
CentOS Linux 6.4 Released - Tsiolkovsky
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2013-March/019276.html
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networked
Can HNers who have used both Debian-derived Linux distributions and
CentOS/RHEL in production share their opinions on how they compare? I'm sure
there's a lot of people here who, like me, are primarily experienced with the
former and wouldn't mind learning about the latter.

~~~
Spidler
CentOS / RHEL comes with a working SELinux setup out of the box, which is
something that Debian lacks. For some, SELinux is just another pain in the
arse to be disabled as soon as you run into a permission problem, for others,
it comes with a really nice set of features to further lock down your system (
including disabling ptrace, which has been a great cause of concern security
wise ).

Otherwise, things are somewhat different. No update-alternatives, vi is vim
rather than nvi, Apache configuration is drastically different.

The packaging system is a lot stricter, packages may not touch each others
files, checksums & permissions are stored in the package DB and used to verify
on both install, uninstall and upgrades. there's no "recommends" system,
there's no interactive upgrade packages. ( No offers to "merge your samba
config" or anything like that ) as the installer system is made to be usable
headless.

In "Enterprise" solutions, there's also support for Satellite (
[http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/rhn-
satellit...](http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/rhn-satellite/) )
which is quite nifty.

RHEL has older kernels, with a lot of features&fixes backported from newer
development, causing them to be very strange beasts.

Overall, I've used both, both have their place, but I really can't stand the
fact that .deb archives need extra plugins to simply verify that nothing has
fucked with permissions or file contents.

~~~
sliverstorm
The added rigidity is the thing that stands out to me the most. I'm not really
an IT professional, but from my limited experience it seems like Debian is a
bit more flexible and a bit more suited to smaller shops, while RHEL (being
more rigid) is a bit more suited to really big shops.

~~~
Spidler
You tend to struggle a bit against it to begin with. "what do you mean,
conflicts?!" "do as I want, dammit" and so on ;)

But after a while you realise that rpm -Va is a wonderful tool that you'll
miss.

------
ck2
Very nice. I wonder if they finally upgraded openssl to 1.0.1

Anyone know the kernel version bump? It's always hard to figure with the
backporting.

Okay tried it on one box

    
    
        2.6.32-358.0.1.el6
    

Looks like there are some reports of problems with xen with the update.

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ersii
Thanks for all your hard work, CentOS-volunteers!

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skorgu
Allegedly xen dom0 is going to make a return in this release at some point.
Can't wait.

