[ic] Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version Choice and Hosting Options?

[Dave Aiello]

One of my consulting clients is trying to build a very stable 
Interchange environment that includes development, test, and production 
servers with similar configurations, as well as vendor tech support for 
the OS and as many distro components as possible.  The production server 
would ideally be hosted at a large commercial hosting company that also 
supports the OS build that we choose.

As a result of the vendor tech support requirement, we have been looking 
carefully at Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I am having difficulty finding commercial webhosts that can provide a 
supported RHEL environment that is likely to run Interchange 
successfully.   The vendor that I have talked to that definitely 
supports RHEL 3 (Rackspace) seems very reluctant to allow us to 
substitute a non-threaded version of Perl.  As a result, if we were to 
choose them as our production hosts, we would probably have to use RHEL 
2.1, because it is very similar to the RH 7.2 distro.

Does anyone know of any large commercial webhosts other than Rackspace 
that support RHEL today , that we can include in our evaluation?

Is my conclusion correct that Interchange will not run on RHEL 3 unless 
a non-threaded version of Perl is substituted for the version of Perl 
5.8.0 that is normally part of RHEL 3?

If we chose RHEL 2.1, will Interchange run on the RPM versions of 
Apache, MySQL, Perl, and Sendmail?

FYI, the versions I am seeing offered in RHEL 2.1 currently are:

apache 1.3.27
MySQL 3.23.56
Perl 5.6.1
Sendmail 8.11.6

Thanks,

-- 
Dave Aiello
CTDATA
+1-609-918-9650 x 101 phone
+1-609-918-9681 fax
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