Using Red Hat Site For Documentation

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Hi,

Is using Red Hat site for documentation legal?

If I understand correctly you have to be a customer of Red Hat to be allowed to use their bandwidth:
https://access.redhat.com/help/terms/

“2. Terms Applicable to Red Hat Content. In order to access a Red Hat Portal and Red Hat Content, you must be a current Customer of Red Hat or its affiliates
[…….]
“Some Red Hat Content may have additional terms, license agreements, privacy terms, export terms, subscription agreements, or other terms and conditions (“Additional Terms”) that apply to your access to or use of the applicable Red Hat Content. In the event of a conflict, inconsistency, or difference between these Terms of Use and the Additional Terms, the Additional Terms will control.
[……..]
6. Use of Content. Red Hat grants you a personal, non-assignable license to use Red Hat Content for your own internal use while you are a Red Hat Customer (as defined in Section 2 above). Distributing any portion of Red Hat Content to a third party, using any Red Hat Content for the benefit of a third party, or using Red Hat Content in connection with software other than Red Hat Software under an active Red Hat subscription are all prohibited. Red Hat authorizes you to display on your computer, download, play, and print the Red Hat Content provided: (a) the copyright notice is not removed, (b) Red Hat Content is not be altered, (c) Red Hat Content is used only for your personal, educational, and non-commercial use in support of your active valid subscriptions to Red Hat products and services and in accordance with your Customer Agreement, (d) you do not further redistribute or copy Red Hat Content, and (e) you comply with any Additional Terms. In the event of a conflict, inconsistency, or difference between this Section 6 and the terms of a License or Customer Agreement, the License or Customer Agreement will control
(for example, for Red Hat Content licensed under a Creative Commons License, you will have the rights set forth in the applicable Creative Commons License).”

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12 thoughts on - Using Red Hat Site For Documentation

  • This only can be said about the portion of their website that requires username and password to access. Everything else (such as Documentation)
    appears to be put out by them into public domain (that is you do not have to agree to any terms when you enter the documentation portion of their website), and therefore documentation can be used by anybody. This does not include copying portion of that documentation and posting it elsewhere
    (which separate – copyright – notice covers, I meant to say prohibits).

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
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  • Oh, boy. Now I have to rant on Linux and RedHat after being so happy with them for much longer than a decade. OK, the first thing I have to admit:
    I’m ignorant person. Please teach something…

    Now questions:

    1. How often do you reboot your Linux servers? (every about 45 days there is either kernel or glibc update. I remember somewhere about RedHat 5 –
    RedHat 7 machines having uptime about 2 years)

    2. All major Linux distributions either have switched to systemd or plan to do so in next release… I prefer system V init. I don’t like something big handling everything when there is no reason to.

    And the list can go on…

    But there are changes I really like (to keep the balance…). Such as switching to XFS as to default fs! And BTW, I was extremely happy I went with RedHat/CentOS when my debian friend sysadmin was re-creating all keys and certificates (and rebuilding systems) after known random number generator flop debian had…

    So, please, teach me something: how do I build enterprise level server based CentOS 7 which I’ll be able to run 1-2 years without reboot (I did apologize already for being ignorant person ;-)

    Thanks. Valeri

    Department and on several older servers (introduction and philosophy of RHEL 7 made it clear that new servers will definitely be not CentOS 7,

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
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  • You don’t _have_ to install a new kernel/glibc the second it is released, especially if the server isn’t internet-exposed. Usually any memory leak or device driver bugs are discovered and fixed quickly in the release cycle, so if current kernel has any of those problems they should be fixed soon. Then you just need to watch the update notifications and decide if subsequent updates are something you need badly enough to reboot. Just be aware that something that is described as a ‘local root escalation’ might be combined with different application-level bugs in server programs to give the effect of remote exploits (and there _will_ be people who know how to do that) so you can’t ignore everything.

  • Thank you for your explanation. Everyone is ignorant, usually partially, because of lack of time, lack of brain power and lack of “in head”
    storage. I’m still learning.

    Surely the only re-boots needed are kernel related? Therefore the uptime is solely dependent on kernel improvements, including security patches, and hardware related problems. My current longest uptime is on C 6.5 = 185 days.

  • Eventually, you’ll be able to use kpatch to avoid reboots for kernel updates, (http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2014/02/26/kpatch/), however I
    tend to think that Uptime is overrated. Newer technologies, such as VMs and containers, allow services to not be tied to single servers anymore. Anyway, it’s hardly Red Hat’s fault that it addresses security issues promptly.

  • This looks very exciting!

    uptime as a number of days is overrated, but scheduling down time is certainly not.

    The container host still needs to be patched and rebooted. For simple services with light storage needs this is fine, but a container with large local storage might not be easy to hot migrate. You’re certainly not going to migrate a 30TB storage container, for example.

    No, but the kernel itself has had a number of serious flaws this calendar year, which is what the previous poster was concerned about.

    –keith

  • Hi Maxim,

    Thanks for pointers!

    I knew about similar thing: ksplice

    http://www.ksplice.com/

    for about 7 years or so. I was offered that at discounted price (one of brilliant programmers at that company is relative of our Center Director). I decided against that. It is similar thing to why I do not use RedHat
    (even though our university maintains license), but use CentOS instead. More direct solution (i.e. switching servers to system which I do not have to schedule reboot often; FreeBSD would be one of the choices) was the decision for servers. But workstations stay CentOS (CentOS 7 from now on). The system is great for the purpose!

    Thanks to everybody for all your input: it is really instructive!

    Valeri
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++