When I volunteered to do this review I quickly realized that I was asked to review ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server‘ and not just ‘Red Hat Linux’. Then panic set in. How different was this going to be from regular old Red Hat that I’ve used and relied on for years? Is this going to be a whole new Red Hat with a whole bunch of advanced features that I wouldn’t be able to talk about either because I missed them or because I’m not qualified?
Introduction:
Well I realized during my first installation that this simply was not the case. In fact throughout the entire process I felt entirely at home with RHELAS (wow that acronym was a handful). While there is plenty of cool stuff to talk about in this release, I am going to limit the scope of what I’m going to talk about to just relevant issues new to RHEL and issues relating directly to server installations of this product (scalability performance). If you (the reader) is already familiar with recent Red Hat releases or Fedora, then much of this may not be news to you.
So whats new in this release you ask?
What sort of cool features can I expect from this release that I didn’t have in RHEL 2.1. Well there are quite a few features actually. While they are standard in Fedora and older regular Red Hat releases I figured I’d go over a few of them. The first that jumped out at me is that RHEL 3.0 supports Logical Volume Management. This is a way for an administrator to ‘logically’ manage disk space (rather than physically partition the disk) so that resizing file systems is easy. I would have loved to test this feature for this review but sadly I don’t have access to a machine with enough disk space to make this meaningful (but rest assured this is on my to do list 🙂 ).
RHEL 3.0 also adds support for Native POSIX Threading Libraries. This is simply a new implementation of POSIX threads for Linux. From all that I’ve read this promises greater performance than the older implementation in Linux but since I am not much of a programmer and I don’t feel qualified to go into more detail for fear of getting anything wrong.
The last change Red Hat made that I felt was relevant to a review of this product was to the kernel rpm package. The package was separated into 2 packages: normal and unsupported. This makes quite a but of sense to me simply because it would be unreasonable for Red Hat to support every conceivable piece of hardware someone may be using. This way they can ensure that their core kernel is solid while users have the option of using other drivers/features that are not included by default. Although if one of these unsupported features if one that you need, support can be arranged through Red Hat in some situations.
Installation:
The installation was exactly what I was expecting. Anaconda (Red Hat’s installation program) worked and felt just like Red Hat 9. Except I normally use reiserfs as my file system of preference. I had booted up and where I would have expected the option to format as reiserfs I had nothing. This to me made sense if Red Hat didn’t feel that reiserfs was stable enough for their prime time server OS that they would be expected to support. The only other thing I encountered (or didn’t encounter) that I was used to in the Red Hat install process was the option to install a ‘Personal Desktop’, ‘Workstation’, etc. This again makes sense because the product is named ‘Advanced Server’. The default install included the usual: Gnome, Apache, Samba, and Red Hat’s graphical configuration tools. I accepted the defaults wherever possible for the sake of this review.
Set up a few servers:
First install I did was on my main desktop (AMD T-Bird 1.4, 1 Gig RAM, 60 Gig Western Digital Drive, Sound Blaster Live, nvidia GeForce 4 4600 ti). I had never really used the Red Hat configuration tool for Apache (httpd as Red Hat likes to call it). So I figured that this was as good a time as any my feet wet with this (I had always just edited httpd.conf manually). And since it was installed by default anyway I figured: ‘What the heck?!’. I downloaded the latest phpnuke from the site (www.phpnuke.org). I figured this was was a good test of functionality because it involved apache, php, and mysql to get the entire package working (plus I’ve used it a few times in the past so I knew how it works). I installed the rpm packages required using Red Hat’s graphical package management system. This seemed to go smoothly, but I’m used to the functionality of synaptic and apt, so I was not totally impressed with it, but whatever works. After feeding it the CD’s it asked for the packages were installed. I went to the HTTPD configuration utility and made a few changes to the default document root directory, browsed the rest of the options in the tabs and clicked ‘OK’. Wow that was easy (though I still felt a little weird not editing the con fig file by hand). After creating the necessary database per the phpnuke instructions, restarted the relevant ervices via the handy dandy Red Hat Service Configuration application and my site worked perfect. Just as it had in the past although I must say, it took much less time than when I did in FreeBSD with ports.
