Posts by John Haxby

Re: Default is ...

For openssh 3.9p1, 4.3p2 and 5.1p1 (the versions I have readily to hand) the default cipher would appear to be aes128-cbc. You can put a "Ciphers" stanza in you ~/.ssh/config to choose one of the stream ciphers -- see ssh_config(5). I've no idea what you do if you're using winders.

I expect there'll be a patch along shortly though.

@AC -- Fedora Revenue

The issue here is not charging money for Fedora, but converting people from Fedora into fee-paying RHEL users. How much are they prepared to pay for support and stability? Is $750 per annum too steep? Is $5 in perpetuity less than it costs to provide the service? Converting CentOS users to RHEL is harder -- they already have stability so you're left with providing support (which they don't need) and access to patches quicker (which they mostly don't need).

There's no way I'd pay for Fedora either, but I might be prepared to spend a small amount to get RHEL and its updates and I'll skip the support thank you.

Of course, where Red Hat can and do differentiate themselves from the free hoi polloi is in support, especially when it comes to complex things like HA clusters, but that's not where the mass-market money is. And that's the challenge.

Fedora stability

Fedora 10 alpha is very, very early in the cycle. You won't get access to anything else as early unless you're actually working on it yourself and that is the point: if you want to get involved very early on you can do.

Fedora 9 gave a much-needed impetus to the KDE 4.0 work and while KDE 4.0.5 undoubtedly has a lot of rough edges, it's much better for the extensive testing and fixing that it got through the Fedora exposure -- KDE 4.1 (and Fedora 10) hold great promise as a result.

Fedora, any release, though can be seen as the enthusiasts distro: it has everything bar the kitchen sink (I checked) and the latest version of all of those things. By its very nature it's not stable although I have less trouble with it than I do with Windows (except that I hardly use Windows any more).

If you want crave stability and you want to stick with Red Hat, then go for RHEL or CentOS. Of course, you won't get the latest of everything and your favourite package probably won't be updated ("rebased") for the lifetime of the release, but it's stable and well-tested and the only time they get rebooted is when the kernel gets a security fix or when the next update for the series comes along. Or some idiot trips over the power lead.

You could write practically the same about Ubuntu and Ubuntu LTS -- the enthusiast releases will never have the stability that the long-term support releases have.

@KenBW

There are four extant flavours of RHEL. 2.1 is having its last gasp and all support will formally end next May; RHEL3 is in maintenance mode (I think); RHEL4 and RHEL5 are under active development.

It's not a crazy versioning scheme, it's four distinct products. And yes, there are people that want to stick with the older products ('versions') mostly because they do what they were bought for and on the hardware bought at the time and there is simply no point in going through a major upgrade. New hardware, on the other hand, will get the newer product (often because the new hardware won't run with the old OS).

How many Nokia n800 tablets?

Amazing. And to think Nokia have only sold a handful of their linux-running Internet tablets. In fact, me and my two friends must be the only three.

Either that or no one ever follows the link to the BBC news that the n800 ships with.

Must be that then.