[WBEL-users] Which Version should I go with 3 or 4?

[John Morris]

On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 12:54, Jerry Amundson wrote:

> 4, unless you're adding on something which requires the 2.4 kernel.

Wish it were that simple.  There are some good reasons for installing a
new machine with 3.0.

1.  Firewire support.  In 3.0 it is in kernel-unsupported and for good
reason, under some pathological situations it can take out your
machine.  (A drive in a firewire cage failed and I got a kernel panic.)
But at least you have the option.  With 4 you get to try building a
custom kernel.

2.  USB support.  4 doesn't support USB hard drives.  The very latest
kernel might fix that but the release notes for RHEL4-U3 still carry the
warning about the lack of USB hard drive support.

Combine 1 & 2 with the fact external drives are the only viable backup
solution for small to medium installations where tape changers aren't an
option and you have a real good reason to stick with 3.0 despite it's
age.

And 4 has it's oddments also, just different ones from 3.0.  Just as an
example, one (x86_64) has a bug with logrotate where syslog isn't
getting a HUP so the log keeps being written to the moved file.  But two
other machines here, also x86_64, rotate their logs just fine.

By the way, just as an aside.  Between here at the library and at home I
have a lot of WBEL3-i386 machines running but none left on x86_64.   
For WBEL4 there are only two machines here at work and one at home, all
three are x86_64 with no 32bit installations.  Of course all four
variations get installed and wiped regularly from a testbed machine, but
that isn't the same as having one in full time service from a testing
pov.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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