I’ve been meaning to test out Squid for some time now too so I took the opportunity to hit 2 birds with one stone and deploy Squid at my house with RHEL. I took an old Dell Optiplex tower I had laying around (PIII 600 with 128 megs, 8 gig drive) to see how RHEL performed on less powerful hardware. The install was basically the same as above accept I didn’t install HTTPD or Samba (since they weren’t necessary). I booted up for the first time and I got a warning that said something to the effect of: ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to run on systems with 256 Megs of RAM or more’. The message timed out and it booted up anyway. Everything worked that I used in spite of the warning (I’m not sure what the point of that was because I (and any good Sys admin should) know that the system I was using is under powered). This time found the Squid rpm and installed it manually (I can’t really get used to the Red Hat graphical package manager). I edited the squid.conf file and again, bingo everything worked fine. At the time of me writing this the server is still sitting here and working fine.
What I Liked:
Well using RHEL was very uneventful because everything I tried on it worked fine. That doesn’t mean this is a perfect distribution, I didn’t do anything extremely involved and I have only used it for about 3 weeks now. The system has been totally stable while I’ve used it. While only using it for 3 weeks is hardly a real yard stick for the long term stability of a server operating system, it doesn’t seg fault daily like my desktop running Fedora Core, which I find to be quite refreshing.
Furthermore since I was already familiar with Red Hat jumping into their Enterprise distribution was easy for me. Anyone (well… pretty much any one) who’s comfortable with Red Hat Linux and Fedora should feel totally comfortable using RHEL.
What I didn’t Like:
I felt from the very beginning that the default install of a server should include almost nothing like OpenBSD does. Including Apache and Samba by default I feel is asking for trouble because administrators who may have a lot of Linux experience could leave an unpatched version of Apache on their server and unknowing leave themselves vulnerable. I would have liked to see a more conservative default installation.
Furthermore it by default boots directly into X Windows. This to me again doesn’t make sense for a server operating system. It is simple enough to edit the inittab file, but again I felt like that was an unnecessary step that shouldn’t have to happen on a server operating system.
This is not a desktop distribution. I know I’m stating the obvious because I was using Advanced Server, but I’m sure that someone out there will or has tried this as a desktop, and found the same thing. Finding rpms of applications I normally take for granted was impossible (example gaim). The obvious alternative is to compile from tar.gz or src-rpm but the reason I use Red Hat is so I don’t have to compile all my applications (I’d use Gentoo if wanted to compile everything 🙂 ).
My last grip (although minor and wont’ apply to RHN users) is the lack of public ally available binary patches. I know src-rpms are available but that was one hassle I really didn’t want to deal with. Call me lazy (and I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think I am at this point) but I would have much rather had binary patches straight from Red Hat.
Conclusion:
If you currently use RHL and are looking at RHEL as an upgrade path to a supported system, I think its a great choice (IMHO). This is especially true if you qualify for the educational deal with Red Hat and can obtain it at a greatly reduced rate. I feel that the normal fee for the system ($1500) is pretty steep but if a company were to find that the advantages out way the cost then this is definitely the way to go.
If you’re just a geek like me, or are really cheap and don’t want to pay for anything, then RHEL is not for you. The release cycle is way too long and finding up to date rpms is nearly impossible. Fedora (or whatever else you prefer) is really the distribution for you. Although stability is not its strong point (go ahead argue with this one 🙂 ) Fedora provides a much more cutting edge platform to sink your teeth into.
About the Author:
I’m currently a Senior at Syracuse University majoring in Information Management and Technology. I’ve been using Red Hat since 5.2 and I have been using it as my primary operating system on all my machines for 2 years now. I also have experience using Solaris 2.6-8, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
“Furthermore it by default boots directly into X Windows. This to me again doesn’t make sense for a server operating system.”
or
“I felt from the very beginning that the default install of a server should include almost nothing like OpenBSD does.”
Its a pity that red hat keeps making all their tools graphical. Perhaps RH should take a hint and either let people use the command line or make ncurses based scripts for config utilities. Does RH really believe that people are that alienated from the command prompt?
Take note RH “Minimal install and for tools: give people the option to use ncurses”.
I don’t use RH so I don’t know if they do have those kind of tools available. Just my humble opinion.
After reading your review – I am now confused as to what exactly the difference between Fedora and Advanced Server is. I always assumed that Advanced Server has many more GUI admim/system tools and extended some of the functionality in the existing admin/system tools. The review mentioned nothing “new” compared to the desktop version.
Is the support contract the only reason to chose Server of Workstation?
