I finally broke down and installed Red Hat 7 on one of my test boxes. Despite all of the negative press it doesn't seem to be that bad. If you choose to try it here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
1) Don't try to mount NTFS partitions during the install. It will crash the install ever time (which I learned the hard way. Red Hat is aware of the problem)
2) There is a problem with rhnsd, the Red Hat update agent. Either disable it or upgrade it. It leaks file descriptors and will crash the machine in roughly 72 hours. I did not install rhnsd so I cannot confirm this. The update is available here -
http://www.redhat.com/support/errata...00-081-05.html
3) I hear there is a problem with the default MySQL install. I tend to install packages like this from source, so I cannot confirm this, but I have seen it in multiple places (including bugzilla).
Other than that the machine has been up/stable for days and I have been beating on it pretty hard. Anyone one else try it out?