Finally!

[mdlbear]

As of last night I have finally finished upgrading my home file/print server from RedHat 6.2 to 7.3. 'Finished' in this case means that I have it back to the exact set of services it was running before I started. The last piece in the puzzle was getting the Big Brother network monitoring program working again.

The problem with BB was that it would happily accept reports from other systems, but wouldn't run any tests that required talking to other systems. Turned out this is a known problem (ping hangs, and you have to add a -w3 flag to give it a 3-second timeout). It's alluded to very obscurely in a comment in the bbsys.local file; I found it in the mailing list archives.

The main goal for the upgrade was to convert the filesystems from ext2 to ext3, which does journaling and so is a little less susceptable to things like power failures. I also get a newer version of samba that might actually deign to talk to chaoswolf's new computer.

This will be the last time I put RedHat on any of the servers; Debian is much easier to keep up to date, and has more of the packages I need. I would have switched already except that all my userids are in the range that Debian wants for "system" users. (Mine are a leftover from Slackware days, when userids got assigned starting at 100, just as they did in SunOS.) The firewall/router/server is already Debian.

The 'Why I'm Dumping RedHat' Rant

The main problem with RedHat is that they've abandoned their base in order to chase after the money. They used to have a good, solid, free distribution that worked equally well on servers and on workstations. You could pay and get phone support, a printed manual, and a few proprietary apps -- all things most people don't need. Damned near everybody downloaded the free .iso's for their home systems and desktops, and had their employer buy a couple of boxed sets for the servers. This, of course, gave RH a huge installed base, but not much of a revenue stream.

Their new policy is quite different: their free distros after 7.3 have had fewer and fewer packages; they seem to be moving toward a policy of only including the packages they think you should be using and that they feel like supporting, rather than everything somebody might want. For example, they now have only CUPS for printing, where 7.3 had both CUPS and LPRNG. For another example, they've dropped ctwm, ical, and xtoolwait, all three of which I use. And they've gone over to Apache 2.0, which seems like a great idea except that a lot of modules still haven't been ported over from 1.3. And so on.

Linux is all about choice, and I don't like having my choices second-guessed and restricted.

Moreover, there's their pathetic "RedHat Network" and their cumbersome update procedure based on a centralized database that knows which of your machines are "entitled" to be updated, and what versions they need. That's great, if you have only one release of the OS on each machine (I tend to have several), and are paying for each system (otherwise you get upgrades for only one), and have a fast net connection. And 7.3, the last of the 'old, good' releases, is hitting its end of life at the end of the year, so there won't be any more updates after that point.

Debian is decentralized -- you can download updates from any mirror, and can cache the packages locally for as many machines as you want to upgrade. And it's much better at handling dependencies. It's true that Debian doesn't continue support for old releases for very long, but upgrading to the newest stable one is a matter of one config-file edit and two commands.

No doubt I'll continue to play with RedHat and other distros, but I'll be sticking with Debian and its derivatives (Knoppix, Morphix, Xandros, DeMuDi, ...) for the servers and probably for day-to-day desktop use as well.

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that Red Hat's new policy is "if you want stable, buy the Enterprise version. Otherwise, it's fine for development, but don't run a production server on it, cheapskates."

I'm sticking with SuSE for the time being. I've been very happy with it, and I'm told that apt-get has been ported to it quite happily.

[mdlbear]

Indeed. The free distros are basically just betas now; they've even changed the name to Fedora, presumably to keep people from associating them with the RedHat brand.

They might survive, but it's not a sure thing anymore.

There's a generic apt port for RPM; see http://apt.freshrpms.net/ for the RedHat and YellowDog versions. But it's not as good at resolving dependencies as the Debian version, and I wouldn't count on being able to use it to upgrade from one major release to another.

That said, it's a heck of a lot better than raw rpm, and I use it all the time for the machines still stuck in the RH timewarp. There's a GUI front end called synaptic, and a curses-based one called aptitude both of which are available for RH. Good for making that initial pass over the whole package database to see what you're missing.