Eric Lee Green wrote:
Well, 4 days have passed, and here's what the conclusion is:
SuSE 5.3 is one heckuva general-purpose workstation.
...
A little more attention to enterprise-scale features, and I'd unhesitantly recommend it for large-scale deployments. Here's some things that need to be considered for enterprise-scale deployments: 1) Routine maintenance tasks need to be distributable across the network without editing script files. Red Hat's /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, and /etc/cron.monthly are such a means of doing this. I can use "rdist" or equivalent and zap out
is this a problem?? you *can* alter / create entries in /etc/crontab
a script to all of my sites to do a weekly database cleanup or etc. without disturbing any other scheduled events or editing any files. Similarly, /etc/profile.d provides an easy way to drop in a script to be done at login without disturbing the contents of /etc/profile or the contents of any other login script. 2) Same with authentication information. PAM is a must for centralized
I do not know PAM, just by heared it mentioned, the way you're arguing sounds reasonable. I'd agree.
3) An effort must be made to segregate configuration and user information from the rest of the system so that a coherent backup strategy can be formulated. For example, under Red Hat Linux I know that if I back up /etc, /usr/local, and /home I can restore my entire system configuration by reinstalling the system, reinstalling my applications such as applix, then restoring the contents of those
As far as I remember, a few things were changed due to "standardisation", like the move from /etc/init.d to /sbin/init.d. So, if we are talking about that, we have to keep in mind that there are standards set in unix world that should be reached (by all unices). Linux is most flexible in that way and the way things changed from release to release drove me mad sometimes.
Lest you think these are just minor quibbles: they are *NOT* minor quibbles when you are trying to maintain 250 systems scattered across a 10,000 square mile area in less than 2 hours a day of available time. I have managed enterprise-scale deployments. "minor" things like this swiftly become major when the number of systems involved passes 100. Many of these features were added to Red Hat 4.0 as the result of feedback from people like me, people who were managing
yes, that's true. try that with the "other" OS. ;-)
asks for feedback from others who are involved or who have been involved in the past with corporate-wide deployments of Linux, because I know that you can probably come up with some stuff that'll blow Red Hat in the weeds there. But it won't happen without someone making it their
hould this *realy* be a prime goal??
In the meantime: I am unhesitantly recommending SuSE Linux to our customers who are buying Linux machines for personal use. I'd like to see it get to the point where we could sell a couple hundred copies to someone deploying on a corporate-wide basis too.
;-)) Jürgen -- ========================================== __ _ Juergen Braukmann mail: brauki@cityweb.de| -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Tel: 0201-743648 dk4jb@db0qs.#nrw.deu.eu| /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ==========================================_\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e