Redhat to Fedora - up2date/RHN

[Charles Gregory]

Greetings!

Just my luck. This past spring our organization (a Community Net) did an
in-depth evaluation of different flavours of Linux. We were looking for
two critical factors, both rooted in the fact that our organization often 
find itself lacking in technically qualified personnel:

1) We wanted a Linux distribution that would be relatively 'stable' over
the course of years, so that we could write a single procedure manual that
would not becoce outdated too quickly, and,
2) We wanted a Linux distributions that would have a good set of tools for
(near) automatic updates of the software for patches/errata. 

We settled on Red Hat because of the above, and as a bonus, we were able
to get Red Hat Network which would inform us of when patches were
released. And all this fit within our meager budget.

Now, less than a year later, Red Hat (basic) is being dropped, the RH
"Enterprise Edition" is ridiculously expensive (for a small not-for-profit
community net, anyways), and while everyone seems to think that this
'Fedora' project is an adeqaute replacement, there are no real documents
on *how* to make this migration/transition, and whether 'up2date' will
continue to work in the same way. Or how it *will* work if it is
different.

There is also no clear indication in the downloads page of which versions
are 'stable' and suitable for a production server environment, and which
ones are 'test' versions. Or I'm looking in the wrong place. To me there
is a much stronger flavour of Fedora being a 'test' or 'development' site
that than a place to obtain stable Linux distributions. But this can't be
right, can it?

So, exactly how would I go about making a *smooth* transition to running
Fedora (from RH9), and what manual procedures would I have to run to
replace the functionality of the Red Hat Network, and keep things 'trained
monkey' simple.....?