On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 09:25 pm, Hans du Plooy wrote:
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 It's slow moving, packages are more out of date and the newer ones may not even be present.
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.
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?
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? It's savage balancing all those tempting features with the work of re-building all the services on a new platform. Consider it in the light of the priorities on your site and the answer should be plain. The only bet I'll make is that the cost of licenses comes way down the list of considerations. PS: I am working to get my 5 servers to SLES, (3 down) and the 66 cluster nodes to 9.3 (1 in construction) -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166 Internet Explorer is fine for downloading Firefox, but after that....