You have read in Lux of my predisposition towards the Red Hat distro. Sometimes however what is an advantage of this distribution, namely maintaining the version of certain key components throughout the life cycle of a major version, reveals as a limit. An example is the pair kernel-iptables for a firewall. Frank was born to overcome this problem without losing the other benefits of Red Hat.
Frank is a set of RPM packages that replace or complement some packages in Red Hat, with more recent versions and more advanced features. Packages are taken mainly from Fedora and adapted to Red Hat where necessary.
While I use Lux generally on all my systems without ever thinking about it, I employ selected Frank packages only when necessary on some specific system because I need some specific feature not found in Red Hat or in Lux.
The packages currently in Frank are:
- kernel derived from Fedora 18 with IMQ scheduler, Julian Anastasov Jumbo patch and bridge-ipmode patch.
- iptables derived from Fedora 18 with IMQ scheduler, Julian Anastasov Jumbo patch.
- bridge-utils derived from Fedora 18 with Julian Anastasov bridge-ipmode patch.
- iproute derived from Fedora 18 with Julian Anastasov Jumbo patch.
- ipset derived from Fedora 18.
- conntrack-tools derived from Fedora 18.
- ipvsadm derived from Fedora 18.
- ebtables derived from Fedora 18.
- arptables derived from Fedora 18.
- xtables-addons up-to-date compiled for the Frank kernel.
- postfix derived from Fedora 18 with VBA, cdb, spf, pam_dict patches.
- dovecot derived from Fedora 18.
- squid derived from Fedora 18.
- libecap derived from Fedora 18.
- vsftpd derived from Fedora 18.
- samba derived from Rawhide which eventually will go into Fedora 19.
- openswan derived from Rawhide which eventually will go into Fedora 19.
- various packages ported from Fedora for dependency reasons