running redhat 7.2 mailserver (sendmail) 7.3 is my personal copy at home i also use mandrake 9.0 call me a wuss i like my gui any how i hear debian is ausome with the ability to autoupdate and suse with yast is ausome to so went looking into allternatives for redhat (since stuck with it as mailserver now) to much work to port over (or is it ????) anyhow heard of apt4rpm aptrpm and alien wich can convert deb files to rpm urpmi if anyone has extended experience in this could respond as to what would be my best choice as far as 1. ease of implimentation 2. reliability 3. chronability (can be set up with cron preaty easy??) unfortunatly someone is using the hole in our version of sendmail to spam and looking to plug it but auto updates without the rpm headache bit would be nice thanks for any replies in advance

it makes absolutely no sense to convert *.debs to *.rpms since the package management system used in rh is just rpm. if you want to have the advantages of the debian package management system you HAVE to use debian. (the paths to libraries etc are different in debian so the chance to break your rh system installing converted debs is quite high) i can only recommend against using debs on a rpm system and vice versa. but i can assure you (using debian for some time now) the deb package management system is just unbelievably reliable, stable and easy. (forget about rpmfind.net etc..) just apt-get install packagename and all dependencies are cared for automagically :)

i forgot: updating via cron is very easy too: make a script containing: #!/bin/bash apt-get update && apt-get upgrade exit 0 and have it executed weekly. configure your cron daemon to mail the results to you (youre being asked during installation how you want your system to get in touch with you and you can easily change this afterwards) and thats it :)