On Thursday 09 June 2005 14:18, Ken Schneider wrote:

On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 21:57 +1000, Michael James wrote:

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On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 09:25 pm, Hans du Plooy wrote:

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The question that I'm struggling with, is which version of SUSE to use.

SLES made very good impressions on me, but I will have to add some packages and also upgrade many of the packages that it ships with.

SLES9 gives you stability. patches available for 5 years. well tried increments of packages. support from people like oracle.

Now ask what is the downside of those selling points? It's slow moving, packages are more out of date and the newer ones may not even be present.

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Which makes me wonder if it is worth the money to pay for SLES (basically for the support) if I'm going to void the support by fiddling with the internals.

No disrespect to SuSE (or Novell) but your $400 SLES license fee doesn't buy much of a professionals time. You'll still get better support from this list and the SLES one. Support is only a consideration when you are paying real money to someone like oracle. They will sidestep unless you are on a certified platform like SLES.

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Also considering that we have a handful of very capable and experience linux sysadmins.

How much time do they have to cope with SuSE Pro's 6 month upgrade cycle?

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Which brings me to 9.3. in my experience so far 9.3 is by far the best 2.6 based SUSE distro yet.

I agree with you there, 9.3 is a vintage on par with the legendary 8.2.

SuSE Pro gives you cutting edge. only 2 years of patches. newer versions of packages.

But how much time do your handful of sysadmins have to cope with it's 6 month upgrade cycle?

Who says you -have to- upgrade every six months? If 9.3 is stable enough for what they are running there is no need to upgrade, just keep the security patches up to date.

If you are running this as a high availability server you will be better off with SLES9 in the long run as SLES is all about stability and support.

True, but let's not forget third party support... example: You got a problem with an Oracle Database? Call Oracle Support, they'll just say no SLES, no Support... Honestly, they cannot support every suse pro release. But SuSE certifies SLES with them and many other third party companies. How important this is to you, only you can tell... Jerry

-- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners." -Ernst Jan Plugge

Thanks for all who replied. Like I said, this machine will be a web/mail/dns server, and not much else. All the major components are already in SUSE (SLES and 9.3). The stuff that I routinely update/rebuild are mostly postfix, amavisd-new and related packages. I don't know how SUSE feels about package versions being updated by the client (me) but I don't think they like it very much. Oracle isn't even a consideration - we have no reason to use that. The only third party database that might possibly make it's way onto this box is Intersystems Cache, but even that I sincerely doubt - that's not this box's job. -- Kind Regards Hans du Plooy SagacIT (Pty) Ltd hansdp at sagacit dot com

On Thursday 09 June 2005 22:51, Hans du Plooy wrote:

Thanks for all who replied.

Like I said, this machine will be a web/mail/dns server, and not much else. All the major components are already in SUSE (SLES and 9.3). The stuff that I routinely update/rebuild are mostly postfix, amavisd-new and related packages. I don't know how SUSE feels about package versions being updated by the client (me) but I don't think they like it very much.

Come on, rebuilding postfix on a server? Why, why? And I was thinking you might have some very, very special requirements. There is absolutely not recommended (not sane) to rebuild postfix and related stuff on a server. It's pretty clear, SLES would be the best option.

I guess 5 years of updates makes sense, but then I don't plan to update SUSE Pro every six months. Whatever I put on will stay on until the box dies or it becomes absolutely necessary to upgrade the hardware.

I'd say whatever you put on it stays there until it's out of maintenance.

On Thursday 09 June 2005 21:51, Hans du Plooy wrote:

I don't know how SUSE feels about package versions being updated by the client (me) but I don't think they like it very much.

I really don't think they care. You are free to install, rebuild or upgrade whatever you want on your machines. You just lose support, that's all

I guess 5 years of updates makes sense, but then I don't plan to update SUSE Pro every six months.

Unless you want to handle security updates yourself, you're more or less forced to upgrade after two years, because that's about the time you get security patches on the Professional products

I think one thing to consider for SLES though, is there is some functionality that seems to be available exclusively for it. For instance, I'm looking to have a local YOU server setup, synching off a public mirror for local clients (running 9.3) to point to. With SLES this comes as a YaST option. So far, I haven't seen a way to do that in regular SUSE, only SLES. I imagine there's some manner to hack it up on your own, but personally I'd rather just go with something pre-built for that. D'Arcy Hans du Plooy wrote:

On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 23:30 +0200, Anders Johansson wrote:

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On Thursday 09 June 2005 21:51, Hans du Plooy wrote:

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I don't know how SUSE feels about package versions being updated by the client (me) but I don't think they like it very much.

I really don't think they care. You are free to install, rebuild or upgrade whatever you want on your machines. You just lose support, that's all

[snip]

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Unless you want to handle security updates yourself, you're more or less forced to upgrade after two years, because that's about the time you get security patches on the Professional products

Which is precisely why I question the value of buying SLES in this case. If I end up voiding the support and taking care of security myself, what's the point in buying SLES over SUSE Pro?

SLES may be in theory the more stable option, but, honestly, I have SUSE Pro boxes that have been up for close to a year now, some of them slow machines that work very hard, and none of them have the sort of backup generator to the backup UPS to the UPS and clean stable power that the machines in the hosting facilities have.

Anyway, as for the SLES/SUSE Pro issue, last time I set up SLES, I had to install a number of perl modules, for example, for software we wanted to run, and a number of things that comes with SUSE pro which don't come with SLES.

Anyways, thanks for all the input.

On 6/14/05, suse_gasjr4wd@mac.com wrote:

On 6/14/05 12:32 AM, "D'Arcy MacIsaac" wrote:

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I think one thing to consider for SLES though, is there is some functionality that seems to be available exclusively for it.

Anyone know of any screen shots for SLES that Pro doesn't have? I've been thinking about going in and getting the "real" thing...but I want to see what I'm getting for the extra $ other than the extended time. The "support" is still only for installing, right? But does any good GUI comes with it...that I can see first?...

And yes, I looked on the novel-suse site first...

-- Thanks, George

Why screenshot? They have trial period of 60? days. Go download and install it. It comes with the installation support as well. Sunny

On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 08:51 -0400, James Knott wrote:

The server packages also have a very nice configuration interface, which is better suited for servers, than what's in the desktop version. Could you please elaborate on that? I ran SLES for a while and all I saw was Yast with a few extra modules.

-- Kind Regards Hans du Plooy SagacIT (Pty) Ltd hansdp at sagacit dot com

On Monday 13 June 2005 00:17, James Knott wrote:

Hans du Plooy wrote:

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On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 08:51 -0400, James Knott wrote:

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The server packages also have a very nice configuration interface, which is better suited for servers, than what's in the desktop version.

Could you please elaborate on that? I ran SLES for a while and all I saw was Yast with a few extra modules.

My experience was with SuSE Linux Standard Server 8, which included an integrate configuration interface, for the various servers. I had assumed the same was in SLES.

No, Standard Server had a web interface that was special to it. It was its selling point. It was an added extra on top of SLES8 (which was the basis for it). SLES does have extra YaST configuration modules that don't exist in suse pro, but not that web interface