As many of you are probably aware the officially supported nodalpoint Linux distribution is Debian. Seriously though, most of our regular contributors are Debian users and we can probably thank Dopey for setting us straight (orignially I was running nodalpoint point on a RedHat server). Now there are many reasons why Debian is a better choice than RedHat for use in an academic environment (security, flexibility, package dependencies etc.). There are also good reasons why you would choose to run RedHat over Debian in a commercial environment, the main one being support contracts from commercial vendors like IBM. This thread over at slashdot on Using Debian in Commercial Environments is a good roundup of the issues involved. The consensus seems to be "Don't run Debian if it voids your support contracts with IBM".
So now I am faced with a similar situation. My current lab has purchased the Tivoli backup system from IBM and of course the only supported platform is RedHat. So my question is should I give up my Debian web server in favor of RedHat so the IBM engineers can install the Tivoli access manager or should I deal with the installation myself using alien ? I find this situation rather annoying (for selfish reasons maybe ?) but we are in an academic environment and not a commercial one. It makes sense to me to save money implementing our own backup solutions and use the grant money to hire more people ?
