[CentOS] RHEL-6 vs. CentOS-5.5 (was: Static assignment of SCSI device names?)

Sun Jan 30 20:13:38 UTC 2011
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:37:19 -0800 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> 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.

NetworkManager is fine for something like a laptop with a 'varying'
network environment, since it interfaces with the gnome-network-manager
applet, which gives one a little GUI thingy for selecting this or that
wireless hot spot, etc.  For a machine with a *fixed* network
connection, NetworkManager just gets in the way and trys to be
excessively 'clever'.

> 
> 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.
> 
> I look forward to CentOS-6 and all the goodies we can expect, and I'm 
> quite happy to wait until the CentOS crew does their thing before 
> releasing it ... they deserve a lot of credit for doing a thorough job 
> all these years.
> 
> Chuck
> 
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>                                                                                      

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Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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