Just found something interesting this week.

We set up Red Hat 9 on our new linux server because it worked best with our Promise FastTrak RAID card. What we found, though, that the box wouldn't stay up longer than 24 hours (wouldn't even respond to ping packets).

We found out that Red Hat didn't like the Belkin KVM that it was on (with 2 other servers). Not only that, but I found that the RedHat was really lacking in terms of software (way out of date, missing packages I felt were critical). So we broke the RAID (no more Promise FastTrak...going for 3ware Escalade) and went with Mandrake 9.1. It has been solid. Same KVM, but no downtime. Not sure what RH had that was crashing the entire OS.

Another great thing about Mandrake 9.1 is the ability to choose between apache 1.3 and apache 2. Some of us network admins aren't quite ready to make that jump (mod_php issues).

Personally, I have always preferred Mandrake, but we went with RedHat because it was the only distro I could get the Promise RAID to work with. Overall, however, Mandrake's benefits overweighed Promise RAID benefits.

Thumbs up, Mandrake developers!