Re: Anyone upgraded from 5.0 to 5.1?

[Eric L. Green <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

On Sun, 31 May 1998, Tom Diehl wrote:
> On Sun, 31 May 1998, Eric Lee Green <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > definite place in the corporate world. I'm just glad Red Hat listened to all of
> > us in the business community when we said we needed something stable as well as
> > something bleeding edge.  
> Is 60+ days of uptime unstable?? I have 3 5.0 boxes here and have never 
> had them crash for any reason except a power failure that lasts longer than 
> the ups batteries. Loads vary from light to very heavy. What is the beef?

There are two kinds of stability: program stability, and deployment
stability.

For us, with servers scattered over a 250,000 square mile area, deployment
stability is crucial. When we deploy a server we cannot justify doing an
operating system upgrade on it for at least a year. We only recently have
upgraded our last Red Hat 3.0.3 servers to Red Hat 4.2, and that only
because that district upgraded to have Internet connectivity and RH 3.0.3
is a security hole. This was a major endeavor, taking one technician four
days total to drive to all of the schools in that district with a CD-ROM
and boot disk. The most time-consuming part was cleaning up the
configuration afterwards -- all the old configuration info was saved in
.rpmsave files, but the appropriate information had to be placed back into
the regular config files. I estimate that this cost us around $200 per day
in direct expenses (hotel, gas, meals, wear-and-tear, etc.) and more than
that in indirect expenses (while he was driving around with his CD-ROM he
could have been doing something that actually made us money). The only
saving grace is that we convinced the district to let us upgrade the
memory at the same time, letting us charge them a service fee for the
memory installation, which partially paid back the costs. 

This does not matter as long as a previous stable version continues to be
supported with basic security fixes for a reasonable amount of time.
However, it was obvious from the first that RH 5.0 was not going to be the
last in the RH 5 series, and that all support for RH 5.0 would be
discontinued as other releases in the RH 5 series were brought out. Thus
we have not deployed RH 5.0 in any of our schools. 

Point: Stability is not just machine uptime. Stability encompasses a
number of factors, including deployment stability. As long as upgrades are
available we can easily install them via wide-area network or modem. The
problem comes when upgrade RPMs are not available for a particular
release, such as with RH 5.0 shortly. 

Now, personally, I am still running RH 5.0 here in the office on my
workstation, and with the latest set of upgrades it is trouble-free and
quite pleasant to use. I am running RH 5.1 on my machine at home and
having fun. But slobbering over techno-goodies doesn't make them
appropriate for use in a commercial setting. There are factors other than
technical superiority which explain why an operating system, or particular
versions of it, are useful for commercial purposes. 

Eric Lee Green   [EMAIL PROTECTED]          Executive Consultants
Systems Specialist               Educational Administration Solutions
             See http://members.tripod.com/~e_l_green


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