[ale] Web server OS

[Paul Cartwright]

On Thu December 25 2008, Jim Kinney wrote:
> RHEL/CentOS updates are security and bug fixes only. Once a release is
> installed, it doesn't change anything unless it must to fix a problem.
> Enhancements are not part of the process (That's for Fedora!). Code that
> will require library changes is not allowed. If an upstream security/bug
> patch requires a lib change, RedHat will back port the patch to run without
> the lib change. Thus while the current kernel.org kernel is 2.6.28 (Thanks
> the present Linus!), security fixes are back ported to the 2.6.x kernel for
> RHEL4/5 and 2.4.x for RHEL3. This same process goes on for core libs and
> other packages in the release. Thus a custom app for RHEL5 will run for the
> entire life of RHEL5 regardless the changes to the system for the entire 7
> years unless the app relied on one of the problems that gets fixed (it has
> happened!).

this will bite you though.. 3 years ago I started to install an app on RHEL 
3.2 . First I ran into a problem when they strung together  6 drives in an 
array to create 1 logical drive. rhel 3.2 only allowed up to 1 Tb file 
systems, and those 6 drives were 300Gb each.. so we had to upgrade to thel 
3.6. Then, not too much later that same year, dell came out with some new 
hardware for PerC controllers and Broadcom ethernet cards.. rhel 3.6 didn't 
recognize the hardware, so we had to go get new drivers.... As new hardware 
comes out, this old version of red hat suffered, yet the app was only 
certified on rhel 3.6 for the next 2 years. They finally came out with a new 
version of the app , and it works on rhel 5.2 !

-- 
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800
Registered Ubuntu User #12459