Buck wrote:
... If the school can buy 6 servers and however many workstations, it can come up with $100 for unlimited software with only update support. (IMNSHO)
They didn't buy them - they were donated. Nearly all of their hardware is. My home network isn't too far off that either. Only my workstation was bought new - the servers were 2nd hand purchases or built from hand-me-down parts (nothing over 300 MHz, either).
\quote In all of the above cases, i'd really like a set of CDs/DVDs delivered to me. They don't have to be pretty, just functional. The main reason for this is that on current bandwidth prices, it would cost me a minimum of AU$168 to download a 3 x 700 Mb CD set. Quote\
I assume you would agree to pay shipping.
3 CDs couldn't possibly cost $168, even with shipping. I'm not talking about boxed sets here, just updates for subscribed customers.
... I would want an intermediate update program for my non-profit and low end edu purposes. I would want a utility that finds all the necessary updates for all my computers and downloads each RPM. Then I would want each computer to have a customized up2date that sees the new packages, checks to see if it needs one, and automatically installs it from where I downloaded them to. That would be cross beneficial to Red Hat and me as I have less work and RH only uses the bandwidth for one of my computers. All my other computers would get them from me.
That's what RHN Enterprise is for. With the attached price, of course.
You can get a lot of the benefits of having RHN Enterprise by running squid and putting useNoSSLForPackages=1 in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date. Set them to use the same proxy server and all the packages get cached locally.
Speaking of which, it's time to write my next rant on useNoSSLForPackages (in a new thread, of course).