Red Hat AS 3.0: A First Look

By Moshe Bar

October 27, 2003

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No matter how many cool new Linux distributions come alive, Red Hat still remains the reference platform. Red Hat stopped selling a boxed version of its well-known workstation distribution a few months ago, but it sells more and more of the Advanced Server distributions to enterprises. In just two years AS managed to become the standard for Linux servers in production enterprise environments; now AS 3.0 has just been released to the public.

Red Hat recognized early enough that enterprise customers don't want and can't afford to switch distributions and kernel utilities every other week, so AS offers a standardized, tested application environment. Now nearly every application and tools system vendor has an AS certification or is actively trying to get one, and users require it before buying new software from ISVs.

SuSE has been trying to counter the Red Hat AS offer with United Linux, and has had some success on the new Opteron platform. For the last two years or so, some of SuSE's best kernel hackers, people like my good friend Andrea Arcangeli, have dedicated special efforts toward getting the SuSE kernel to fully exploit Opteron's potential. Red Hat has focused more on Itanium, Sparc, and—recently—the IBM S/390. However, certainly Red Hat's most successful product for now is Advanced Server on the i386 platform.

What's New in AS 3.0

Wheresas AS 2.1 was based on Red Hat 7.3, the latest version is based on Red Hat 9.x, so we get all the latest tools and programs. Capabilities of AS 3.0 include:

• mail
• the TUX kernel-accelerated Web server
• the arptables firewall
• DHCP
• network authentication (Kerberos)
• an LDAP directory server
• SSL
• remote boot/image server support
• support for AMD 64, which was not available in AS 2.1
• support for 64 GB of main memory and up to 16 CPUs (AS 2.1 only supported 16 GB and 8 CPUs)
• async IO
• NPTL threads (also not available in AS 2.1
  
  

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