Recently NewsForge had the chance to test out Red Hat’s new version of its popular Enterprise Linux product, which Red Hat is officially unveiling today. The results were somewhat disappointing, as RHEL4 offers few compelling reasons for current RHEL3 customers to upgrade. For those considering new deployments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 will be a more attractive option than its predecessor, but how will it fare against rival products from Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Mandrakesoft? Another RHEL 4.0 article can be found at LinuxPlanet.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4: An overview
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Eugenia Loli
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my parents just bought rhel 3 ws and i installed today and i don’t think they want to push back the date of the installation of their medical software for redhat to be upgraded, besides i don’t think the software will run on it, the idiots installing the medical software don’t know much about linux ;-p
Read the review from LinuxPlanet. It is far better (and longer) :
– “RHEL4 is a huge step forward for Red Hat and should be a breath of fresh air to businesses who require the stability and support associated with and enterprise Linux distribution, but desperately needed or wanted new versions of the kernel, servers, and applications. If you were waiting for newer features or software to appear in the Enterprise Linux space, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is well worth a look. If you’re already a RHEL customer, run, don;t walk, to your support representative for an upgrade.”
btw, RHEL feature :
– SeLinux
– ext3 online resize
– Gnome 2.8 + hal/G-V-M
– KDE 3.3
– gcc 3.4
– Xorg 6.8
Novell nor Mandrake does not provide these feature and many other.
> my parents just bought rhel 3 ws
So they have one year support and they can download RHEL 4 via rhn.
A commercially supported SELinux/Apache infrastructure is, it seems to me, going to be very attractive to many of Red Hat’s customers. If used correctly, and I think that Red Hat has managed to shake out most of the problems between FC2 and FC3, this has the potential to greatly reduce the damage from security holes. With SELinux, even if you find an exploit for a server and get a shell, you’re a severely crippled user (even if your UID is root) with the ability to affect only a small sandbox.
I’d like it if SELinux were simpler, but it’s still a very nice piece of work, and it’s tricky enough that having good support is going to be an issue.
I’m debating upgrading. I (personally) will likely have to because I already decided to move my machines at work over to it.
Just checked and the only Version 4 I see are Beta 2.
not that easy. this is a doctor’s office i can’t simply do the upgrade because its there. the software hasn’t been tested or anything at all. people’s lives are at stake! besides even people in a normal enterprise wouldn’t upgrade for a couple of months.
re: mike distrowatch says its gonna come out tomorrow newsforge jumped the gun.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat
oooo its probably gonna be released tomorrow because thats the first day of linux world in boston.
I really like RHEL 3 as I use it for a web server (and will deply more most likely). It’s a great product.
I will probably start using Suse for other stuff (file services) but will stick with RHEL for the web stuff.
Besides the 2.6 kernel, which is really a minor improvment considering how well 2.4 was made, there is very little that as new in this release. Yeah, Gnome 2.8 looks really nice, but a more polished GUI is usually what people mock Microsoft for. I think, with this release, RedHat Linux is now officially behind. When purchasing a system, I would really only consider Windows 2003, Novell Linux, and Solaris 10.
I think the newsforge article is somewhat biased. The author doesn’t understand what people use RH for. I think he looks to much on it as it was a desktop os. RH did a lot of nice things; SELinux/2.6 kernel/ext3 resize etc etc. These changes don’t look much, but that’s wrong. We are very happy RH customers, it’s rock stable and i’m 100% sure RH will be too and offer speed improvements too.
that RH dropped the old (started back in 8.0) Bluecurve Gnome (1-bottom panel to mimick KDE) and went with Gnome/FC3 layout by default.
I don’t know just seems intresting
I can’t think of a good reason to pay Red Hat’s high prices
for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When I can use another distro for free. What makes RHEL, so special to make any body dish out that kind of cash for it? I really would like to know.
