back to article Red Hat unleashes EL 7.2 beta on a waiting world

Red Hat has offered up a beta of Enterprise Linux 7.2, touting security, storage management, and expanded container capabilities. The container support the outfit highlights includes enhancements to its OverlayFS and user namespaces. The company says its aiming to support both the migration of existing apps to containers, and …

  1. astrax

    Some nice additions

    Particularly like the inclusion of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) as standard and, of course, DNSSEC. I haven't really touched SCAP before but it looks pretty useful. It will be interesting to have a play with the "remotely manage local disk data security based on network identity" implementation too.

    I think most both sys admins and devops will be pleased with the inclusions.

    1. DainB Bronze badge

      Re: Some nice additions

      "I think most both sys admins and devops will be pleased with the inclusions."

      Why ? What's wrong with EL6 ?

      1. JakeMS

        Re: Some nice additions

        "Why ? What's wrong with EL6 ?"

        Absolutely nothing. I use both EL7 and EL6 and both are doing there jobs nicely. But I am always glad to see improvements to EL releases in general.

        Though I tend to keep on the current stable release this way as machines age and become ready for a replacement they get the latest available EL release along with their replacement.

        (Except .0's, I avoid those I tend to wait for .1 first. Example skip 7.0 but use 7.1 as by this time most deal breaker bugs are found and has given you time to test by sticking it in, wiggling it around and probing it on your test machines to see if she's okay with it.)

        As long as you keep any homebrew applications ready for the next EL release and the current one it should work great and generally helps avoid that "Oh no! My OS is EOL! PANIC NO SECURITY UPDATES!" as most machines will have moved on, and if not they can be safely upgraded to the newer EL release knowing full well your applications were updated and ready to go.

        1. TrevorH

          Re: Some nice additions

          Oddly the release notes make no mention of two of the biggest changes: systemd is rebased from version 208 to 219 and gnome from 3.8 to 3.14.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @astrax - Re: Some nice additions

      You mean devops because competent sysadmins never had problems these solutions offer to solve.

  2. future research

    Time to look into it.

    Haven't really look at EL 7 or Centos 7 yet, I suppose its time I did. Currently the commercial software I administer that runs one Linux it certified for particular 6.x releases. I just haven't felt the need to get my head around systemd as I cannot see it bring me any benefit.

    How have others found systemd?

    1. JakeMS

      Re: Time to look into it.

      "How have others found systemd?"

      At first I was very much against it.

      Then I actually sat down and "grudgingly" started using it.

      Now I kinda like it. Once you've got your head around it, it's actually fairly easy to use.

      Want to enable a service?

      instead of chkconfig <service> on use systemctl enable <service>

      Want to start/stop/restart a service?

      instead of service <service> start/stop/restart use systemctl start/stop/restart <service>

      Oh, and one handy feature you can chain start/stops. Example;

      systemctl restart shorewall httpd mariadb

      instead of:

      service shorewall restart; service httpd restart; service mariadb restart

      And creating service is also easier.

      Although. I know that it still breaks that whole unix thing of "do one job and do it well" but so long as it works well and isn't causing any major problems for you by being combined.. does it really matter?

      1. future research

        Re: Time to look into it.

        "Although. I know that it still breaks that whole unix thing of "do one job and do it well" but so long as it works well and isn't causing any major problems for you by being combined.. does it really matter?"

        Thank you for your response, sounds a lot like the opensolaris smf, just a little different when it works.

        I do find with the opensolaris smf stuff though if a simple restart does not work finding out why (past the smf logs ) escapes me.

      2. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Time to look into it.

        You know, even 2 months ago I would have likely downvoted as I loathed systemd. Now however, after first having to dive into it because a client insisted on using RHEL7 and then - like you, grudgingly - making an effort to migrate my various home servers to CentOS7, I've gotten used to it.

        Maybe it was the lobotomy (scars healing nicely, thanks for asking) or the North Korean style brainwashing by Poettering...

        Seriously though, once you "get used to it" you just sort of shrug, adapt to the new commands and move on. Is creation of a new service still a convoluted mess? I think so, but you use a cheatsheet and only do it once anyway, then send those templates around via your OS management system of choice.

        I guess I'm just too old to fight any longer. Let the younguns carry the torches and pitchforks.

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