On Friday 29 September 2006 13:43, Alan Brown wrote: > On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Kern Sibbald wrote: > > >> One of the reason we dumped SLES on our production machines in favour of > >> RHEL was that SUSE was consistently shipping with mismatching dynamic and > >> static library versions - and would not fix it even when notified. > >> > >> SuSE may be great for home systems but having endured it (and SuSE's > >> so-called "support desk") for 4 years, I do not believe it is suitable for > >> enterprise or business production use. > > > > Well, with the exception of three things, I have found the installation and > > stability 10x better than Fedora. > > Fedora is by definition "bleeding edge" and we've frequently found that > Fedora won't even install on new hardware while RHEL will.
Yes, I like to be on current software but not the "bleeding edge". RHEL is sometimes not as current as I would like, though they are excellent for their security updates. > > > RHEL stability is exceptional, so I cannot > > comment, but the SuSE installer is far superior to the RHEL installer. > > However, I cannot afford to be on RHEL, and at least for the moment, would > > prefer not to be on one of the "clones". > > Centos is _very_ stable. RHEL can be licensed quite cheaply if you don't > buy the support package (about US$10/machine) The last time I looked (some time ago), it was over $200/machine. That is too much for me. For a company or someone serious about servers, that's OK and quite far given their security updates. > > > The second problem is that they don't take enough care to make sure that > > their updates have all dependencies resolved. > > Yes. > > This, plus their refusal to deal with people pointing it out even if they > have paid for support, plus the refusal to even talk to Novell management > when we escalated it) gives the impression of a bunch of surly teenagers > operating out of bedrooms rather than a professional software company. Fortunately, I haven't seen that, and I hope it doesn't happen. > > > And finally, what is really disturbing me is this kernel oops. It > > really killed me -- for two weeks I beat tried everything (lots of work) > > thinking it was a Bacula bug. In the end, I had to "reluctantly" admit > > it was either a compiler or a kernel bug -- I've now proved it to be a > > kernel bug -- very frustrating. > > Your experiemce is not unique. > > >> Novell (SuSE's owners) management in the UK even tried to intervene on our > >> behalf and were completely stonewalled by SuSE. If a company is this > >> dysfunctional internally, then I don't hold out much hope for getting any > >> problems fixed at all, let alone in a reasonable timeframe. > > > > I suspect that has changed and evolve even more in the future. > > This was current as of June 2006. Hmmm. > > > PS: I'm going to test it against their SuSE 10.2 kernel (to be released > > in Dec if I remember right) and if it fails, I'll file a "blocker", > > which will ensure that it is fixed. > > OpenSuse is similar to fedora - bleeding edge. Well, up to today, I have found SuSE 10.1 very stable, and as far as I know they are not trying to put out a new version every 6 months (which IMO is the main cause of problems with Fedora). Also as I said, without going into all the gory details, the installation is at least 10x better than anything I have ever seen (in short after loading the first of 4 CDs, my external CDROM drive for my laptop died, and I was left with a system that didn't even have a root login, but with little effort I was able to complete the installation via the network, it picked up where it left off -- no other distro can do that! In addition, after getting all the right packages loaded, it even automatically reconfigured the screen to the correct driver, ...). > > SLES is supposedly a more "stable" animal - and at US$1500 per machine per > year, I'd expect professional behaviour and responses, instead of refusal > to respond when serious deficiencies are uncovered. > > AB > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
