some thoughts about SuSE 9.3 Pro

[dphull at insipid.com]

Quoting Gary Hildebrand <ghildebrand at centurytel.net>:

> After having used it for six weeks, my opinion is mixed.

I recently inherited a bevy of SLES boxes. I like to think of myself as being
distro neutral. I've used nearly all of them at one time or another, but have
been using RHELAS almost exclusively for production systems for the 
last couple
of years.

The first thing I noticed about SLES is that the default iptables 
configuration
is overly complicated if you're just trying to limit access to services 
running
on the same box as iptables.

Secondly, online_update doesn't work as well as up2date. You can't use
online_update to install some package that doesn't currently exist on your
system. Or if you can, I haven't found the syntax for it yet. You have to use
yast to install new software which is ok, but it would be nice to have 
a simple
command line tool rather than a full blown GUI (ncurses or X).

And my biggest complaint, and I believe this was mentioned here or on 
KULUA (or
was it OLUG?), updating the kernel wipes out the old kernel and it's compiled
modules by default. In my case, this left me with an unusable system as I've
got a server with an unusual RAID controller that the kernel doesn't recognize
by default.

Automatic removal of previous kernels is not a good thing, IMO. Let me remove
them manually after I'm sure everything is going to work under the new one. I
dug through yast a bit trying to find a place where I could tell it to not
remove the existing kernel after updating, but the only thing I could find was
to have it backup the existing software to /var/adm/backup.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com