20020729: Query about using linux other than Redhat

>From: James Murakami <address@hidden>
>Organization: UCLA
>Keywords: 200207292151.g6TLp1904313 platforms Linux

James,

>It appears most people running on linux are using Redhat.

This may be due to our policy of fully supporting only RedHat Linux.

>In the near
>future (sometime in August), our Dept. programmer will set up a PC to
>replace our current weather server (an aging SUN Ultra 1). Speed and
>lots of disk space were the main reason to switch from solaris to
>linux.

You have another option: Solaris x86.  We have found that the LDM runs
much more reliably under Solaris x86 than under Linux on the same
hardware.  Also, since it sounds like you already have Solaris
administration experience, you would not experience the "culture shock"
in moving from Solaris to Linux.

>My question is this. Do you think using a different version of linux
>(SuSE, version 8) will be too much of a headache to use?

There _are_ differences that are not directly addressed in the software
that we supply.  By moving to a non-RedHat distribution of Linux, you
would be implicitly accepting more of a toubleshooting role in keeping
our software running than if you were running under RedHat.

>We can't use
>Redhat because of some compatibility issue (involves NIS+).

Can you elaborate?

>There are
>no binary versions of ldm for this form of linux that I saw, and I
>don't know how involved it would be to start with source versions of
>ldm, gempak, and mcidas (I'm not a programmer).

For the most part the various flavors of Linux are the same.  What differs
is non-kernel related "stuff".  A specific example of how the various
Linux bundles have diverged from one another is the use of xinetd versus
inetd.  RedHat 7.x uses xinetd; Debian still uses inetd; SuSE _I belive_
supports either, but you have to configure your system to use one or the
other.  Why Linux vendors have not gotten together more to standardize
their distributions, I can not say.  What I can say is that this kind of
divergence is not helping them out one bit.

>Any comments/advice are appreciated.

The drawback in using Solaris x86 would be the Sun position that it
would only support x86 as a server platform.  This means that they are
spending any effort on supporting the latest video cards, etc.  They
do, however, keep up to date on support of new SCSI interfaces, etc.
as this is something you have to do on a server systems.

The other question is if Sun will really continue support for x86.
I, for one, sure hope so.  We find that it is much more robust under
heavy load than Linux.

In the coming months, however, we will be "road" testing FreeBSD to see
if it is a good candidate for our software.  I can tell you that my
limited experience with FreeBSD has shown that it is much more secure
than Linux AND runs quite a bit faster on the same hardware than
Linux.  I must point out that FreeBSD has its own set of quirks that
will require us to tune our software.  So far, however, the latest
versions of the LDM, GEMPAK, and McIDAS do run under FreeBSD 4.5 (as
has been pointed out by Jim Koermer).  However, since we havn't had the
opportunity to _really_ test FreeBSD yet, I can't advise you to move to
it.  Maybe in 2-3 months I could.

I hope that this helped somewhat...

Tom Yoksas