I just took a two-week training course in Red Hat Linux, and decided to build myself a workstation here at the office. The initial setup was insanely simple and fast. It took me a couple days to get it to communicate with my Exchange server, and I’m having trouble getting LDAP authentication set up (I have trouble with certificate services, and I’m the CA Administrator so nobody to ask). So far it’s been pretty cool and a good practical learning experience to compliment my studies at Red Hat the last two weeks.
I’ve been in IT for a while now, and it’s high time I got into some serious Linux/Unix administration.
I know this is pretty dry stuff, but a FREE OS is still a FREE OS, and we all loves a bargain, amirite?
In your opinion, how does system administration (automation/scripting in particular) compare (between Fedora and…whatever flavor of Windows it is you usually deal with)?
When will you be trying out Debian, Gentoo, and/or Slackware?
Is there anything you’ve noticed in Fedora that [doesn’t work|irritates you|is poorly designed|etc]?
I reckon it’s all the same, except Linux/Unix is more textual. It will take some time, too, to figure out where log files are located and which ones I need to look at in the context of whatever I’m troubleshooting. I’ve done a lot of scripting and command line-based Windows administration, so it’s not that much of a stretch, just learning a new command set. One of the main things that makes me a good Windows admin is that I’ve got such a deep reservoir of break/fix experience (even if I haven’t seen a particular problem before, I can quickly determine what the problem is by ruling out what it isn’t - I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but it’s a big part of what I do). I don’t have that depth of experience with Linux so in many ways it will be like starting over, but I work with an excellent Linux administrator, so I have much support to rely on to bring me up to speed.
I’ve dabbled with Ubuntu, but not Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware (we don’t run them here). I might, though. I would imagine a broader experience base could only help me. Plus, with a name like “Slackware” it’s got to be good.
The only thing that sort of annoys me about Fedora is the lack of simple, out-of-the-box integration with the Windows environment. It’s generally acknowledged that the Unix-based OS is more stable, scalable and (technologically) superior, but let’s face it - Windows owns something like 95% of the business computing environment so they’re obviously doing something right. As far as particulars go, I cite the example I mentioned in the OP. I still haven’t got my email client 100% working. I can send and receive mail, but can’t sync my Sent Items folder with Exchange, and can’t call up the Address Book. I’m also STILL unable to get LDAP authentication going. That’s bullshit, if you ask me. It shouldn’t be this difficult. Actually - I’m quite certain it isn’t difficult at all, as I’ll realize when I finally puzzle it out.
It’s all good, though. The harder I have to work at getting this workstation fully integrated into my Domain environment, the more I learn.
Having used both Fedora and Ubuntu fairly extensively, I’d definitely recommend Ubuntu for the desktop over Fedora. The caveat being for servers: I think Redhat Enterprise is far and away the gold standard for setting up and managing a nice stable, secure webserver. So if you plan to manage a mix of servers and desktop machines, it may be easier to just stick with Redhat throughout.
Don’t bother with Gentoo – it’s kind of cool to see everything getting built from source every time you do anything, but at the end of the day desktop PC hardware is all the same. So any mucking around you do with the compile flags is more likely to make things worse than better, at least as compared with binary distributions like Ubuntu.
And if you find a linux calendar application that can talk to an Exchange server, please let me know. They switched us over to Exchange at work a while back. For email, it’s seamless: Thunderbird works just the same. But the calendar support is pretty crappy. Right now I’m using some web interface to Outlook, but it sucks pretty hard. At some point, I’ll need to do some research and see if there’s something better, but my coworkers tell me there’s not much out there so I haven’t bothered.
I will probably set up another Ubuntu workstation at some point. I chose Fedora because I’m trying to ramp up quickly to admin out RHEL servers, and figured the command & software mix would be most similar with Fedora. Maybe when I get this desktop just the way I want it, I’ll nuke it and start over with Ubuntu.
It’s good to have experience with different package managers (which was the primary differentiator in my head when I asked). Last time I used Fedora (years ago now), I really didn’t like yum – apt (Debian and Ubuntu) is far superior IMHO. I have no experience with Gentoo or Slack either…perhaps one of these days.
You should try going the other way sometime. Actually, don’t…it’s close to, if not actually, impossible.
