CentOS Newbie?
 

Since I know many of you swear by CentOS, I would like to ask a few questions if you don't mind.

Apparently I'm gonig to have to switch our data center over from Slackware (my flavor of choice) to CentOS.

Seeing as how I've never used it, I was wondering what everyone's opinion was as far as how easy is it to set up and manage? Why has that become your flavor over all others? Are there any tips or tricks can share as far as it is concerned?

Thank you in advance for your input!

What will you be using it for? Web hosting?

The reason I like CentOS is because it's virtually a clone of RHEL. RHEL is what I have most of my webserver management experience with. I'm sure I could do what I need with pretty much any flavor of Linux, but CentOS/RHEL does what I need quite well.

Thank you for the reply John!

Yes, it is for web hosting and databasing.

I have two large concerns regarding CentOS. One, security and two, stability. I know I'm basing my worries off Red Hat 6.2 (which I used years ago at an ISP). It was horrible.

So what makes CentOS better than RHEL at this point?

RHEL as of version 3 went commercial and required that anyone using it had a support license. Due to GNU & etc Red Hat still had to make the source freely available. So a number of new Linux flavors were started based on RHEL. All they needed to do was remove all of the Red Hat trademarks & logos, basically.

CentOS is basically a clone of RHEL that is distributed freely. CentOS aims to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL. So when running CentOS you are pretty much running RHEL. Only differences that I've noticed is with the up2date feature of RHEL, which requires a support license to access. CentOS uses a different program that does basically the same exact thing.

As far as I can tell, CentOS is quite secure. Obviously it needs all software patched and updated pretty much the same as any other Linux flavor. CentOS 4 / RHEL 4 has selinux, I believe as part of the linux kernel, which can be used to lock down the system even more.

Most hosting companies that I've seen usually offer RHEL or CentOS. I see that as a vote of confidence for them both.

I have 30+ servers running CentOS. I find CentOS, and other RHEL clones, to be the easiest distros to use and manage. While I do not have alot od experience with Slackware in a server enviroment, CentOS is the most secure and most stable distro I have ever used on a server.