[CentOS] Redhat vs centos vs ubuntu

[Christopher Chan]

On Friday, November 11, 2011 11:49 AM, Craig White wrote:
>
> If you want something heavy duty you could simply 'apt-get install
> shorewall'' but I suspect that you just want to be pedantic. The point
> that Lamar made - that was that there wasn't any firewall installed by
> default at all, which I agreed with.
>    

I have seen shorewall generated rules. Far way too much branching off 
and following rule paths is a pain. For small setups, yes, it will do.

But if you need to handle high traffic and therefore optimize the rules, 
forget it.

> Now if it's package quantity vs. quality type of discussion that you
> want to have... yes, there are some packages that Ubuntu has that don't
> interest me in the least but the quantity can be mind boggling. For
> example (and in my sphere of interest), Ubuntu has pre-built packages
> for netatalk, davical&  bacula which I use everywhere and I am building
> them from source for RHEL or CentOS deployments. To be fair however, I
> did have to build cyrus-imapd from source on Ubuntu whereas Simon's
> packages for RHEL/CentOS are terrific.
>    

1) Not all packages in the provided repos are Canonical supported. Most 
of them are actually third-party aka 'community' maintained or 
unmaintained even and 2) You can get a similar if lesser experience with 
regards to quantity if you also add third-party repos on RHEL/Centos.

Just because you don't get third-party packages available without a bit 
of tinkering is not that much of a plus for Ubuntu.

> Then there's the utility of aptitude/apt-get vs. yum where I can deploy
> and dynamically manage 'holding' packages on Ubuntu which is simply not
> available with an rpm/yum package provider. Yum/rpm is good, apt/dpkg is
> better.
>    

I can play that game too. apt/dpkg is good but yum/rpm is better because 
it gives me 1) checksums and 2) multi-arch support.

> Linux is pretty much still Linux and one thing has become obvious since
> I started playing around with Ubuntu the last 7 or 8 months... that my
> skills have improved by learning how the other half lives. I still love
> Red Hat stuff, still use Fedora for my desktop. Some things Ubuntu does
> better, some things I much prefer Red Hat methodology. In the end, it's
> still Linux.
>
> I just can't embrace installing an OS whose security updates have
> consistently lagged 3-6 months behind.
>
>    

I would not have said much if you have pushed Debian but Ubuntu? It's a 
joke. I only happen to have one Ubuntu Hardy server because I did not 
have a Centos disk at hand when I had to do an emergency installation of 
a box to take over the predecessor's read RH9 squid/nat box. I have no 
qualms learning the ropes of another distro but the Ubuntu distro takes 
the cake for faking a community and having tools that are way behind 
those available with RHEL/Centos. Does d-i support/have lvm on raid 
recipes yet?