[LON-CAPA-admin] Fedora v. Enterprise Linux (good price on enterprise)

[lucasm at ohiou.edu]

Lynn,

You might want to be careful about the fine print. These prices are for 
students or faculty for the own personal systems. In other places they
differentiate between non-production campus subscriptions and production 
subscriptions. I don't know if we can get away with the $50 variety for 
our servers or not.

Later,
Mark

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Lynn Thorp wrote:

> Red Hat Enterprise has some academic pricing that is very good. $50/year 
> subscription for server and $25/year for desktop.
> http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/education/indiv/
>
> Lynn Thorp
> This might not get to the right thread.  My "new" (we just have ndsu.edu, not 
> ndsu.nodak.edu now) e-mail address wasn't registered yet and the e-mail got 
> rejected so I'm reposting after I resubscribed.
> Peter Kovac wrote:
>
>> Greetings~
>>
>>    The good news about future Suse packages/installers got me thinking.  As 
> dangerous as that is, I'd also like to make a possibly inflamatory 
> suggestion: I think LON-CAPA needs to replace Fedora with an Enterprise Linux 
> distribution as its development base.
>>
>>    I don't want to start a "my distro is better than yours" flamewar.  I 
> do, however, think that for L-C to grow and become more marketable, L-C 
> *needs* an "Enterprise" base.  Consider the following points:
>>
>>    - Fedora has a 6-month release cycle
>>    - L-C has required new versions of the base O/S for Fedora upgrades at 
> least 3 times since the Fedora project start, including for v.2
>>    - Fedora is a non enterprise-supported, community O/S with no real 
> corporate backing
>>    - Some versions of Fedora have also been plagued by release bugs.
>>
>>    The kind of people that make large-scale IT decisions don't like to see 
> that kind of thing.  From previous discussions with developers, providing 
> generic packages for L-C is a fairly difficult and time-consuming task given 
> the current setup (filesystem structure, etc).  For a stop-gap, I think 
> producing a RHEL-equivalent package/installer would be a very good step.
>>
>>    RHEL-equivalent O/S's descend from the same source as Fedora, hopefully 
> making the transition easier.  More importantly, RHEL has a seven-year life 
> cycle, significant market penetration, a good reputation, and the possibility 
> of purchased, enterprise-grade support.  RHEL has also become a de facto 
> compatability standard.
>>
>>    Those features, of course, cost money.  However, RedHat makes SRPM's (*) 
> freely available out of the kindness of their heart (oh, and the GPL).  This 
> means that there are several excellent free and reliable projects based on 
> RHEL that would provide a nice base for small users without the expensive, 
> customized support options.  Centos [ http://www.centos.org/ ] (popular 
> community project, base of such things as the ROCKS cluster distribution - 
> http://rocksclusters.org/ ) and Scientific Linux [ http://scientificlinux.org 
> ] (produced by Fermilab and CERN) are both excellent options.  Having a 
> RHEL-equivalent installation package will make L-C much more palatable to MIS 
> types and people managing large groups of machines.
>>
>>    Just my $.02.  And yes, if the summer continues to be slow and people 
> agree with me, I'm willing to work on the transition.  ;-)
>>
>>    -P
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> =======================================================================
> Lynn Thorp                           e-mail : Lynn.Thorp at ndsu.edu
> Systems Administrator                Phone  : (701) 231-7786
> Dept. of Computer Science            Office : IACC 258A19, NDSU
>  and Operations Research            Fax    : (701) 231-8255
> North Dakota State University        http://www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu
> =======================================================================
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Lucas					email: lucasm at ohiou.edu
252D Clippinger Lab  				phone: (740)597-2984
Department of Physics and Astronomy             fax:   (740)593-0433
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701