In the past I’ve been asked a lot about what the difference is between RHEL and Fedora – a lot of people think that Fedora is just a ‘free’ version of RHEL with pretty much the same features with the only difference being that you have to pay for support with RHEL whereas Fedora is only community supported. Unfortunately there are more differences between Fedora and RHEL than just support. The best way I can describe it is a comparison between a Formula 1 car (Fedora) and a well-cared-for Mercedes road car (RHEL). The F1 car has all the latest gadgets and technology and is on the bleeding edge of design, but unfortunately things can go wrong, and things like the tires wear down and sometimes the car flies off the track after a corner (update). If there’s a design flaw (bug) the chances are they won’t re-design a new car mid-season just to fix it – they’ll rather fix it in the next design.
The F1 car design gets a new release each season with a new paint job and better performing spoilers etc and unfortunately accidents still happen. After a year or so, the old car design is scrapped completely and parts aren’t made specially for it any more (it’s reached End-Of-Life and is no longer supported).

On the other hand however we have the Mercedes road car which has drawn all of the experience of building the engines and parts for the F1 car, but have had the time to mature the technology used in F1, make it extremely resilient and safe and put it all into a stable car. You can be confident driving the road car that nothing will break unexpectedly and that even if it does, you can take it to the garage and they’ll figure out what’s wrong and make it right again (bug fixes). You get air bags (RHCE’s ). You also get the peace of mind knowing that the car has a warranty and will last for a long time to come, and that parts will always be available for it, and that the tyres won’t wear down quickly etc. All because you know the car has been safety tested and engineered to withstand a crash and a break-down.

I think that’s about as far as I can take the analogy – but I’m sure you get the drift

So, since I last wrote we’ve got a new greyhound bitch called Mimi. I caught and rescued an emaciated stray German Shepherd (Alsatian) who was scavenging for food  around the Waterloo marina. Here are the photos in my gallery. She was a little apprehensive about being on a lead to start and we had a few growls and snarls to start with but once she knew I was not in the mood for any messing about she soon became quite submissive and was happy to follow me. The poor thing was absolutely famished and we’d noticed a rabbit carcass on the field where we take the hounds for walks – with hindsight it was obvious that it must’ve been her who caught the wee bunny for dinner.

We phoned seven different agencies to get advice on what we had to do to get her picked up / out in a kennel for strays. On the way home I flagged a passing police van and asked them if they knew of a number to call etc. They told me it was the dog warden who was legally responsible for collecting and kennelling stray dogs.  The dog warden didn’t answer and apparently, from speaking to all the various charities (who couldn’t take the dog due to the legal requirement of going through the “dog warden”) the said dog warden service is a pile of shite. They see it as just a 9-5, Mon-Fri job, with no interest about dog welfare, there’s no out-of-hours contact, even though there’s supposed to be. Out of the seven agencies we contacted it was only the RSPCA who were interested in taking this dog in, because she was so mal-nourished.

She had quite a good demeanour about her once she knew she was in a safe environment and  she knew certain commands like “sit” etc, so it was obvious that she’d been domesticated so she should be easily re-homed. In fact, looking back, this reminds me of a post I wrote a while ago about a dog database. When the RSPCA guy turned up he scanned her for a microchip and she didn’t have one. It’s cases like this, which I’ve now experienced first-hand, when a database / compulsory chipping would be great. To either re-unite with a loving family, or prosecute an abandoner.

At work I’ve been really busy working on a few RHEL (Linux) and AIX (IBM UNIX – read ‘mainframe’) projects for a few of our clients. I actually really enjoyed most of the project work – it’s all really fascinating stuff, for me at least and very good for my career as a whole. All good stuff for the CV! I really feel that I’ve learnt and refined my linux skills quite a lot recently. I’ve got a Google notebook that is stuffed full of really useful tidbits of bash scripting and commands – I keep meaning to write a decent “crib-sheet” post on here for some of the most useful stuff.

Oh! I nearly forgot!! Mimi (our new greyhound) is the one on the right…