Having worked with every distro out there and having to deploy RHES this last week for a customer i can personally say i think it sucks. Much rather deploy Debian or Mandrake Corporate Server, but some stupid companies only certify their apps on redhat. I am already working on modifying the program to get it to run on debian. I think its bogus to be paying this much for support and yet my updates can only be done with up2date, no yum or apt-get. To make things even lamer i get a whole whopping 18K download speed during the updates and that is on a 3 meg line. Hell even my customers downloading from me get faster connections than that.
Redhat has the corporate market but they still do not have a good linux distro in my opinion
“Redhat has the corporate market but they still do not have a good linux distro in my opinion”
I totally disagree. I’ve been supporting boxes with RHEL3 as my day job, and there’s nothing better than RHN for fast and easy administration – you do use the web interface for administration of multiple machines, right? I’ve never seen any speed problems, either, but then again, I don’t waste my employer’s time by standing in front of the computers while they update.
If RHEL4 is a stable, supported FC3, Red Hat has absolutely nothing to worry about. RHN is something magical, and most of the people who bash RHEL4 have absolutely no idea how it works, or that it even exists.
-Erwos
I can’t think of a good reason to pay Red Hat’s high prices
for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
—-
support and SLA
“Having worked with every distro out there and having to deploy RHES this last week for a customer i can personally say i think it sucks”
that sort of criticism is not constructive
RHN is something magical, and most of the people who bash RHEL4 have absolutely no idea how it works, or that it even exists.
Absolutely on point.
The typical review / or poster talks incessantly about what kernel level RHES is at – or what the install screen looks like. Most of them show what true amatuers they are given the fact that they *never* seem to mention RHN.
Sure, if you are deploying 1 or 2 servers — feel free to use {debian | *bsd | fedora} they all make fine servers. When you need to deploy 40 different servers in 20 different cities give me a call and let me know how that is working.
If the average poster spent 3 minutes previewing the RHN site they would suddenly *get* what RHES is really all about.
For instance, we have 3 profiles here; router, samba, and database. When a new server comes in – I do a minimal install and assign it to profile. Automagically, it will download all needed packages and even install the customized config files that I have.
” RHN is something magical, and most of the people who bash RHEL4 have absolutely no idea how it works, or that it even exists.
Absolutely on point. ”
lets get Redhat GFS, SELinux enabled by default and so on to this list
The 2.6 Linux kernel has replaced the heavily patched and modified Red Hat 2.4 kernel, providing better scalability and expanded hardware support
Um despite what the detractors say the 2.6 kernel upgrade is a huge improvement.
At one point Redhat was a low cost choice. Today you can get Solaris or AIX for significantly cheaper than what Redhat is charging for RHEL. I just can’t believe how much they charge for this stuff. In terms of quality of support how can Redhat compete with IBM and Sun? Redhat got its start being an alternative to Unix, now it’s just as expensive.
> Today you can get Solaris or AIX for significantly cheaper than what Redhat is charging for RHEL.
Compare what give RHEL EL (349 $) and Solaris.
Do you have servers, development tools, _source_, … in Solaris ?
NO !
If RHEL is too expensive for you, use Fedora.
Check /usr/sfw/bin on a Solaris 10 machine with a Full Distribution installation and you will find GCC 3.4.3 (amongst other things). And what servers are you looking for, Solaris 10 supports NFS, NIS, NIS+, LDAP, and Samba “out of the box”.
I wonder how long until CentOS comes out with version 4.
Not too long, centos 4 is already in beta.
I wouldn’t hold my breath considering RedHat is touting EAL4 compliance and it has not been submitted yet (http://niap.nist.gov). Common Criteria evaluation normally takes about six months to complete.
saw rhel 4 at linux world boston today! linux world rocks.
> Check /usr/sfw/bin on a Solaris 10 machine with a Full Distribution installation and you will find GCC 3.4.3 (amongst other things). And what servers are you looking for, Solaris 10 supports NFS, NIS, NIS+, LDAP, and Samba “out of the box”.
In addition to all that you get some good pieces of Java Enterprise System middleware stack with Solaris 10 for free. For instance you get the platform addition of the industrial strength Application Server licensed for both development and deployment (including a message queue) plus a Directory Server, which is probably the best directory server product on the market. Solaris 10 is a much better deal on any count than RHEL.
