On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:30:26 -0500, "Bryan J. Smith" <thebs413 at earthlink.net> wrote: > You were paying $1,000/year for RHEL ES??? As I recall it was in the $700.00 USD range which amounted to over $1,000.00 CAD per year at that time. And that was with the discount that RH gave to early adopters of their new support programs when we were forced off of our previous plan with the depreciation of RH9 (at ~$60.00 USD per host per year). However, I might be confusing the renewal price with what we actually paid while on RH support. In any case, the final cost in the second and subsequent years was over the magic three figure limit. Perhaps if you have hundreds or thousands of machines then RH might offer attractive bulk discounts, but for companies with just a handful of servers the cost of RH update support was made unbearable. I see now that there is a Basic level of support available from RH, which I do not recall as being offered originally. This presently costs $349.00 USD or about $410.00 CAD per host per year and I suppose that this service is equivalent to what CentOS provides in effect. To create a local mirror for RH updates without paying the per host fee is, of course, a violation of the contracted support agreement. One is compelled to place each host on contract, go without support for some hosts, or pay a tremendous sum of money for the privilege of maintaining a local mirror. To put RH pricing in perspective, I just installed a 2.8Ghz P4 server with a DVD DL super-mode burner, 250Gb of disc and 2Gb of RAM for less than $600.00 CAD. As I wrote earlier CentOS, at ~$25.00 (CAD) per host, is a bargain in comparison to RH. The minuscule degree of delay in updates between RH and CentOS hardly bears serious consideration in the matter. I suppose that if you have a government regulator on your back about some security issue or other then one might find a certain legal solace in pointing to a subscribed service as evidence of due diligence. Then again, our federal government requires us to use an application written only for the now depreciated and unavailable Microsoft JVM and supports it only under MS-IE 5.5 running on a pre- XP version of MS-Windows. So, go figure. (It runs, so far, under a fully patched MS-IE 6, but that is not the supported platform.) Regards, Jim -- *** e-mail is not a secure channel *** mailto:byrnejb.<token>@harte-lyne.ca James B. Byrne Harte & Lyne Limited vox: +1 905 561 1241 9 Brockley Drive fax: +1 905 561 0757 Hamilton, Ontario <token> = hal Canada L8E 3C3