> ...This is not the same in my book, since I don't care
> to run RHL in any kind of production environment...
> <snip>
>
> What is it about RHL that various people wouldn't
> recommend running it in a production envornment?
> I don't have a contrary view, so much as I'd like to
> know what's specifically wrong with the RH distribution.
> We're trying to decide on a distribution on which to
> develop telecom software, utilizing PostgreSQL of
> course :-) What other distributions would you
> recommend and why?
Here's my take on it, it may or may not reflect reality. : )
RH didn't get where they are by being the "best", they got there by
being the most "sellable". Early on, they grabbed a large market share by
making a few very sellable decisions, and now, the fact that they are so
large now gives them momentum that keeps them afloat - oddly enough, just
like Microsoft. : ) Because they're large, they garner support in terms of
drivers and programming, and that, in turn, makes them more attractive to
potential users.
Their products aren't necessarily "bad", at least not all of them.
Historically, the .0 releases are buggy and flakey, the .1's are better, and
the .2's are decent. Now that, of course, depends on your own definitions
of such qualitative terms as "buggy" and "decent", but according to my
definitions and experience, that's been about right.
For my needs, they're also becoming extremely bloated. I don't need
three CD's worth of installation crap to get Apache, SSH, and PostgreSQL
running. : ) I also don't like depending on precompiled packages, for a
couple of reasons - including the fact that it's hard to choose compile-time
settings on pre-compiled binaries. : )
So, I've started working on putting together a sort of "mini-distro"
with only what my servers will need. It's quite a bit easier than I thought
it would be, and lets me "mix and match" the features that I want, such as
XFS support and what-not.
Now, since I've been so negative about them, I'll also be positive -
RedHat isn't "bad" for production use. Stay with .2 releases, and things
will likely be just fine for you. There are some policy decisions that
(IMHO) aren't as good as they could be, but those can generally be fixed
with a few minor modifications to startup scripts and configuration files.
As long as you tighten down the security holes in the default installation,
most people would likely be just fine using RedHat on their production
machines.
steve
