On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Chuck Munro chuckm@seafoam.net wrote:
Hello list members,
My adventure into udev rules has taken an interesting turn. I did discover a stupid error in the way I was attempting to assign static disk device names on CentOS-5.5, so that's out of the way.
But in the process of exploring, I installed a trial copy of RHEL-6 on the new machine to see if anything had changed (since I intend this box to run CentOS-6 anyway).
Lots of differences, and it's obvious that RedHat does things a bit differently here and there. My focus has been on figuring out how best to solve my udev challenge, and I found that tools like 'scsi_id' and udev admin/test commands have changed. The udev rules themselves seem to be the same.
Regarding networking, all of my 'ifcfg-*' files from CentOS-5.5 worked well, including bridging for KVM. Of course, one of the first things I did was remove that atrocious NetworkManager package ... it needs to be rewritten to make it a *lot* more intuitive. RedHat uses it during installation to manually configure the NICs, which I think is a mistake. I much prefer the way CentOS anaconda has done it so far, as a separate install menu form.
Unfortunately, working out all the dependencies and preventing it from activation is more tricky. I suggest putting "NM_CONTROLLLED=no" in all your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files, it just makes the whole thing a lot safer for server class installations. I don't know if it's more stable or workable in the latest Fedora releases, but I'm still unhappy with it in CentOS and RHEL.
The performance of the machine seemed to be better with the newer kernel, which is encouraging. I suspect we can look forward to a number of improvements. I've just managed to scratch the surface. I do expect there may be a few challenges for those of us upgrading a system from 5.x to 6, where some user-written admin scripts could break depending on the system commands they use.
Ohhhhh, yes. This is inevitable with OS updates this far apart: just the switch from the default sendmail and syslog to postfix and rsyslog caught me somewhat by surprise.