+1 for CentOS. I use Fedora at home, simply because I want to be on the "cutting edge." However, there's a lot to be said for the stability of CentOS. IIRC, CentOS is all the packages for RedHat Enterprise that have been rebuilt and "de-branded" or "re-branded" and don't have the paid-for support of RHEL. If you want to pay for support, anything that works on CentOS should work on RHEL. But, don't take my word as gospel. J
John-AldrichTile-Tools From: Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:53 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Abandoning Cisco Fedora and CentOS are not that bad, if you're coming from FreeBSD. I would definitely look at CentOS, because Fedora has a high entropy factor. I've always been a huge BSD fan, but it's utility is being marginalized all the time. Really wish that community would wake up. On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]> wrote: Well, we *are* a relatively small firm. But, we've got about 230 people on site, including about 80-90 (if memory serves) hardware and software engineers, and then there are the sales staff, and our customer installation/support staff, etc. We do need relatively serious bandwidth, though we couldn't justify the cost of a full DS3. We have a 5mbit soft cap on the DS3 - if we exceed that limit at the 95th percentile of the course of the month, it's an extra $100/mbit - I can't remember what the base cost is, but I think it's in the $1100 range. We've never exceeded the cap for more than about an hour at a time, and when you factor in the down times overnight and on the weekends, it works out really well. But it's *really* nice to have it for those really large downloads. We got a screaming deal on it because the fiber was in the building, not being used, and NTT was looking for money. We also have a T1, from a different ISP, which isn't being used at the moment. I had planned on implementing BGP on the router I built, but that might have to wait a while. It seems that the manufacturer of the DS3 interface card I bought two of (Sangoma A301) has dropped support for FreeBSD, and only supports Fedora Core and CentOS. I'm not a fan of Linux, so I'm considering my options, and got a quote for a Cisco machine that does DS3 and has a couple NICs in it for about $11k. But, given that there are some interesting drop-in packages for open source routing, I might investigate one of those. Something like XORP, Vyatta, Quagga, or one of the others. I'll have to learn how to configure BGP, but I figure I can get the ISPs to help out with that. Kurt On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 17:57, Richard Stovall <[email protected]> wrote: > <questions prompted by bandwidth envy> > > DS3? Holy cow! Haven't you written here that you're at a small mfg > facility or something like that? What on earth do you use all that > bandwidth for? > > </questions prompted by bandwidth envy> > > >> I *love* my Sidewinders. When I purchased them it was from Secure >> Computing, but they've since been bought by McAfee, I'm afraid. >> >> They have excellent prosy services, which some find annoying, but I >> find very reassuring.. I also find them easy to manage. >> >> I have two at HQ in an HA configuration in front of my DS3, and two >> smaller ones, one in each of my foreign offices. Very nice to manage. >> Of course the reseller was a good part of that. We got them through >> NCA, and the folks I dealt with there were stellar. >> >> I cannot comment on Cisco firewalls, since I've never used them. >> >> Kurt >> >> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ >> ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ >> > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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