Is your pharmacy required to be in compliance with the HIPPA laws? I don't know much of the details on those laws other than there is a lot of focus on the security of the info. If you are required to be in compliance you may want to be sure that RH8 can even be used. My guess is that RH8 would not pass the requirements.
It's almost shocking that a software company would recommend RH8 to be used at a pharmacy or any other place that is connected to a public network and that deals with sensitive info. If your server was not connected to any networks and only to other workstations in your office then I don't think this would be much of an issue.
As far as I know, Red Hat dropped support for RH8 at the end of 2003. The company I linked in my previous post, Progeny, had a paid update service available for Red Hat that ended in Dec. 2005.
I think the important thing to consider regarding RH8 is that there will be NO updates available to you for that operating system, at least that I know of. So even though official support ended in 2003, you would essentially only have whatever updates that were included in the official release of RH8, which was back in September 2002.
The Fedora operating system is, as far as I understand it, Red Hat's testing ground for features that may be included in their enterprise operating system RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is currently at version 4). So, it seems that Fedora users are beta testers for Red Hat in some way. I'm not sure it would be best for you to go with that type of OS.
CentOS came about when Red Hat no longer provided their OS for free. Red Hat's only obligation with the open source licenses is that they provide the source code, etc. The only way to get the newer RHEL distributions, as well as update support, is via subscription to their Red Hat Network. CentOS is a clone of RHEL, there are very minimal differences mainly to do with how updates are made available as Red Hat's update system is by subscription only - so that part had to be changed. Other than that, CentOS is exactly the same but with all the Red Hat logos and trademarks removed.
If the dispensing server software operates on CentOS, I would recommend going with that. It would be most similar to RH8, although RHEL is quite a big upgrade from the old RH8 OS. Things may be different, only way to know if it would work would be to test it or find out from other users of the software.
Ubuntu, as far as I know, is more geared towards workstation/pc usage and not really for servers. Although it would probably work fine as a server. I don't know how different it is compared to RH8.
|
