debate from the Linux side, only exagerration. "Of course Linux is faster", "Linux is way more secure", "Linux never requires reboots", "Linux is much more stable", "Linux is so much more l33t"

Look, if you want to talk about the limitations of Microsoft products I am more than happy. In fact, I would love to do that and share knowledge. But I'm not going to sit idly by and watch some punk who thinks installing Linux makes him l33t bashing on Windows issues just because they don't know there is a better way to use the product.

If you don't know how to do something... ASK! Don't sit there claiming Microsoft sucks because it doesn't work exactly the same as Linux.

#9 By 135 (65.30.226.137) at 3/26/2002 8:10:00 PM

JD - Maybe you should spend some time on slashdot. I think the mentality there would be much more to your liking.

BTW it is the GPL which is viral... not the OS. FreeBSD doesn't have the same issues as Linux.

#10 By 135 (65.30.226.137) at 3/26/2002 8:10:02 PM

duplicate post :( I'm going to blame it on Windows 98.

This post was edited by sodablue on Tuesday, March 26, 2002 at 20:10.

#11 By 1913 (68.14.48.57) at 3/26/2002 10:26:02 PM

Oops ...my bad. I forgot to login to my account.
#31 is my comment ;)

RommelS

#12 By 2332 (129.21.145.80) at 3/27/2002 6:09:05 AM

Wow... vicious argument goin' on in here... wish I got in on it earlier.

A couple of points:

OS reboots are very important in an enterprise environment, whether or not you have redundancy. There is *no* reason why critical updates require a reboot other than laziness on the part of Microsoft, as Sodablue said.

On thing to note is that the only other OS that supports kernel patches without restarts is VMS, which, happily, the NT kernel used as a design basis. This means that there is the possibility of kernel patches not requiring a reboot for Windows!

I've even read articles that the next version of Windows.NET Datacenter will support this patching process, with the rest of the .NET servers following soon after, and eventually even desktops! :-)

BSD, Mach, and the various other kernels on which many *nix varieties are based simply aren't designed for this, and would take a complete re-write to achieve.

But, for the time being, I certainly give *nix the thumbs up over Windows for happy-patching and rebooting. It *is* getting better though.

#13 By 4240821 (45.149.82.86) at 10/25/2023 7:54:00 PM