Hi,
We are currently using Red Hat to serve LTSP, X sessions, DNS, and Gateway
to the outside world. Roughly every two weeks, Mozilla processes starts
rapidly respawning processes until the entire system slows down to a complete
freeze. Try killing those processes and it'll have respawned ten more by the
time you're finished. When we reboot the server (cold boot), the Ext3
partitions frequently NEED a filesystem check, to prevent untold issues
thereafter..... Sometimes not even booting. When we used ReiserFS for the
last 4 yours on other systems, we had many power outages but never had a
problem with the filesystem. Furthermore, it never required any long lasting
filesystem check--which I thought was the main point of a journaling
filesystems. It's nervous waiting for this thing while customers start
walking out the door. After rebooting the server we cannot log into the
console machine directly for at least one day--otherwise, it'll freeze up the
whole system again.
Other grievances with Red Hat are with KDE. It seems virtually all of the
nice little things about it have been removed and we cannot properly theme
the desktops--only the backgrounds and a few other peddy things. The most
important feature to customers has been the little spinning disk that lets
them know that an application is loading--particularly Mozilla, as it takes a
longest to load. We still use KDE as much as possible because it shares its
desktop componants, as where GNOME shares very little of anything. GNOME
seems to be more a political alliance, because there is very rarely any
relation between any of its applications, technically. The resulting
difference in performance and resources is exceptionally significant.
We are testing Gentoo and SuSE 8.2 Professional. Gentoo may be our
ultimate answer but SuSE was MUCH easier to get up and properly running.
Gentoo is impressive in terms of performance and customizability, but takes a
long time even to expirement with. Can it be configured to download patches,
instead of complete source files? We'll use SuSE until we get a stable
Gentoo system up to satisfaction. Another concern is stability--how often
will updates break Gentoo? We need security updates quickly, but will those
updates break the system? We need to learn how to:
(A) Update only security patches
(B) Update only specific packages
(D) Roll-back updates on specific packages
(E) Automate the checking for security updates
Knowing how to do all this will most likely mediate the risks
sufficiently. If we can get all of this down pat, I might even decide to
learn Python.
--
Matthew C. Tedder
SimpFlex Technologies, Inc.
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