[KLUG Members] Re: Latest SUSE stability? -- what "features" are you looking for (desktop or server)?

[Bryan J. Smith]

Quoting Adam Tauno Williams <adam@morrison-ind.com>:
> I've always been a RedHat man.   But they are still lagging in a couple
> of useful features, without patching the kernel.

"Useful features" for desktops???  Or servers???
Exactly _what_ "features" are you looking for?

> Talking to Stu at the last meeting led me to believe that SuSE
> provides features missing in RedHat.

SuSE does a lot of things RedHat doesn't, out of sheer "kitchen sink" mentality.
 As does Mandrake, only more out of sheer "bleeding (and badly ;-) edge."

> Since I'm on the verge of finally upgrading our primary file
> server I'm evaluating my options and seriously considering
> switching it to SuSE.  Any impressions on the stability of
> recent SuSE releases?

SuSE has a "release model" similiar to RedHat which makes it easier to follow
(unlike Caldera and others -- although Mandrake has "changed" as of late to be
more "RedHat-like" again).

> The primary load on the server is Samba and NFS.  I've had
> terrible luck with both NFS and file locking on non-RedHat
> distros, so I'll admit that I'm a bit gun-shy.

And rightly so.

The #1 reason why ResierFS was a "no-no" on my file servers for the longest time
was the NFS issues.  But both SuSE and Mandrake supported it regardless.

Back in the 2.2 days, SuSE reverted to using a more unstable, non-Linux client
unfriendly NFS daemon.  If you had non-Linux clients, forget it.  But once 2.4.1
came out with ReiserFS, they worked hard to patch the kernel with NFS fixes. 
But there are still some nagging issues with ReiserFS' non-traditional UFS design.

Mandrake just ignored such details completely (and usually does, which makes it
a "no-no" for servers IMHO).

RedHat, on the otherhand, is the most file server-focused vendor (and even
downplayed the desktop, until 8.0), hence the NFS+Samba reliability.  Hence why
they've always looked to Ext3.

SGI's XFS also runs quite smoothly atop of RedHat distros -- and I'd recommend
that over any distro that ships with it natively.  I also like its feature set
versus ReiserFS, and the performance difference is debateable (it all about what
you serve, XFS can be faster than ReiserFS for some things -- especially large
filesysetms).


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.             Contact Info:  http://thebs.org
A+/i-Net+/Linux+/Network+/Server+  CCNA CIWA CNA SCSA/SCWSE/SCNA
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