You pay for the support. Everything in it is GPL, and available as other distributions (“whitebox” I believe).
The source code is free. You can download and compile it yourself (less the proprietary tools). Now please go troll somewhere else. Shouldn’t you be defending the latest Microsoft bugs/exploits/tom foolery “IE Bug Lets Fake Sites Look Real”.
>> After reading your review – I am now confused as to what exactly the difference between Fedora and Advanced Server is. I always assumed that Advanced Server has many more GUI admim/system tools and extended some of the functionality in the existing admin/system tools. The review mentioned nothing “new” compared to the desktop version.
Is the support contract the only reason to chose Server of Workstation?
> You pay for the support. Everything in it is GPL, and available as other distributions (“whitebox” I believe).
The reason why I ask is because with SuSE Personal – you don’t get all the admin tools that you get with SuSE Professioal
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
I think RedHat is following the lead of the big 3 (Sun, HP, and IBM). Sun promotes Solaris Management Console and Sun Management Center as if they are the only answer for administering servers. IBM has been looking at replacing smitty and smit with WebSM for some time now, and HP has SAM.
As far as installing X, with Solaris you can use the SUMWreq cluster and not get X. With AIX, if there is a graphics adapter in the system you get X whether you want it or not. And I have never installed HP-UX so I can’t say either way.
And where the graphical interface comes in is when you install something like Oracle (which requires it) unless you perform an unattended installation.
I can administer machines either way, but there is obviously some demand for the GUI because it seems that everybody includes it.
> I can administer machines either way, but there is obviously some demand for the GUI because it seems that everybody includes it.
GUI can become extrememly powerful over directly editting config text files if designed right.
A GUI config application can:
1) check for correct data input
2) limit certain settings when need be
3) allow you to apply the settings much more quickly
A good example, please don’t flame me, is IIS. You can in the matter of minute setups: a certificate, multiple virtual directorys, aliasing, filters, permissions all of which validates your settings before they are applied. Now yes, you can do the same with httpd.conf but it would take much longer and you have to be much more careful when applying the settings.
My intent was not to portray graphical utilities in a negative light, infact I found the apache and samba utilities be extremely easy to use and much quicker than doing it by hand. I just found that it was a little hard to get used to simply because I had been using the config file directly for so long. And Robert Escue is right, things like Oracle need a gui to install, I just an not sure that X should start up by default when the machine powers on.
“My last grip (although minor and wont’ apply to RHN users) is the lack of public ally available binary patches. I know src-rpms are available but that was one hassle I really didn’t want to deal with. Call me lazy (and I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think I am at this point) but I would have much rather had binary patches straight from Red Hat.”
The binary RPMS are available through RHN, which is included in the purchase price of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Your point about GUI’s is very valid. I as a reader did not take your wording as being negative in any way, shape or form. I was expressing a personal preference.
The typical default GUI install leaves x listening to ports ~6000-6047 (if I remember correctly). Since its a server, there is really no need to use those resources for a GUI. Personally I believe that a person could use CLI or a ncurses config tool as easily as a GUI without using as many system resources.
People, I ask forgiveness. I was not trying to smack GUI’s. They are a very useful and powerful tool. My only point that I wanted to convey is of choice. I would love to see more ncurses tools. GUI’s are a wonderful. All I wanted to see was a choice. I should have explained myself in a more appropriate manner.
Sorry Andy Richter and people. I didn’t not mean to start a GUI war. Please accept my sincerest apologies.
any other projects that are doing the same type of thing?
i was thinking about trying it but this may just save me some time and effort :o)
Red Hat Enterprise WS 3 would be better value for money had they bundled Crossover Office 2.1 with it. Sure, some purists will say, “ooo, Windows ABI”, but the fact remains that if the customer likes Office 97/2000 but finds that Windows doesn’t “do its thing” then why not win over a customer by simply offering them a bridging piece of software until they find an Office suite they like on Linux?
Like many others I bought in to the RHAS 2.1, I was tasked with bringing up an oracle ias instance. The redhat install was flawless… yet I was able to get as far in the oracle install with 7.2, 9 ( with some relinking ) and gentoo. Oracle imho is not ready for linux… I feel as if RHAS is target to take out Sun, which I think will happen some time, but oracle is not ready for the penguin…
none: no offense taken
Honestly… I would personally prefer ncurses admin tools to what redhat currently offers… simply because i wouldn’t have to waste resources on X. but anyway… maybe i’m totally wrong and X is great… but whatever
That’s wild. I found this article by Andy Richter, while watching Conan O’Brien.
