Robert E. Blair wrote:
> You might suggest to them that if "branding" is their sole criterion
> for security they might want to do a little reading on the latest SONY
> fiasco.  Explain to them:
>
>   1. SL is built from exactly the same sources as RHEL
>         1. the only exceptions being where trademarks or other legal
>            restrictions make this impossible
>         2. the installation procedure differs mainly due to the above
>   2. you should explain that CERN, Fermilab, Argonne, Brookhaven ...
>      large national labs use this OS and they really do care about
>      security. Hell, they not only use it they distribute it!
Thank you. I didn't think to use the names of the large national labs
the last time, and hopefully that will have an impact! I am going to do
just that the next time this conversation comes up.
>   3. Finally if you can't convince them don't reinstall just review the
>      tiny number of rpm's identified with "SL" in the name and replace
>      them with their "EL" version and change to using  the up2date
>      mechanism from yum for keeping things current.
>         1. the beauty of common source roots is that almost nothing
>            changes from one distribution  to another - this has worked
>            fine for me in migrating from WhiteBox to SL and is all of a
>            5 minute process (the only potential gotcha here is how to
>            initialize up2date since this is an area where primitive DRM
>            comes into play and makes life potentially difficult)
Cool. I was set off in this direction by a reply off-list suggesting I
do this by replacing all rpms with their EL counterparts. I wasn't too
keen on doing that as I'd essentially be overwriting most of my rpms
with identical versions. Now I know how to determine the rpms modified
by SL, and selectively upgrade just those.

I will try my best to convince them of the equivalence of the software,
but if I can't, this is a suggestion that will work well.

Thanks again,
Harish