Johns Blog

One of the big announcements at OpenWorld was about the Unbreakable Linux support program, which in a nutshell means that Oracle can now offer the same levels of support for your Operating System (so long as you’re using their own Distribution of Linux) that you get with your database, i.e. no longer will you be bounced between two different companies when you have a support issue that might be related to the OS or the database. The distribution that Oracle is using is basically the Red Hat distribution with the trademarks and lots of the Redhat specific things removed.

So, I thought I’d check out the Enterprise Linux distribution and decided to install it on a spare machine, the installation process went very smoothly and is very straightforward.

Because I’m a bit of a ’stickler’ for making sure the system clock is set correctly on machines (it really helps when trying to tie up logfile entries on different machines), I usually opt to use an NTP server to keep my system clock accurate, so I was a little surprised to see that the two default NTP servers that I could use were actually Redhats own servers.

Now you could say that anyone who runs a public NTP server (or indeed any public server) on the internet is making it available for anyone, however it could be just seen as just a *little* bit cheeky that the Oracle distribution defaults to using Redhats servers (there are lots of other public NTP servers out there), or perhaps it was just an oversight on Oracle’s part. Either way…I wonder how Redhat feel about all these new Oracle Enterprise Linux customers using Redhats servers to keep their clocks in sync ;)