"license1.umbc.edu" has been upgraded to (a variant of) Redhat Enterprise 3. Meaning, the magical 'gendisk' system has been upgraded to generate a working
disk image of RHEL3. There are, however, some caveats.
RedHat is nice to put a lot of odd patches into their kernel -- significantly, the
"audit" subsystem and a backport of Thread Local Storage. As we use stock kernels
on our servers, and there aren't very good patches for these around, we don't have them built into our kernel.
The audit subsystem ain't no thang, as a link (created by devfs, of course) to /dev/null for /dev/audit seems to satisfy their libraries instances in being able to write audit records when people log in. TLS, as well, is not a problem, as moving aside the TLS-aware libc/pthread libraries seems to clear this up.
In the end, it's suffice to say that this admin is now officially only using redhat under duress. If your linux distro can't handle users putting a "stock"
kernel on it elegantly, your linux distro ain't my distro.
Comments (1)
I understand that we have a site license for RHEL, so I suppose it behooves us to take advantage of it; but if not RH, what distros do you think might do the job better?
I recall briefly a joke on the LUG list a while back about quietly replacing linux with Solaris 10 on the GL systems and not telling anyone ;D
Would switching more of the campus servers to Solaris be a viable alternative to RH?
... On a side note, I think this blog is an excellent idea.
Posted by kherna1 | March 24, 2005 6:28 PM
Posted on March 24, 2005 18:28