Pointless rant: Red Hat Enterprise Server sucks!

[Kurt Granroth]

Okay, okay, maybe RH ES doesn't really suck.  It is, after all, the most
common server Linux (in the guise of CentOS, commonly).  And it is ultra
stable.  Plus, every third party package has support for it.  In fact,
that's why I'm using it.  Zimbra only supplies x86_64 packages for RH ES
variants.

But come on!  It's not 1997 anymore.  Why do I have to do so many bloody
things by hand?

Let's start by setting the hostname.  In SUSE, this can be done like so:

1. Start up yast
2. Select the Hostname module
3. Enter my hostname

That's it.  Under CentOS 5:

1. Try to find a central config app... and fail.  There's no such thing!
2. Search online and find that you use the system-config-network utility
to set it.
3. I am doing everything remotely via a text console (no X... it's a
server after all) so I start it up.  Oops!  It only supports modifying
the network card (and in an ULTRA simplistic manner -- no advanced
settings at all).  Apparently setting the hostname is something only GUI
sysadmins will want to do.
3. Okay, fine.  Let's do it by hand.  Search online to find what files
need to be modified.
4. Modify the /etc/sysconfig/network file
5. Modify the /etc/hosts file
6. Restart the network

Okay, let's try something a bit harder.  I want to setup BIND as a
master name server for my domain.  Under SUSE:

1. Start up yast
2. Select the DNS Server module
3. Select "Yes" to allow it to install bind and bind-chroot
4. Enter in my domain info (still have to know what A, MX, CNAMEs and
the like mean... but at least it's structured very nicely)
5. Select Finish

Under CentOS:

1. Do a 'find' for all files that have 'bind' in the name hoping one
sounds like a config utility.  No go.
2. Do a 'yum search bind' and scour through all the packages there.
Apparently there is a 'system-config-bind' utility.  Finally!  'yum
install system-config-bind'... WTF?  It's a Gnome app!  I am NOT going
to install X and the Gnome libs just for a simple config utility!.  This
is a bloody SERVER!!
3. yum install bind bind-chroot
4. Look in /etc for named.conf.  None.  Look in /var/named/chroot/etc
for named.conf.  Still no go.  Look for a named.conf to start with
ANYWHERE on the system.  Nope.
5. Start searching online for how to configure a full named.conf file
6. Screw it.  I fire up SUSE on a vmware host, and configure BIND there
7. rsync -a /var/lib/named/ centos:/var/named/chroot/
8. service named restart

I don't even want to think about how many more steps there would have
been if not for step 6 and SUSE.  And don't even get me started on how
LONG it takes to do things the SUSE way vs the RH way.

Later, I'm planning on setting up some iSCSI targets.  Will there be a
RH config panel for that?  Ha!  There's a SUSE one so I'm just going to
configure it in SUSE and rsync the files over.

Shame on you, Red Hat!  You've been around for a very long time.  Plenty
of time to create a coherent set of configuration utilities that work
equally well in text mode as in a GUI.  SUSE has had this for *years*.

Kurt