On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:49:45 -0400 (EDT) Robert P. J. Day wrote:
the second (separate) issue is: where does one get centos support?
Way back when, I remember reading something that said words to the effect of "If you can carry your own water, Linux is free."
The reverse is also true.
and i *don't* know how to answer that. a previous poster listed a number of places: wiki, mailing lists, IRC. which is all well and good, but will mean *nothing* to a large company whose only concern is: "if something goes horribly, horribly wrong, who do i call to demand to fix it?" that's all they care about -- someone to yell at. they're not going to accept that they should start joining mailing lists or hanging out on IRC chats.
If that's the situation, Centos will not meet their needs. RHEL is what they want, and the answer to the who-to-call question becomes Red Hat.
I've never used RHEL myself, but I get the impression that you don't get to "play the edge" quite as much as you can get away with on Centos because you need to insure that you keep a maintainable RHEL system, where maintainable is defined by Red Hat.
But RHEL is really the only answer to your question. Centos ain't it.