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I've been working on setting up two RedHat-based Dell servers at work today.  We have RedHat 4.5 on both machines, with RedHat subscription on one of them (the other one is for DB serving only with extremely limited access to it, so no need to spend money for updated software or patches)

The problem is that I needed to install and configure the environment for my Ruby on Rails based portal systems hosting. New servers, relatively new OS (there's no RHEL 5 for Japanese users yet :/ ), software subscription allowing to install stuff with a single mouse click (well.. literally, that is). What could possibly go wrong?

Well.. RHEL 4.5 went wrong. I just don't get it WHY the software which is piped to the server thru up2date program is so hopelessly, horribly outdated. Apache is at version 2.0.xx, PHP is stuck at 4.x, ImageMagick is at 3.0x, etc, etc…

And I need Apache 2.2 in order to use load balancing feature, RMagick for Rails doesn't want to work with ImageMagick < 3.6.x, PHP 4 just plain sucks (come on! We're at 5.2x series already! Not stable enough huh?). And of course everything gets installed by randomly spreading files over the disk (well.. that's how RHEL works, but I like to have everything/most stuff inside my precious /usr/local directory)

So I had to  reinstall half of the software which was supposed to work out of the box, installed/updated the other half using RedHat Network, and at the end of the day, when I though I have everything working, and moved one of my sites to test on the new system, I started to get seg faults here and there, and the system went pretty unstable.

So, tomorrow I'll just reinstall the whole OS, leaving most the RedHat-supplied stuff off - and will get a 100% working and controllable system with 100% probability.

What I don't understand is - is it me who just doesn't know how to build stuff on top of pre-built stuff, or is it RedHat's approach to installs, oriented to "average user" sort of system admin? Oh well.. one day of work lost, but lessons were learned :)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Linux, RedHat, Servers, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.