While it might be as “cool” as some other things, I’m gearing up to start looking seriously at Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 (OES 11) for some upcoming transitions for our main file storage solution. Since we already have time and effort put into Novell NetWare, and eDirectory specifically, that is what I am going to look at first.
While I have extensive experience with Ubuntu and OS X, I haven’t taken a look at SUSE or openSUSE for years. Since OES 11 is usually paired with SUSE Enterprise Linux I need to at least take a look at what is on the other side of the Linux divide.
So, if anyone has any experience or tips with working with SUSE and openSUSE, please leave them in the comments.
3 replies on “Messing with openSUSE”
I’d recommend going straight to SEL and skipping experimenting with OpenSUSE if you’re looking to build exp points for OES. There’s some pretty big differences between the two. I’ve found that Open is much simpler to work with because it’s far more modern and the temptation to always do stuff in the GUI. SEL is definitely behind the times (like Win server 2003 compared to 2008r2) but it is crazy stable. It’s always been good for me to hit my head on the wall with SEL to level up Linux skilz.
The transition from Netware to SEL is a little nerve wracking but once a person gets used to OES just running as a layer on Linux its all good. Your normal linux command line stuff works and scripting options are much better.
I think you are absolutely correct, and I’ll probably end up going that route. The main thing I want to try and get used to is the tooling and terminology.
I really believe that is SEL’s selling point … extreme stability. Kind of like Red Hat in a way. Our CentOS boxes and VMs are still running the 2.6 kernel right now, which is “crazy old” in the world of technology, but the stuff doesn’t break.
I’ll probably see if I can setup an SEL laptop in the near future. I’m looking forward to beating my head against OES on Linux a little bit to see if that migration will be worth it or if we are going to go (shudder) Microsoft.
How much experience do you have with SLES and SLED?