[CentOS] CentOS vs. RHEL vs. Oracle Linux ?

[Scott Robbins]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 04:30:32PM +0000, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
> On 24 November 2010 15:13, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> 


> > Along with, I'm sure, the OP, I want to thank you for this post, it
> > makes me realize that if we definitely do this for real, there are
> > obviously some things I missed.

> OEL is a funny one. The only reason it exists is to destroy the
> upstream. They're completely unlike CentOS in mentality. Their main
> reason of existence is cutting RHEL from support revenue. Our PHBs
> decided to use OEL for customers since we're an Oracle shop at work so
> getting all licences & support from a single source makes accounting
> easier. 

In our case, it has something to do with support--we are still
discussing this--my own take is that the problem won't be with the
platform, so we should use CentOS, or if management wants to be sure of
paid support, which does make sense, use RH.  Oracle is saying there may
be issues of aspect X not being supported if we don't do all of this on
Oracle. 

In any case, after a typical Oracle Enterprise licence
> calculation RHEL or OEL seems like peanuts. 

LOL.  Yes, literally out loud. It just echoes some of what one our web
developers said.

What worries me is with
> OEL eating the support revenue from RHEL and simultaneously being
> dependent on RHEL for upstream dev & patches, it's not a long-term
> viable situation, it's not even a partnership.
> 
> There are other little things why we would go for OEL, one being the
> OCFS2 when we do shared-storage clusters. Reading the small pring
> gives you the impression that Oracle won't support OCFS2 unless it's
> OEL. I'm not sure that's true but hey, that's what's been decided at
> work.

Yeah, see above.  
> 

> As I mentioned, the other funny thing is if you choose
> Oracle-validated package, it stuffs your sysconf.ctl with values. Then
> try installing Oracle 11g (R1 or R2) on it, the installer barfs up
> warnings about various kernel parameters being wrong.
> 
> There's a public yum repo but as Alexander has mentioned, not much of a use.
> 

I think that's what I took (using a recommendation that I *thought* was
from Oracle's site), which may explain the samba thing.  I didn't choose
it during installation, although, since for our uses, that WinSCP is an
easier and just as effective solution, that particular thing didn't
matter--still, I bet that's it. 


> I'm not a big fan of OEL. I'd rather use upstream with paying
> customers and CentOS internally. Unfortunately this decision is out of
> my hands.

+1.  Once again, many thanks for the input.  


-- 
Scott Robbins
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