Hi,

I have been using Linux for quite some time now. Though, I haven't really used the Red Hat Enterprise OS, I have managed to bring up few distributions such as debian, CentOS, Fedora. I have been employed in a company who is now using AIX as their main OS. Their are a lot of differences and sometimes I find it more easier since they have "smit".

Now, I am thinking of applying as a RH administrator. They are using the Enterprise. I want to know whether the CentOS is entirely the same as RH Enterprise as their website suggest that CentOS is a complete rebuild of RHE. What clustering technology are they using in the market? Are they using like Veritas/HACMP also? Is there a smit equivalent? How do you detect new hardwares in RHE is it also using kudzu?

Sorry for a lot of questions. Hope you can enlighten me.

Thanks in advance.

Yes, Centos is a complete rebuild. You will see bug for bug under centos and Red hat. I also administer about 7 Aix 5.3 machines and 30 Red Had Servers. red had comes with a lot of system-config-* for things like samba, nfs, bind, and other things. They do have a graphical tool when you have a desktop loaded but all the systems at work are all command line base. To detect new hardware I believe that yes, it still uses kudzu. For clustering they use their own software. this can be configured by using system-config-cluster.

Hi jsteven84,

Thanks for the info. Does the clustering come with the Red Hat installer itself? Or is it something you need to purchase separately from RedHat? How about HACMP and Veritas? How's your experience on Red Hat? Which one is more convenient to use for you? So the commands and administration for CentOS and Redhat same? Thanks again.

Yes it comes with Red Hat. When installing it will give you different things like web server / virtualization / clustering / and some other things. Both of them are pretty much easy for me. I find somethings on AIX that I wish I could have on Linux and vice versa. As for Veritas I am using Backup exec 11d and it has a linux agent. If that is what you are asking for.

Example is I wish Linux had a command similar to prtconf. that gives an extremely detailed list of hardware. However I find commands like free -m which is great.

Hi jstephens84,

I have just installed a CentOS4.2. I don't think it have the clustering or storage manager the same as the Red Hat Enterprise. I guess no way to test clustering using CentOS. Thanks for the info.

Try using centos 5.3. I know that does have it.

Hi jstephens84,

Thanks a lot for the info. I will download the latest CentOS and try. Have you tried the storage manager on the Red Hat Enterprise? If so, how is it compared to AIX LVM?

Thanks.

Well I have used lvm on both systems if that is what you are asking. The commands are a little different but if memory serves me correctly I believe that most of the commands like lvdisplay and vgdisplay still work on both.

Also I am a big fan of the ibm jfs file system so most of my test (centOS) machines use jfs.