Pointless rant: Red Hat Enterprise Server sucks!

[Kurt Granroth]

Craig White wrote:
> Shame on you Kurt for thinking that Red Hat should pander to your SuSE
> driven expectations.

Yes, shame on me for expecting that Red Hat behave like an OS worthy of
being the class leader.

> First off, the full host name configuration tool smacks you in the face
> on install. With a little planning before the install, this would have
> never been an issue in the first place.

Unless, of course, you didn't do the install.  This is a virtual server
that is setup from an image.

> Red Hat even by minimal setup will install X and it's pretty much
> expected that their market will run X on their servers, right or wrong,
> it's what they do. Therefore, those that need the crutches of GUI
> configuration tools (or quasi-gui text based) are fully satiated. Unless
> you absolutely customize the install, it's extremely hard to make it not
> install X. In fact, given your understanding of RHEL (CentOS
> derivative), I'm quite certain that your bluster above ignores
> completely that x was installed and is already running (try ps |grep
> xfs)

Nope, this is a server image that came stripped of anything related to
X.  Okay, yeah, I did break down and install X yesterday when I needed
mplayer (mencoder, specifically... handy for on-the-fly video encoding).
 But X certainly isn't *running*... and only the absolutely minimal X
libs are installed.

> Therefore, if you had installed the system-config-* utilities, you could
> ssh with X forwarding and still run the GUI driven configuration widgets
> on your own desktop. (Though to be fair, I think that their
> system-config-bind or is it named? sucks and never use it).

Right, running a gtk+ app over ssh... *that's* responsive! /rolls eyes

SUSE has all of their config modules equally available in TUI mode.
There's really no excuse for RH not to.

> You could install webmin and use that (definitely my preferred tool for
> Cron/DNS/DHCP/LDAP Users and Groups/Cyrus-imapd and now, their new
> version provides full Bacula support) and sat back and rocked. Out of
> the box, webmin understands chroot based bind (named on RHEL) and is one
> of the few DNS management tools that doesn't totally suck.

I installed webmin yesterday.  It's handy in cases... but fundamentally,
it just like a remembered -- way way too cluttered.  A good config
screen always shows the most common options only so you can get down to
business as fast as possible.  If you want more options, you typically
click an "Advanced" button or tab.  Webmin throws EVERYTHING at you all
at once.  It's just barely better than reading the man page to figure
out how to edit the files yourself.

> Now, considering your methodology of creating the files on SuSE and
> using rsync to bring them over tells me that you completely turned off
> Selinux because you would have pulled out every hair on your head if
> selinux were not disabled.

Yep.

> Thanks for the pointless rant - probably would have been better directed
> at the Zimbra folk who chose the RHEL platform for their product than to
> this list but perhaps not unexpected coming from someone who has
> eschewed their Linux desktop in favor of Mac OSX.

Actually, I have since switched back to using Linux as my primary
desktop.  I got hooked on Amarok, Digikam, and Compiz/Beryl.  I think,
though, that I'll always be switching back and forth between Linux and
OS X as my primary desktop.  Neither really satisfies all of my needs
and it seems that I get to my tolerance with one and switch to the
other... until I get too pissed off at that one and switch back.  So on
and so forth.

It goes without saying that my servers will always be Linux.  SUSE
Linux, if possible ;-)