[4179] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2004-01-07 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jan 7 14:56:49 2004
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 14:56:45 -0500
Message-Id: <200401071956.i07Jujm8017279@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
1. OS platform for 9.3 release
Solaris - Solaris 10 is still in beta; it's scheduling likely won't
work out for us. We aren't anticipating any hardware compatibility
issues, so we will likely stick with the Solaris 9 we have (not even
going to a newer sub-release) for the coming release.
Linux - RHEL pricing is $2500 (which would cover personally-owned
machines) plus one of the following to cover institutionally-owned
machines:
$25/client, $50/server, or
$7/FTE for client, $14/FTE for server
Since we don't make distiction between client and server machines,
we'd have to pay the server price for all machines/FTEs, or maybe they
would waive that. (Perhaps only for the per-FTE pricing? Unclear.)
Even with that waiver, the price comes to somewhere in the $25K range
for the per-client pricing, or the $70K range for the per-FTE pricing.
Anyway, negotiations with Red Hat and with our own budget people
continue. We should have a fallback. Possible fallbacks include:
* Stick with Red Hat 9. Updates for RH9 will end in April, so we'd
be on the hook for security fixes (which isn't a great big deal)
and for hardware compatibility improvements in the kernel (which
is a big deal). There will be outside commercial and perhaps
community support options for RH9 after April, but we don't know
how good they will be (or whether we can afford them, in the case
of commercial ones).
* SuSE or Mandrake. Upgrade path would be relatively clear here
(since they use RPMs), but quality is a big unknown.
* Fedora Core: We would have to take upgrades in order to fix
security or hardware compatibility issues, which means some users
might suffer for the sake of others. So this isn't a great
option, although it's familiar and predictable.
Andrew will look into these.
2. Status report
Submitted separately.
