www.linux-noob.com: www.linux-noob.com -> Catching up...

Okay, so been some time since I posted anything, thought I'd best stick my nose back in and make my presence known.

To catch up: I completed the documentation I was writing for course manuals mentioned below, and in the process installed Ubuntu8.10 to trial it out, comparing differences. Many things I quite liked, and there are some deffo improvements over the Fedora ways of doing things. However, there are a few tools I felt lacking, but in the grand scheme of things that was a weak comeback from the Fedora camp - Ubuntu seems vastly superior in many aspects.

Anyway, material was completed to the satisfaction of several that deliver the training course - and in the meantime I learned a great deal about recent developments in the Linux world: the event-driven framework (replaces the inittab and init.d stuff), PolicyKit, EXT4. Still gotta get to grips with SELinux, mind.

In the meantime a shared server of mine running Fedora6 with Ensim control panel is now well and truly buggered. For those not in the know, Ensim embeds itself deeply into the underlying OS to present a web-driven front-end to manage domain-grouped services. For what it offers, I felt it was better (more powerful and feature-richer) than CPanel. A major drawback is that you can't just go yum-updating binaries at will, they need to be Ensim-aware binaries. Fairy snuff, just add the Ensim repos to /etc/yum.repos.d/. Oh wait, that won't work flawlessly, since some binaries clash with RedHat's own. Okay, so let's disable the RH repos. No, that won't do either, since Ensim don't mirror RH packages on their repos, so yum can't resolve dependencies. GAHHHHHHHH! Dependency hell all over again!

Oh, did I forget to mention another major drawback? Yes. When some of the python libraries break, there's buggerall help with trying to get them fixed. No simple yum-erase/yum-install, not even downloading and unpacking an RPM to extract files needed to replace corrupted ones. Our hosting company suggested blatting the server and reinstalling - the Microsoft option - which was a road we walked in the past on another server, in which we used Ensim to make backups per hosted domain then restored those to the fresh server pretty seamlessly (needed a minor tweak here and there). But this time with a broken control panel, no recent site backups exist. We tried some of the Ensim forums and were led to believe that it WAS possible to mend a broken install insitu.. but nobody could provide instructions nor point us to a guide. Feh.

In the end, we decided to build a new server from scratch and ditch any control panel. And, of course, after my recent dalliances with Fedora10 v Ubuntu, I knew which was a better distro.

So why am I sticking to RedHat for my new server, then? (Actually CentOS - but let's not quibble: stroganoff or curry, they're both stews.) Cowardly familiarity is one thing. The other is that my server co-owner had issues with the first distro he tried (CentOS or Fed10 I can't remember - but it wasn't anything Canonical) so settled on Fed9. What's surprising is that he flies a Debian flag on his home boxen... however he's had root-level privs on one of my Mandrake servers for best part of two years and in that time he's proven he can adapt to other distros.

(for the wary: "root-level privs" means he's included in /etc/sudoers. Nobody knows the root pass on that server. Not even me.)

Oh, as for other news: renovating my new home is coming along nicely, but spending time doing small plastering/tiling/filling/sanding/grouting jobs here and there are taking up a LOT of my time.

But you'll hear from me again, soon!