12:29 p.m.
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you using
large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical" capacity? Do you
know someone who is, and will you forward this email to them?
If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to gather data for
some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our
decision making for Fedora 7.
What's your setup like?
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
What works well for you?
What could be better?
etc, etc. Anything you care to share with me.
Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
Thanks,
Max
--
Max Spevack
+ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaxSpevack
+ gpg key -- http://spevack.org/max.asc
+ fingerprint -- CD52 5E72 369B B00D 9E9A 773E 2FDB CB46 5A17 CF21
12:51 p.m.
Max Spevack wrote:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?
As long I waited for this question! At last that it so! Arhhh!...
Seriously, I'll answer you in details tomorrow.
Dmitry Butskoy
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DmitryButskoy
1:36 p.m.
tor, 26 10 2006 kl. 21:51 +0400, skrev Dmitry Butskoy:
Max Spevack wrote:
> Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?
As long I waited for this question! At last that it so! Arhhh!...
If you'd been waiting for it, why did you not then write up a tale of
your valiant efforts sooner to share.
Seriously, I'll answer you in details tomorrow.
In the hope that this will be a public reply I'll be waiting, I always
like a good advocacy story
- David Nielsen
6:36 a.m.
David Nielsen wrote:
>>Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?
>>
>>
>How long I waited for this question! At last that it so!
>
>
If you'd been waiting for it, why did you not then write up a tale
Production/live environment implies that a man who works with it is
normally *busy*. (Otherwise he will dismissed on reduction. :) )
Production/live environment implies that the man is skilled/qualified
enough, what implies that is is not too young, what implies that he has
a family etc., what implies he is *busy* at its non-work time too.
Have I answered your question? ;)
your valiant efforts
The "valiant efforts" term proves that a lot of people (unfortunately)
mean that using of Fedora in the production environment is a "valiant
efforts" (and it is not allowable in the normal case). I did not "write
up a tale", just being afraid to speak with emptiness...
I always like a good advocacy story
:)
~buc
1:22 p.m.
Max Spevack wrote:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
to them?
If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to gather data
for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our
decision making for Fedora 7.
I work at a school in the Middle East with approximately 1000 students.
We have ~100 computers throughout the school.
What's your setup like?
Our servers were originally running WinNT, but last year we transitioned
to Fedora running samba for the servers. We now have two FC5 x86_64
xen servers running (between the two of them) two rsyncing fileservers
(samba, nfs, ldap, dhcp, bind), a web server (apache, mysql), and a mini
system that's only used to update our local yum repository. We also
have one FC4 x86_64 server (samba, nfs) running yet another backup of
the primary fileserver
Our clients are all Win2K and Win98, though we are planning on
transitioning to dual boot FC6/Win2K this year.
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
I started using Fedora at Core 2 and found the switch from Mandrake 7.x
easy. Fedora was the first Linux system I used that had an rpm
dependency solver (yum). At this point, Fedora does everything I want,
is running cutting (sometimes bleeding) edge software, and I'm familiar
with it. I gave Ubuntu a shot last year (whatever edition was before
Dapper Drake), but quickly returned to my FC5 setup when I realized that
most things in it were equivalent to what I was running in FC3.
What works well for you?
The system is pretty rock solid (especially compared to NT). The only
time I reboot the servers is for kernel upgrades.
What could be better?
Updating Xen and the xen host's kernel has a bad habit of rendering the
guests inoperable until I manually update their kernels. On my FC5
servers, I'm still on the 2.6.16 kernel because of this and the fact
that the hosts became very unstable with the 2.6.17 kernel. (No BZ, sorry)
etc, etc. Anything you care to share with me.
Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
Thanks,
Max
If you need anything else, let me know
Jonathan Dieter
2:48 p.m.
Max Spevack schrieb:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
to them?
Wikipedia does, if this is really large in your terms:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
André
4:53 p.m.
Max Spevack napisał(a):
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
to them?
If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to gather data
for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our
decision making for Fedora 7.
What's your setup like?
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
What works well for you?
What could be better?
etc, etc. Anything you care to share with me.
Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
Thanks,
Max
Hi Max.
I would see in next fedora core good, or very good tools for manage
desktop settings (gnome) for KIOSK mode FC. We have few FC5 in our
metropolitan library and setting any kiosk mode in GNOME is realy pain.
These computers are in use by people from outside to browse web or our
librarys books catalog.
Maybe thre are any tools, about i don't know ... maybe FC6 ist better
for kiosk mode ?
FC is lack of managment tools to manage group of host from one place in
admin deskotp. It's good, when you must manage more than few hosts (For
one clik of mouse i could for examle in group of host change screensaver
or wallpaper or homepage in their webbrowser)
When i could clone desktop settings from one host to another host or
group of host - it's would be for me perferct.
Thanks,
Jancio_Wodnik
5:37 p.m.
On 10/26/06, Jancio Wodnik <jancio_wodnik(a)wp.pl> wrote:
Max Spevack napisał(a):
> Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
> using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
> capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
> to them?
>
> If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to gather data
> for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our
> decision making for Fedora 7.
>
> What's your setup like?
>
> What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
> something else?
>
> What works well for you?
>
> What could be better?
>
> etc, etc. Anything you care to share with me.
>
> Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
>
> Thanks,
> Max
>
Hi Max.
I would see in next fedora core good, or very good tools for manage
desktop settings (gnome) for KIOSK mode FC. We have few FC5 in our
metropolitan library and setting any kiosk mode in GNOME is realy pain.
These computers are in use by people from outside to browse web or our
librarys books catalog.