Andy, nice article, but you need to proofread. Lots more than just typos.
X listens on port 6000 only and is not by default accepting any connections other then localhost
If you think running apache, X or whatever by default makes you vulnerable take a look at the default firewall that blocks those connections. the exec-shield that helps prevent stack/buffer/heap/lib overflows or the fact half of these daemons do not even accept connections execept localhost.
there is always that little red globe in the corner telling you to update. There are plenty of things inplace for default security.
Just one note…
RedHat has done a great job with their kernel. It is very responsive, very fast.
What the heck are you thinking RH is making its` business off?
Should they work for free? For me it is totally reasonable that they want to have money to build a solid server distribution and therefore only sell RHAS (RH EL) with a service-contract.
Since this is one of Red Hat’s ‘big’ products shouldn’t we see some benchmarks and installs on some systems with RAID arrays and stuff?
I guess since it’s using the Anaconda installer it should be the same as any other Red Hat product in these respects so maybe I should pipe down.
Nice to hear about what kinda options it gives you when installing at any rate. Good work.
I work for a small Unix services company, and we’ve pretty much ruled out AS except on co-located managed hosts, where we can pass along the cost of the service contract on to the customer (basically the AS machines are the same price as our Debian or *BSD machines plus the monthly cost of AS). It was kind of a shock to discover that over a three year period, Linux came out to be significantly more expensive than Windows or OSX.
The review itself was pretty spot-on. I do have one small complaint, and it comes from drinking the OpenBSD Kool-Aid. OpenBSD machines are so secure, not because of the code auditing or their design, it’s because they don’t do anything out of the box. Once you open them up so you can actually do something with them, they’re just as likely to get 0wn3d as any other BSD box. Well, maybe not, because the performance is worse. Having Apache turned on by default is probably a good idea, seeing as how the majority of “server” machines will use some kind of httpd.
I agree there should be as little as possible installed out of the box, like gentoo or debian can be. This has always annoyed me about redhat.
I can only speak for Oracle 8 and 9 but X is not needed to install Oracle EXCEPT the package….
Xfree86-libs
With that installed you can output the display of the Oracle install to a machine with an Xserver running whether that be Linux BSD OSX or Windows (running something like X-win32)
” The first that jumped out at me is that RHEL 3.0 supports Logical Volume Management.”
LVM has been in RH since at least RH 8. Pretty ordinary article.
What about if I download the SRPMs of the RHEL3 kernel, build and install on my RHL9? Will it work? Will I have any advantage? Will I have RHEL3 running on my workstatio? Which are the differences between the 2 kernels?
This is RHEL Advanced Server people, if you are an admin, and you do not know how to pick the apps to install, then why blame Redhat. The default install is most probably for people who want to be good to go in fifteen minutes. If you worry so much abotu security, read their Security Primer. Lock the box down yourself. If you do not want Apache installed, uncheck httpd. Its all available in Anaconda. You cannot simply slate Redhat for the choices they made. If we were to have a discussion over here about what should be on or off by default, we would not come to a consensus.
You mentioned using PHP and MySQL, but I had heard that there was no mysql-server package that comes with RHEL AS, nor is it available on RHN. Did you download mysql-server yourself, from mysql.com, or is my information false?
“I agree there should be as little as possible installed out of the box, like gentoo or debian can be. This has always annoyed me about redhat.”
At least with RedHat 9, the minimal install is pretty minimal. Most people, like myself, get lazy and click “install everything” because they don’t have any disk space issues. But the option is there if you want it.
Re: graphical config tools:
Something people don’t consider is that you _don’t_ need X11 going on the server to use these. On the server I admin, I just ssh in, start redhat-config-users, and up pops the interface on my local machine, with acceptable drawing performance. There’s really no drawback to GUI tools anymore, unless you’re doing something very, very weird that the tools don’t support (which does happen!).
Re: mySQL packages
There’s a mySQL SRPM in the RHEL3 sources, so it’s almost certain that it’s got some amount of support.
