Dear Friends,
I have several Linux versions of servers installed in our environment(RedHat,Oracle and Solaris) and I need to update the patches for those servers on a regular basis. I dont have any subscripition with my OS Vendors.Can you guys help me out on how to proceed.
Sathish.

Pay for the subscriptions if you use commercial products. Simple.

1 members found this post helpful.

What about something like this:

http://spacewalk.redhat.com/

I have no experience using it; so additional opinions should be gathered...........

One big issue I see for use in enterprise:

Is Spacewalk supported?

Spacewalk is supported within an open community via IRC, mailing lists and bug reports, similar to the Fedora community. There is no pay-for support for Spacewalk, nor is it supported by the Red Hat Global Support Services.

No way for "regular" patching without subscription.
However you can download "release" DVDs, make yum repository from them
and update other servers to this level only.
Cannot say nothing about Oracle Solaris patches.

You need to pay for updates and support for these 3 if they are serious prod systems.

1. You do have an option for RHEL to changeover to Centos (free rebuild of RHEL), but you only get updates; no support

2. There's no equivalent for Oracle Linux unless you want to also replace with Centos (Oracle Linux is a customized rebuild of RHEL).
It won't be identical, but you can make it functionally equivalent.

3. AFAIK, there's no free version or equivalent for Solaris.
NB: Solaris IS Unix, but it's NOT Linux.
Again, you may be able to replace it (functionally) with Centos; depends on what 3rd party apps/tools you are running.

Ultimately, you need to research into what I've said, then talk to your mgr about the pros/cons of each case (OS).