What's the best free linux now?
- Thread starter sasquatch
- Start date
So what raid cards do you run? What mobo chipsets? Whats your largest disk array? Are you running any 10G interfaces? Do you have any need for CUDA offloading? What VM managers do you use? Are your main services compiled or packaged? What are your packages compiled for? Got any boxes with over 64 gig or ram?
You don't run desktops on servers (apart from a few rare situations,) but have you tried working with more than say 10 servers all of which are running screen? What happens when you want to rsync, svn commit, scp, or ssh into a server? Do you need virtual desktops to split up your usage?
You already stated one of the main reasons to use CentOS as a server without even knowing it. Fedora's short life cycle alone is enough to make it less than ideal as a solid server. CentOS has a life cycle of 7 fucking years. What's Fedora's? A year?
13 months after the release of the next version. This typically works out to be anywhere between 19 to 24 months. CentOS only makes one major update every five years or so. Don't get me wrong, it'd be nice to have a long life cycle, but within two years the Fedora release I put on a server is going to be as stable is it's going to get on that box, and I'm more than likely only going to put maintenance releases of the major services onto it after that time anyway. I can't think of many sites/services I've worked with that haven't had a complete overhaul after two years anyway, which means complete replacement of hardware (to avoid any potential downtime.) The old hardware then gets wiped and re-purposed for the next big project, or sold off it's it's too out-of-date to be of much use.
Oh, and for what it's worth, I have older servers running CentOS 4.X which although aren't technically end-of-life, there isn't any public repositories for them any more, and they require a reboot + DVD/PXE/KS to update to a newer branch of 4.X. To me that is just as much of a pain as Fedora going end-of-life, I'm still forced to host my own private repository at some point anyway.