A bunch of friends and I have rented a box at ServerMatrix, a managed hosting service where you get total control (root) on your box. They support Windows, BSD, and Linux. The flavors of Linux they’ll install are RH9, RH EL3, or Debian. I’ve been elected as head admin of the box and MARK NOTARUS is my other partner in crime. Mark and I were most familiar with the free RedHat versions, and since EL3 is based on those, we went with that.

To sum it up, I’m really impressed with EL3. It seems like a really well QAed version of RH9, which was a solid distribution.

To keep the maintenance on the box down and to make it easy for someone else to pick up should I fall off the wagon, I’ve made it a point to stick with RPMs and redhat tools as much as possible.

The RPMs for apache and php were compiled just how I wanted them to be. (I’m not sure if this means RedHat in general is getting better, or I’m just less picky.) I was able to get gallery and SSL working out of the box. Gallery was a good test app, since half of us using the box are moving our photos there.

This is my first experiance using up2date, and its not too bad. Its certainly not apt-rpm or yum but its not a complete pain to use.

The only things I’ve really had to do by hand were Tomcat and its apache connectors (because it just doesn’t ship with redhat) and Postfix because I wanted a more up to date version. Also, any webapps that would be shared by everyone such as Jamm and SquirrelMail. Okay, that was a bit more than I thought, but most of those are setup and forget, until a security exploit comes along.

Actually, I’ve added courier-imap by hand as well, but I grabbed a SRC RPM and used that. I’m not sure if that really counts as “by hand” but it certainly wasn’t a standard package from RH.

At work, our IT group is looking to move a bunch of stuff over to Linux. I feel comfortable advocating EL3 thanks to my experiance here. There’s really no other choice for an IT dept. like ours.