Re: "stuck at RHEL5"?

[Crusty Saint <saintcrusty () gmail com>]

We're mostly on the same line page. My beef is product-vendors and distro's
are not integrating very well. There seems to be little interaction or
interest, my voice is to small to change this i believe, though both would
benefit. Maybe that is the point we're after here.

I kind of enjoy figuring out what it takes to compile stuff (for now) Though
my time-budget is limited. I can only hope Debian-based distro's will
prevail in the future and their level of commitment will not alter or only
improve as business interest grows.

Just to have my final say on the matter.

2011/1/25 JP Vossen <jp () jpsdomain org>

> On 01/24/2011 10:44 AM, Castle, Shane wrote:
> > CentOS != RHEL. If you think otherwise you are mistaken.
>
> That is certainly true.  RHEL is fully supported by Red Hat, and is
> compiled in certain ways in a certain environment.  CentOS's goal is to be
> as close to that as possible [1], but there are certainly differences.
>
> Nevertheless, for many purposes, and I would argue specifically for the
> purpose of hosting a Snort sensor, CentOS is "close enough."  At the very
> least, in this context snort compiled for CentOS-5.x ought to run on
> RHEL-5.x and vice versa.
>
>
> Related, see the following for an interesting article about "eating your
> own dog food" and why Fedora does not.  http://lwn.net/Articles/422710/
>
> That's what I was talking about when I argued against using Fedora for a
> Snort sensor OS in http://marc.info/?l=snort-devel&m=129448514222862&w=2.
>
>
>
> On 01/24/2011 04:31 AM, Crusty Saint wrote:
>
> > @JP
> >
> > I totally do NOT get 70% of what you're complaining about.
> >
> > Without any prior snort knowledge i got it to run 100% on a Centos EL5
> > installation. RTFM first, everything you need is in there. Based on the
> > docs
> > it is quite easy to build a script that automatically gathers your
> > dependencies for building from source, though admittedly this is something
> > sourcefire could have done themselves.
>
> But I'm not talking about building from source, I'm talking about supplying
> RPMs that work, for OS's that are (or seem to be, or should be?) supported.
>
> Sure, in many ways building from source is easier, and you can argue
> better.  Personally, and in production as far as possible, I really *hate*
> to go outside of the packaging system.  That's what it's there for.
>
> Yes, I can build my own RPMS, and I did.  That's not the point either, keep
> reading.
>
>
>
>  There are offered external repo's that do supply libpcap and many but not
> > all required libs. Not satisfied with these because they don't offer the
> > same warranty RH/CO do offer ? Then don't use RH-based distro's, the base
> > support for libs on this platform is plain poor. I never get why people
> > bother to even offer rpm's and they do require quite a load of extra work
> > to
> > support them.
>
> There's a double-edged sword here.  If you do not offer binary packages,
> your barrier to entry is higher (potentially much higher, depending on your
> project) and uses will go elsewhere.  If you do offer binaries, you get
> smacked around when they don't work.
>
> As Joel and I discussed elsewhere, you can't leave it up to the distros
> themselves or else you end up with totally obsolete versions floating
> around, which goes triple for something as fast moving as Snort.
>
> So if you are packaging software you need to do the work so your
> users don't have to.  And to circle back around, I was arguing that the
> work isn't done for CentOS/RHEL 5.
>
> But that also begs the question, should it be done?  I originally thought
> yes, it should, because a lot of people are "stuck" using RHEL/CentOS 5.
>  Since there has been only silence about that, either I was wrong, or those
> who do use it have already reinvented the wheels or otherwise just don't
> care about this issue.  So I should probably stop wasting time and bandwidth
> on it.  (I solved my problems with it weeks and weeks ago now.)
>
>
>
>  Debian-based distro's deliver a much wider supported base from
> > a single repo, as this distro is alive and not beaten flat by corporate
> > interest and focus.
>
> As I said, personally I'd rather use Debian, but larger shops have
> standards, and lots of them have standardized on RHEL/CentOS in my
> experience.  Yours and current Snort users may differ, since again everyone
> else has been silent.
>
> (Though perhaps the "dev" ML is not the best place to find that answer?  I
> thought it was, but...  And I still think Joel should poll the community to
> find out what should be supported, but I understand that he's swamped...)
>
>
>
>  No offence, but i've had the same objections and found only it took about
> > 4
> > hours to resolve most of it once and for all. It is also possible to build
> > snort in /opt and use it's own separate directory of libs under /opt
>
> It's not a show-stopper for me, and there are certainly a number of
> work-arounds.  But why should I have to work-around something or reinvent a
> bunch of wheels that the vendor should be solving in the first place?
>
>
> Having said all of that, I think we should just let this thread die.  It
> doesn't seem like this is a big deal for anyone, which surprises me. But
> unless a lot of RHEL/CentOS 5 users suddenly come out of the woodwork asking
> for support, we might as well put the time and effort into something else
> since this seems like a non-issue.
>
>
>
>  2011/1/12 JP Vossen<jp () jpsdomain org>
> >  I'll comment in-line (with trimming) on both Joel and Nigel's replies.
> > > Thanks to you both for the useful and informative answers.
> > >
> > >
> > > On 01/08/2011 01:57 PM, Joel Esler wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 5:53 AM, JP Vossen<jp () jpsdomain org>   wrote:
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > Main point up front:
> > > > > Who else votes for better RHEL5/CentOS-5 support and longer
> > > > life-cycles?!?
> <lots trimmed, go see
> http://marc.info/?l=snort-devel&m=129480325111952&w=2 for details.
>
> Later,
> JP
> _________________________________________
> [1] http://centos.org/
> "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources
> freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux
> vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution
> policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes
> packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.)  CentOS is free."
>
>
> ----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
> JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
> My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
> ----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
> "Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
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