Hi,
I work for a major defense contractor that is very tight with money at
times. Two years ago, before I came, they got RH 9 (bought or
downloaded- whatever). I guess that got deemed appropriate to buy
at the time, and it has been sitting here getting old ever since.
The purpose of this server is to run Symantec Manhunt on it as an
IDS. They bought Manhunt at the same time and never got around to
deploying it until now.
Now I am about to deploy a linux server (Dell) and I am trying to
figure out which version to go with - RH 9, FC 1-3, or whatever.
I want it to be redhat-based since I am the main admin, and I am more
comfortable with that than on debian based systems.
On the other hand I am not sure what to do. My boss makes the
argument that we need to run the oldest, since he has seen versioning
issues and conflicts in this situation. However most of that is
in the world of Windows which does stupid things by default as we all
know.
In this scenario my argument is <still> that we should go with
something more recent. I don't like the idea of putting something
out there that is so old it isimpractical by today's standards, that am
going to think is stupid. I guess there is some wisdom in
being able to keep the age of the OS in sync with the age of the
software, but in the linux realm, that really isn't the same issue as
it is in other areas - right? OTOH I don't want to do a 'yum
update' on the box and not be able to get updates because the version
is so <frickin'> old. I think FC2 would be a good
choice. Although it is still old, it at least is a little bit
ahead of RH9. An additional concern - even if I were to deploy
FC2, I would probably want to upgrade that too. Is that gonna be
a problem? Can I upgrade versions of Fedora (2 to 3 to
whatever) on a production box without a lot of problems? Will yum
do that cleanly and consistently without a lot of headaches?
Whatever choice I make is going to have to last for a good while. Does anyone have any advice for this situation?
Thanks in advance
Marc
