Hello everyone!

I have spent a few hours trying to find similar threads, but have not found one (probably my fault as this seems like it would be a common question).

I am accustomed to Red Hat based distros, but may be doing some work with SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) in the near future. I was hoping that the community could contribute some of their communal knowledge as far as differences between administering the two operating systems. I know that the fundamental core is the same, but I am curious as to differences in things like:

1. Network device configuration and management. Does SLES use IP ranges the same way and do they behave the same way as RHEL, and are the ifup and ifdown scripts available in SLES or do you manipulate the interfaces using ifconfig? Are the configuration files in the same location?
2. Package management (I know SLES is RPM based and uses yast, but does yast have a command line equivilency like yum or up2date?)
3. HA/Cluster RHEL uses RHCS and some of the docs I've seen on-line that discuss clustering on SLES involve grabbing the RHCS tarballs from Red Hat to build the cluster. Is there no direct package group in SLES to have the same level of HA/cluster configuration?
4. Service management. RHEL uses the init.d script wrapper called service and chkconfig to add/remove services and set thier default runlevel states. What is the equivelency in SLES?
5. Automated installations. RHEL uses Kickstart, is there something as fully featured as kickstart for SLES? Does it support unassisted PXE-boot based builds?
6. Patch management: I have custom internal repos set up for my yum based RHEL 5 servers, what is the equivalent method for SLES?
7. Custom RPMs, since SLES is RPM based, are the same rpmbuild tools available in SLES?

I think that more than covers my curiosity for now and thanks in advance for your help.

~Art

PS - I'm not asking which OS is better, but rather what the different nuances are in terms of administration/deployment/configuration etc.

Hello all,

I have installed OpenSuSE on a spare workstation and will be looking into some of the above questions over the weekend. I will post my findings in an attempt to contribute

Thanks again,
~Art