Re: Crossover Office
There’s no real point in bundling Crossover Office with RHELWS. A “workstation” typically connotes an engineering or design workstation, where you’d be doing serious work with CAD or other such programs. It’s not usually what you put on the secretary’s desk for typing up a memo. And, fact is, why not just use OpenOffice? If the secretary’s on Linux, presumably everyone else is…
There’s also support costs to be considered. The contract you make is with Red Hat. Supporting MS Office for Windows on Linux is not trivial, and Red Hat (wisely, IMHO) has decided that they don’t want to take the burden.
The article was quite good overall, and I look forward to installing the server “academic edition” variant.
-Erwos
why aren’t server products reviewed by people qualified to do it, with hardware to match?
I mean, who besides scriptkiddies and wannabes run this “Advanced Server” products on hardware which is basically a game PC? If I want to read a server product review, I want to know how it deals with raid configurations, performs on server centric benchmarks, how manageable it is inside a larger farm. Not how pretty the installer looks (does anyone actually install lots of servers from scratch off the CD with a custom install?) and what version of Gnome it comes with (I know, the reviewer didn’t mention this, but I conveniently use this occasion to bitch and moan about this kind of “reviews” in general). In this case the reviewer himself states he’s not really qualified to do a decent review of this product. So here I am wondering why he did actually write about it then. Just to have his name splattered all over the frontpage of this website? This sort of site pollution is not of much value to anyone but the self interrest of the reviewer.
Also, on the subject of reviews, why are a lot of reviews I read done by college students? Is it only because they have the time to do it? I mean it sure isn’t the quality of the reviews which seems to attract people to publish the stuff. Reviewing stuff properly is hard. I wish people would put some more effort into doing it properly, and write a decent report about it. Seems that reporting is a skill which isn’t tought in said colleges anymore. Pity.
I guess they don’t want to make RHEL too different than Fedora so you feel comfortable using it.
I didn’t know Andy Richter is in school again. I saw him on Comedy Central’s last special. It wasn’t too bad. Is there going to be another season of A R Controls the Universe?
well it would be nice to have tesets done on real hardware.
but real hardware isnt cheap. if you have acesses to real hardware the you should sign up as a tester and write a rewiew.i mean this is not a service we pay for so we cant force people to buy cool hardware just to test stuff.and yes alot of students have more time but i also thing that students have a bigger intrest of checking out new stuff.
Hey, I’m a college student and I want server benchmarks.
Also, I’m really tired of install articles, I want to see an
article called “The first year of running XXXXX linux as a
server” where XXXXX is some distro, I’m going to be
purchasing a small 1u rack and run it as a server, I could
write a review in a year and a couple months…..
“There’s a mySQL SRPM in the RHEL3 sources, so it’s almost certain that it’s got some amount of support.”
Yes, but that’s only for the MySQL client programs (mysql, mysqladmin, mysqldump, etc.) and libraries. No server!
“Just one note…
RedHat has done a great job with their kernel. It is very responsive, very fast.”
are ya kiding everybody here? 5 years (not much in the life) using RH, and now I have made a move to Slackware. It is only two words ya said: responsive and fast. No way to honour two of these words on RH which it is actually right on Slackware (a quite careful comparission was carried out by myself between RH and Slack on the same system b4 I have made a move). Even Gnome, a RH defacto long time is still far behind Dropline in Slackware or in Slackware Gnome (Gnome goes w/ Slack distro) about speed and responsiveness, and not often to see bugs as working on slackware env.//
I dunt blame RH, just wanna say something which is true. RH is always next to me at work, but Slackware is the best in my selection.
I’m a slacker too, since 1996 =)
It is installed on all my comp/servers at home (5 in total) and it rocks.
Bur at work, for a customer, I’ve installed RH9 and RHLES 3 on the same server for a test and I can confirm that between RH9 and RHLES, there are big performance gain in favor of the RHLES.
I have been using Fedora on my laptop since a couple of days after it was released and have yet to see a serious crash leave alone a kernel crash.
chocolatecheesecake – no self respecting admin would install an office suite on a server.
I can confirm that RedHat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server does not contain the mysql-server package. This must be a review on one of the RedHat rebuilds, note the author states that he wishes he had binary rpm upgrades.
Having undertaken the rebuild process myself, I can also confirm that rebuilding from source does generate a mysql-server package.
This is going to suck for all the small time LAMP’s (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) because they will have to generate their own mysql-server rpm and even with a support contract, they will have to support their own mysql-server.