[newly cross-posted into the centos mailing list]
On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>> I understand that the following products [RHEL v the
>> CentOS rebuilds] differ in price based on the extend of
>> support. Apart from that, is there any other difference
>> (i.e. performance, kernel stability etc)?
CentOS is an outgrowth of early efforts of Lance Davis in the
UK, and has been consciously shaped, structured and recruited
by me and a couple of other admins at the end of the RHL
series to tap 'the best and the brightest' of the pool of
non-Red Hat RPM based distribution developers to build a
professonal grade 'community' RPM based successor to RHL;
some of us ran the cAos-1 high performance cluster oriented
distribution creation to explore some packaging and
buildsystem issues, and to build community, tools, and
approaches.
Once CentOS was viable, it spun off from being a cAos
sub-project into the free-standing project it is now; in
Enterprise Linux community rebuild space, it has essentially
displaced WhiteBox (in part due to the loss of momentum which
last years hurricane inflicted on New Orleans, and John
Morris' fine effort), had a friendly merger in of David
Parsley's Tao, and regularly has binary updates in place and
more available than the upstream, due to a massive mirror
pool, and a smart, geo-location aware update mirror
dispatching system.
> I don't think this is really on-topic for the Dell Poweredge list.
dunno -- one is commercial and carries front end SLA's, a
certification program, etc, some non-freely available source
software, and costs; the other is community, organic and
consciously without SLA's and the rest, and is not. Each runs
just fine on Dell hardware (which I have been using on Dell
PowerEdge kit for many, many years, in specing and delivering
complex networks to customers) [btw, Matt, et al., thanks for
the XPS series -- it makes a stable, sweet and scaldingly fast
Linux lovin' desktop]
> The differences between CentOS and RHEL are mainly in the
> type and level of support you get from each. CentOS support
> is whatever you get from IRC, mailing lists or what you
> will pay a consultant to answer.
The main CentOS IRC channel #centos on irc.freenode.net
consciously tries to mix relentlessly On Topic, fast,
technically accurate, work safe _teaching_ replies [based
loosely on a Socratic method], with a bit of 'floorshow' -- I
am one of the 'ringmasters' most weekday US business hours,
and we have developed a cadre of 'regulars,' each of whom
demonstrates advanced RHCE level expertise in addressing
questions in real time from all comers.
> The mailing lists and IRC will not spoon feed an answer and
> will tell a person that they are an idiot directly versus
> telling their bartender at the end of the shift.
(smile) part of the floorshow design [the channel op's try to
make the channel the one tab in the audience' IRC client left
open and on top, so that less skilled admins will 'idle and
"read the mail"' in it, to see what happens next, and also
soak up both good BOFH skills and accurate RHCE type training
;) ]; a careful observer will note that Off Topic participants
are pointed to other more appropriate venues for their
inquiries, and cautioned several times before any
'festivities' occur. [I cc the centos list, as a way to
publicly thank those participants]
> For as much as I can tell, the base Centos is RHEL
> recompiled with the same options etc. and the Red Hat
> trademarks removed. If your organization does not need any
> support then CentOS can be a good match.
CentOS are very cautious to be 'very correct' as to respecting
intellectual property rights in the rebuild.
It is also correct that we expressly strive to match build
environments, and use 'ldd' and other tools to verify as close
as possible binary compatability to the upstream's binary
offerings as we can [some recent packages have been built with
non-released compiler variants at the upstream 'PNAELV', and
so there are minor known divergences from time to time, which
thus far have not affected performance]; we upstream issues,
and proposed fixes from the CentOS Bug tracker into Red Hat's
Bugzilla regularly, and some of the core are well known
participants in the 'Fedora' project RH runs.
'performance, kernel stability' and the rest should be
identical - if a deviation is suspected, I hope for and want
to see a bug filed; we will track down a substantiated issue
reported to our bug tracker; we maintain a reporting address,
and respond to security inquiries confidentially and promptly;
we have the expected mailing lists, website, wiki, forums, and
the rest. Sometimes our art is criticized as not as flashy as
some other distributions, but the distribution is not looking
to win style shows ;)
Commercial support is available from several of the core
CentOS developers' companies, on an a la carte basis.
- Russ Herrold
