Is the Red Hat Network worth its 5 bucks a month price?
-Seriv

I bought a subscription. I use it. Great for getting info on bugfixes and getting updated packages. I find that downloading from RH directly is way faster than downloading from rpmfind or the like. Plus you are supporting open-source which is always a good thing. Just think of it as putting the money (2/3) that you would have spent on Windows Shorthorn to a better use. :-)

do you know how many computers that supports? I am just a high school student and don't have a lot of money, but I have a desktop and a laptop with RHL 9.0 on them. If I get a subscription I want to make that 5 bucks go far.
-Seriv

I would not buy it.... if you use linux enough you'll find yourself moving away from Redhat sooner or later...you should be able to get the "Demo" Entitlement for one machine on each account so if you wanna be cheap you can do it that way. But my suggestion is not to buy it because sooner of later you'll be switching distros!

Why would I want to switch distros? I find RHL just fine, and I know people who have used it for years. please clarify why?
-Seriv

I have been happily using RH for over 2 years now. I tried MD and Suse and ended up back on RH. The whole line that RH is just a newbie distro is total BS. I have 9 production-level servers running Redhat 7-9 doing a beautiful job filtering mail, running MySQL, Lotus R5, running Squid and Privoxy, etc etc. All that talk that everyone leaves Redhat because <pick one> distro is better is just that..Talk.. Sorry but it gets my goat when people dog on RH just because it is easier for newbies to deal with than most of the other distros (save Mandrake maybe). Just my 2 cents..

I nice alternative to the RHN is APT4RPM. It'll let you update your whole systme, not just software that came with your distro. And its free of course.

If RedHat meets your needs, then there is probably no reason to switch.

As far as the value of RHN, I've got a few clients that use Redhat on their production systems and they are not using RHN. They seem to be doing ok just by grabbing the updates from the publicly available parts of the sites and mirrors.

I use RHN at work were I maintain around 10 RedHat boxes and it has come in handy when I need to update all of them at one time. If you get entitlements for all your boxes you can put them all under one username and manage them all at once. I would not suggest RHN for those people who only have one or two boxes running RedHat. There are plenty of other ways to keep your box up to date, like Ximian's Red Carpet.

Check it out. It worked for me on 7.3 and 9
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

"because sooner of later you'll be switching distros!"

My experience has been somewhat different. As I grew more familiar with Linux I found that i was maintaining SuSE less and less and maintaining Linux more and more. Now it is irrelevant to me whether I get packages from SuSE or someplace else. Similarly it is irrelevant to me whether I use SuSE's excellent setup program, YaST, or fiddle with the /etc files like a Slackware devotee.

So I think that as time goes on seriv will look at the Red Hat Network fee as more and more of an unnecessary expense.

Its not worth it...but, if you are willing to help linux developers (redhat) in that case its a different story. I use red-carpet instead of RHN, which is free and works the same..

Don't buy it. Not because it's not worth it but because it's not necessary unless you are doing business.
Why?
Because Redhat releases new version every 6 months.
So just get the new distro every 6 months and update it.
6 - month is very short. I think it is not very necessary to update the things within 6 months.