RHEL 2.1 compatability question.

[Ed Wilts]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 09:43:41AM -0500, Shaun T. Erickson wrote:
> This system is going to be my primary computing environment server, and 
> no one will log into it. It won't run anything esoteric. I should think 
> that I could at least download and compile my own versions of things, to 
> provide services such as dhcp, dns, samba shares, mail, etc., yes? 

For all this, you can do the job with RHEL 2.1.  However, if you can get
a good solid install of RHEL3 done, you'll be set for 5 years with
continuing support.  We tend to run our systems for that long around
here - we've still got production servers at 6.1 and 6.2.  We're in the
process of refreshing all the hardware and software at the same time and
the new standard platform is RHEL 3 ES.

> Heck, 
> I could just install FreeBSD 5.3, or Debian, if I wanted to, yes? I 
> don't particularly care what Dell thinks of my choice of OS, as they 
> don't provide support for what came with it anyway, with the support 
> level I ordered - just hardware support. I just want a stable OS, that's 
> easy for me to keep up to date, to give me a solid foundation to our 
> computing environment here. We're a small shop (~25 people) and I 
> inherited a computing environment that's a tad flaky, so I'm rebuilding 
> all the basic services on this new machine.

If you need support, then RHEL is for you.  If you don't want any
support but want the updates, then something like Tao Linux might work.
However, the smaller the shop, the more likely it is that you'll need
support a year or two down the road.  After all, we're pretty sure that
Red Hat will be around providing patches for RHEL in a few years.  We
don't know that the Tao maintainers will continue rebuilding the RHEL
SRPMS to provide updates.

Another poster said you couldn't install RHEL 3 on your hardware.  I'm
not familiar with your hardware, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't
make it work in a supported manner.  Dell has been pretty good with
their Linux support and one of their techies posts here regularly.  I'm
running a PowerEdge 400SC as one my home systems and it's running Tao (my
production system at home is RHPW which is technically equivalent to
RHEL 3 WS).

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program