Quoting Gary Hildebrand [email protected]:

After having used it for six weeks, my opinion is mixed.

I recently inherited a bevy of SLES boxes. I like to think of myself as being distro neutral. I've used nearly all of them at one time or another, but have been using RHELAS almost exclusively for production systems for the last couple of years.

The first thing I noticed about SLES is that the default iptables configuration is overly complicated if you're just trying to limit access to services running on the same box as iptables.

Secondly, online_update doesn't work as well as up2date. You can't use online_update to install some package that doesn't currently exist on your system. Or if you can, I haven't found the syntax for it yet. You have to use yast to install new software which is ok, but it would be nice to have a simple command line tool rather than a full blown GUI (ncurses or X).

And my biggest complaint, and I believe this was mentioned here or on KULUA (or was it OLUG?), updating the kernel wipes out the old kernel and it's compiled modules by default. In my case, this left me with an unusable system as I've got a server with an unusual RAID controller that the kernel doesn't recognize by default.

Automatic removal of previous kernels is not a good thing, IMO. Let me remove them manually after I'm sure everything is going to work under the new one. I dug through yast a bit trying to find a place where I could tell it to not remove the existing kernel after updating, but the only thing I could find was to have it backup the existing software to /var/adm/backup.