[COLUG] Fedora on production servers

[Brian Miller]

On Friday 18 August 2006 4:34 pm, Dane Miller wrote:
> I'm a Debian fan, but have learned a lot about the rpm world of
> RHEL/Fedora/Centos from various Colug-ers.  One such kernel of received
> wisdom was "Fedora is not for production" -- use CentOS or RHEL instead.
>
> Fedora project leader Max Spevack writes a thoughtful response to this
> specific accusation on Slashdot today
> (http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/17/177220).
> Specifically:
>    "We strive to produce a quality distribution of free software that is
> cutting-edge, pushes the envelope of new open source technology, and is
> also robust enough that it can be relied on for server or desktop use."
>
> So has Fedora changed since it's inception?  Who uses Fedora in
> production?  For what task?  Why?
>
> Anyone care to share their experience on Fedora buginess?  On Fedora
> advantages?
>
> I'm referring specifically to always-on boxes performing "server" roles.
> Not desktops.
>
I haven't actually used Fedora for servers, but my big problem is the short 
life cycle.  For how long after the initial release will security patches and 
bug fixes be produced?    I haven't looked at it for a while, but I believe 
it is less than 1 year.  That means to keep up with security issues, you have 
to reinstall every year.  Maybe on a server on your network with no exposure 
to the Internet that would be acceptable, but I wouldn't want to deal with 
it.  OpenSUSE provides 2 years of support (at least they used to until they 
changed the name from SuSE Professional to OpenSUSE--I haven't looked for a 
definite statement on support since then), and I would consider that too 
short for a serious production system.

RHEL/CentOS and SLES all offer 5 years of support after initial release.  That 
means you don't need to upgrade/reinstall  until it's time to replace the 
hardware, while still getting those critical security patches.

FC may be stable enough for a production system, but every time you upgrade, 
you'll need to verify the version number of any service program you're 
running, make sure they are no major changes, and possibly have to redo your 
config files.  The enterprise Linux distros spend some time testing the 
upgrades, etc., to make sure things don't break when you install a service 
pack (or at least giving you fair warning when something will), so you don't 
run the risk of doing an upgrade and then finding out your [insert  critical 
service] server doesn't work anymore.