Essentially both labs had their own in-house compiled versions of RHEL already for slightly different reasons but CERNs was called LTS (long term support) Linux and their original goal was to keep doing security patches to older RHEL versions after Redhat declared EOL ( End Of Life) on earlier versions of RHEL because their were essentially appliances built for labs that were it was difficult to migrate the apps to newer versions of RHEL and at the time Redhat only provided patches for a version for about 2 years for a version of RHEL if I remember correctly. The problem is when you install something in a facility connected directly or by proximity with less that two firewalls in between to a secure US government facility it must have all security patches for any installed software within a few months of the creation of the fix for the security hole. Also every new version of any OS needs to be evaluated for security prior to being connected. So for CERN since so many US Government agencies already used RHEL, and the time its was so popular in the US, that any one in the US who knew linux had used Reheat at some point; it was really the only choice.
As a matter of fact I can remember in the late 90s being so synotimous with linux in the US that I was having a problem with compiling a program due to a Redhat only bug caused by a patch they put into gcc so I ran into 4 different software stores asking if they had any linux distro other than redhat, the first three store I was told no the 4th store told me yea we have plenty and then walked me over to a wall filled floor to sealing of various different redhat (box set v5.x pre RHEL) box sets with various different support add-ons like the "secure webserver" version that included a script on an additional 3.5 floppy to set up a openssl CA for you, but the were all redhat.
Fermilabs motivation to choose RHEL over SuSE I'm not sure of but I suspect since they are funded by multiple countries and the nature of their research they may have also run into the US Government security rules and its just easier in that case to go with the flow than deal with the long drawn out process of getting a different distro certified.
-- Sent from my HP Pre3
On Mar 21, 2013 12:11 AM, Yasha Karant <[email protected]> wrote:
This is perhaps a silly question, but I would appreciate a URL or some
other explanation.
A faculty colleague and I were discussing the differences between a
supported enterprise Linux and any of a number of "beta" or "enthusiast"
linuxes (including TUV Fedora). A question arose for which I have no
answer: why did SL -- that has professional paid personnel at Fermilab
and CERN -- select to use the present TUV instead of SuSE enterprise
that is RPM (but yast, not yum) based, and has to release full source
(not binaries/directly useable) for the OS environment under the same
conditions as TUV of SL? SuSE is just as stable, but typically
incorporates more current versions of applications and libraries than
does the TUV chosen. Any insight would be appreciated. If SuSE had
been chosen (SuSE originally was from the EU and thus a more natural
choice for CERN), what would we be losing over SL?
To the best of my knowledge, there is no SuSE Enterprise clone
equivalent to the SL or CentOS clones of TUV EL.
Yasha Karant
