On Thursday 09 June 2005 14:18, Ken Schneider wrote:
On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 21:57 +1000, Michael James wrote:
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 It's slow moving, packages are more out of date and the newer ones may not even be present.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?
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