How Can I Justify Using Red Hat When CentOS Exists? – Slashdot

How Can I Justify Using Red Hat When CentOS Exists? – Slashdot.

by Paska (801395) Alter Relationship on Sunday October 30, @05:20PM (#37888510) Homepage

CentOS’s release schedule has been really struggling recently. Release 6 was almost edging a 250 day delay over Red Hat.

CentOS have still to announce an official date for 6.1 to be released, which Red Hat released back on May 19th. There is a lot of uncertainty regarding CentOS releases and as such in my opinion makes CentOS not the ideal choice for the enterprise.

Other advantages are Red Hat’s support services and the Red Hat Network (RHN) are second to none. RHN alone is what convinced us to pony up money for licenses.

The gist of the advantages are: better support, quicker updates/security fixes, easier and centralised management of multiple servers with the only disadvantage being a price tag.

Interesting discussion about this over on Slashdot.

OpenWrt

OpenWrt is described as a Linux distribution for embedded devices.

Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developer, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.

via OpenWrt.

The Perfect Xen 3.0.1 Setup For Debian

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.1) on a Debian Sarge (3.1) system.

Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called “virtual machines” or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers’ web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it’s more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

Via The Perfect Xen 3.0.1 Setup For Debian | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

This howto works for other distros as well.

I’ve gone this far without ever having to compile a kernel … until now.  🙂  Though the howto is a bit dated, I downloaded the latest xen distro here. (xen 4.1.1)

SPARC T4 looks to be good enough to stave off defections to x86, Linux

For those who are still members of the Sparc/Solaris installed base—those who haven’t headed for x86 or Itanium already—the T4 is potentially good news. It provides a way to preserve investments in existing Solaris skills and software while getting a significant performance boost over the year-old T3. The T4 will likely stop some defections, buy Oracle time as it prepares its next generation of processor, and reduce the company’s dependence on reselling Fujitsu SPARC 64 systems to run its own database.

via SPARC T4 looks to be good enough to stave off defections to x86, Linux.

How to build your own Linux distro

Few new distros are created from scratch, although it is possible – see the Linux From Scratch HOWTOs at www.linuxfromscratch.org if you want to try it. Apart from getting a head start, there are other reasons to hang on the coat-tails of another distro, and probably the biggest is package compatibility. Consider that there are over 18,000 free software packages considered good enough to be in Debian, and many more that aren’t on that project’s radar.

How to build your own Linux distro | TuxRadar Linux.

Inside the Linux boot process

Summary: The process of booting a Linux® system consists of a number of stages. But whether you’re booting a standard x86 desktop or a deeply embedded PowerPC® target, much of the flow is surprisingly similar. This article explores the Linux boot process from the initial bootstrap to the start of the first user-space application. Along the way, you’ll learn about various other boot-related topics such as the boot loaders, kernel decompression, the initial RAM disk, and other elements of Linux boot.

via Inside the Linux boot process.

Device eth0 does not seem to be present error after cloning a linux machine

After some searching, i found out that there is a device manager for the Linux kernel named “udev” which remembers the settings from the NIC of the virtual machine before it was cloned. To fix the issue simply delete the the following file and it will be regenerated properly on reboot.

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

via Random IT Stuff » ‘Device eth0 does not seem to be present’ error after cloning a linux machine.

This worked for me with a VirtualBox clone that was giving me problems.  Google is simply an amazing resource!  And kudos to the linked site for coming up first with a no nonsense answer.

How Linux mastered Wall Street

Others just use off-the-shelf distributions and pay consultants to tweak the settings for maximum performance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now the dominant Linux distribution among exchanges, Lameter said. Red Hat counts among its customers the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, New York Mercantile Exchange, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Eurex derivative exchange and Philippine Stock Exchange.

via How Linux mastered Wall Street | ITworld.