“If RHEL is too expensive for you, use Fedora.”
No, he should not.
Straight for the Red Hat’s mouth, Fedora:
Recommended for: Developer or highly technical enthusiast using Linux in non-critical computing environments.
Hardware certifications: none.
Industry benchmarks: none.
Red Hat support options: none (community supported).
Update lifetime: N/A.
++++++++++++++++++
I am not going to bet my server farm on it.
Folks if your worried about price, take a look at Novell’s SLES, its much more affordable compared to RHEL.
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/
I have my IBM server (xSeries 445) with Fedora Core 3 running an enterprise web application that is used all over the country (Colombia) with a very high concurrency and it is very stable and so far it has 70+ days of uptime and counting.
The server is an SMP 8x P4 2.2 GHz with hyper threading (this means the kernel sees 16 proccessors), 18Gb of RAM and 80GB of hard disk.
I’m not saying that RHEL has no merit, in fact I think it is pretty cool, but Fedora is a very good product too that is up to the task.
Cheers.
” And what servers are you looking for, Solaris 10 supports NFS, NIS, NIS+, LDAP, and Samba “out of the box”.
selinux out of the box
And I am willing to bet in the vast majority of the cases where RedHat Linux will be used, selinux will NOT be used. Mandatory Access Control (like Privileges in Solaris (man ppriv)) have to be planned very carefully in order to prevent problems where users cannot access resources and applcations do not work correctly.
“And I am willing to bet in the vast majority of the cases where RedHat Linux will be used, selinux will NOT be use”
you havent heard of targetted policy then
Using Mandatory Access Control for anything other than processing very sensitive data is overkill. The scenario I am looking at is using RHEL with Oracle (whether it is Oracle 9i/10g/RAC doesn’t matter). I don’t think it is simply a matter of turning on selinux and “off you go”. There is going to be some configuration involved before everything is “good to go”
Using selinux, like Privileges in Solaris and performing a CAPP/EAL4+ install of AIX 5.2 or 5.3 is a tradeoff in better security and some performance loss due to the increased logging and auditing of actions by users. This at best is a judgement call for anyone deploying the product.
Using Mandatory Access Control for anything other than processing very sensitive data is overkill.
—
not true anymore. MAC if properly implemented can act as a generic security mechanism for the masses. redhat is doing precisely that with fc3,fc4 and rhel4. fc3 already is running with selinux enabled and activated by default in this machine i am running. when complexity was a big thing preventing this from working, redhat has done a good job with the targetted policy.
“I don’t think it is simply a matter of turning on selinux and “off you go”. There is going to be some configuration involved before everything is “good to go” ”
it actually is. the default targetted policy should just work out of the box. if not file bugs or start a discussion within the fedora-selinux list.
“Using selinux, like Privileges in Solaris and performing a CAPP/EAL4+ install of AIX 5.2 or 5.3 is a tradeoff in better security and some performance loss due to the increased logging and auditing of actions by users.”
performance loss is meagre compared to the amount of security you get. again targetted policy makes this very convenient. read the fc3 selinux faq for more details
“This at best is a judgement call for anyone deploying the product.
”
this is a judgement call from someone actively developing and deploying selinux systems
I just purchased the acidemic version or redhat desktop for $25. It comes with one year of RHN. The 4 discs and extras disc are downloading at a crappy 3.5K a sec. Hopefully it picks up speed over night.
I was pretty pleased with Fedora so this should be about the same hopefully. I dont mine paying for Red Hat’s software if it does what I need it to.
I just got back from a conference where RedHat spoke about RHEL (including 4) and I posed the question about selinux and the targeted policy. The engineer stated the targeted policy only covers 10 applications, and it would not affect Oracle, which is good. But if you wanted to include Oracle you would have to modify the policy based on the installation and desired Oracle features and level of access. This would require some testing based on how Oracle is installed and would be used.