On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 at 7:28pm, Hull, Dave wrote

> > > As an aside, I highly recommend CentOS as an option for RH shops moving 
> > > forward.  RH9 is far from supported, while CentOS (being an RHEL rebuild) 
> > > will be supported for years.
> 
> Or until Red Hat goes under due to too many people using the parasitic 
> clone products that do nothing to support Red Hat's bottom line.
> 
Actually, one thing the clones do is provide a greater installed base than 
the paid product alone, which leads to more bugfixing (via bugzilla).  See 
<https://www.redhat.com/archives/taroon-list/2005-March/msg00228.html> 
where Rik van Riel (a very active kernel developer and RH employee) 
expresses a positive opinion of the clones.

> > Will have to talk with the machine owner. The system was intended to
> > run software from Bruker (sp?) Scientific (NMR analysis) and I don't
> > know that they are supporting anything other than RH Enterprise
> 
> I've seen elsewhere online that some vendors who's products are 
> certified to run under RHEL are refusing to give support to folks using 
> clones when the need arises.

Indeed, and that makes sense, just as it makes sense that folks running 
the clones don't get support from RH (except via bugzilla).  But for some 
of us, we don't care.  And RH's pricing structure makes no sense, e.g., 
for clusters.

> After I found them, I made symlinks for /dev/changer which points to 
> /dev/sg3 and /dev/tape which points to /dev/nst0. The mtx and mt 
> commands will default to these devices (/dev/changer and /dev/tape) 
> respectively.

You can also use environment variables -- $CHANGER for mtx and $TAPE for 
mt.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University