The rising star: SUSE

Deals like this one with AMD just highlight the business savvy that Novell has brought to the Linux playing field. This isn't nearly as big a deal as the Novell and Microsoft deal that made such a fuss in the community. But, it does play in nicely with my previous post about the SUSE distribution's future dominance.

Installing, administrating, and generally just living with SUSE is much easier than any other distribution. SUSE reproduces their custom GUI interface for system administration faithfully in an nCurses environment. That means that if you have neophyte system administrators you brought over from a Windows shop you can teach them the GUI administration techniques and everything stays the same even when the system is running headless. The same YAST administration tools are present on SLES, SLED, and OpenSUSE.

If redhat would learn one thing from SUSE it should be consistency of administration. Consistent easy administration for neophyte system administrators. Consistent easy administration through all their distributions. SUSE does this well, redhat does not.

I live thirty minutes from redhat's headquarters but I use SUSE.

SLES10 hands down

In my mind SuSE wins hands down. OpenSuSE and SLES10 are the best enterprise Linux distributions our there and I don't even think about RHEL in production.

Why? No other distribution hits this sweet spot of utility properly:

1. make cloneconfig - beautiful, make a kernel config exactly like your running config without any worries
   
2. yast2 +/- gui - easy to learn sysadmin tasks... low training and pain threshold
   
3. autoYast - easy to clone installs
   
4. LDAP / ActiveDirectory integration - integrate and play nice with Windows domains so easy a newbie could do it!
   
5. centralized patching - keep your systems patched from one patch repository
   
6. "plays nice with VMware"
7. profile.local - put your localized custom configurations in *.local files along side the distribution files... end the Gentoo configuration file merge nightmare by keeping your localized configuration files separate.

Linux is Linux, you can do all these things on any distribution you just have to figure out how. With SuSE you don't have to figure any of this practical system administration stuff out.

Symbolic Link Joy

Let's say you have a server. It runs the frobnicate service. The problem is you have to upgrade the frobnicate service every so often. Sometimes you have to "roll back" to an old version.

What to do?

Lately I've been thinking like this:

 $ cd /usr/local/
 $ mkdir frobnicate-dist
 $ cd frobnicate-dist
 $ install frobnicate1
 $ install frobnicate2
 $ ln -s frobnicate2 current
 $ cd /usr/local
 $ ln -s frobnicate-dist/current frobnicate

The result is that /usr/local/frobnicate is our currently running frobnicate. If you need to change the currently running frobnicate... change the frobnicate-dist/current and all frobnicate versions are in the /usr/local/frobnicate-dist directory.

Perhaps frobnicate-versions?

Just a thought.