On 3/24/06, Matthew Stringer
Hi,
[intro statements muted]
If so we'd probably be looking at Gentoo or Ubuntu the concerns with them are that it will introduce another flavour of Unix into our data centres (Currently have to manage Solaris, HP-UX, AS400, Suse, Suse Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, Free BSD and Windows 2K & 2K3 boxes).
For the reasons you just described I'd not use Linux for this purpose, but Solaris/OpenSolaris instead, and if desired, some BSD boxes. These systems are very secure, have well designed, sophisticated and manageable package systems and allow for system upgrades to be done without hassles and marginal downtimes. Unless your users are responsible for their boxes you'll do much better with Solaris and/or BSD (choose your flavor). \Steve