Maybe thre are any tools, about i don't know ... maybe FC6 ist better
for kiosk mode ?
Not to troll, but I hear KDE has an excellent Kiosk mode. But I
haven't used it myself. You may want to experiment with that.
--
Fedora Core 5 and proud
6:18 p.m.
On 10/26/06, Jancio Wodnik <jancio_wodnik(a)wp.pl> wrote:
[snip]
FC is lack of managment tools to manage group of host from one place
in
admin deskotp. It's good, when you must manage more than few hosts (For
one clik of mouse i could for examle in group of host change screensaver
or wallpaper or homepage in their webbrowser)
When i could clone desktop settings from one host to another host or
group of host - it's would be for me perferct.
I think the Sabayon guys are aware of that and are working on it:
"11. The profile can then be distributed to computer(s) and applied
to the relevant user's homedirs. We haven't started working on the
mechanisms for this yet, Sabayon is the first piece in a bigger
framework. For example, once we get the Netscape directory server code
released and have a robust free ldap server, we can potentially host
e.g. the GConf settings there and push to the server instead of
applying bits to actual hard drives (or NFS shares)"
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/sabayon
Oisin Feeley
4:36 a.m.
On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 04:18:42PM -0700, Oisin Feeley wrote:
On 10/26/06, Jancio Wodnik <jancio_wodnik(a)wp.pl> wrote:
[snip]
>FC is lack of managment tools to manage group of host from one place in
>admin deskotp. It's good, when you must manage more than few hosts (For
>one clik of mouse i could for examle in group of host change screensaver
>or wallpaper or homepage in their webbrowser)
>When i could clone desktop settings from one host to another host or
>group of host - it's would be for me perferct.
I think the Sabayon guys are aware of that and are working on it:
"11. The profile can then be distributed to computer(s) and applied
to the relevant user's homedirs. We haven't started working on the
mechanisms for this yet, Sabayon is the first piece in a bigger
framework. For example, once we get the Netscape directory server code
released and have a robust free ldap server, we can potentially host
e.g. the GConf settings there and push to the server instead of
applying bits to actual hard drives (or NFS shares)"
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/sabayon
I suggest to watch Pessulus progresses:
http://live.gnome.org/Pessulus
and the official page for Sabayon is at
http://www.gnome.org/projects/sabayon/
Daniel
--
Red Hat Virtualization group http://redhat.com/virtualization/
Daniel Veillard | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/
veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
6:46 p.m.
On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 13:29 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?
Yes. My primary mail servers are all running Fedora.
I tried setting up a mail server on a prominent Fedora-based 'server'
distribution recently, as a favour for a friend. It was the most
unpleasant experience I've had with Linux in a _long_ time.
With Fedora, you get current versions of Exim, SpamAssassin and ClamAV
_very_ easily. With that other distro, it was like pulling teeth. Even
getting up to date versions of spam and virus scanning software was hard
-- I had to build them myself. Although they were theoretically
available in some other non-standard repository, I had problems getting
that to work. I think I had problems even getting _yum_ to work, which
may have been a large amount of the problem. I don't remember well; I've
tried to blot out the experience.
More fun was Exim itself. Ok, I wanted a fairly esoteric feature which
was added to Exim recently, so perhaps I wouldn't _normally_ have been
trying to recompile a newer version of that -- but it was made horridly
painful by the fact that the owner of the machine in question had
installed MySQL 5, and MySQL AB have screwed up their RHEL packages by
including an incompatible version of libssl and not hiding the symbols,
so if you link against -lmysqlclient -lssl (in that order) you get
seemingly random segfaults, while linking in the other order is fine.
Another 6 hours or so of my life down the drain working that one out --
they add insult to injury because when I tried to report it to them I
seem to have achieved nothing except to add my email address to their
spam list.
My own machines, on the other hand, are _much_ easier to deal with. Only
today I upgraded one of them from FC4 to FC6 using yum, from about 1000
miles away. Obviously I'd downloaded all of Fedora Core 6 except the
'fedora-release-6' package last week, since it would be monumentally
stupid to wait until this week before downloading _any_ of it. But it
was only today that I built up the courage to install the fedora-release
package and run 'yum upgrade'.
It was, of course, seamless -- the machine kept web serving and routing
mail throughout. As some point I ought to reboot it onto the new kernel
but I'm out of the country at the moment and the person in whose data
centre it lives is also on holiday, so it can wait a few days.
What's your setup like?
Bog-standard Fedora install with Exim+ClamAV+SpamAssassin, git dæmon,
Apache and one or two other services. On i386 at the moment but I'm
planning to replace all the server machines with PowerPC in the near
future.
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
Current software. And the fact that the "updating is painful" myth is
utter crap.
What works well for you?
Er, all of it?
In particular, the fact that (almost) everything is IPv6-capable has
been a godsend recently. One of the machines in the cluster was deprived
of its IPv4 network, for reasons I still haven't quite understood -- it
had to move to a temporary home behind NAT. But it still had a proper
IPv6 address, and could hence still participate. Since it's the list
server that was quite important. It meant that one of the other machines
(which were listed as MX backups for it anyway) ended up receiving most
of the mail from the Legacy Internet and forwarding it -- but it was
fairly much seamless.
What could be better?
Quicker updates of SpamAssassin. ClamAV updates are fairly much instant
already AFAICT, but SA could possibly speed up a little.
And Exim should be the default MTA, not one of the less capable MTAs.
That's one thing that Debian have right that we don't.
--
dwmw2
6:48 p.m.
Max Spevack wrote:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
to them?
The company I work for has recently made an official policy to use
Fedora always (the only two exceptions being for machines that will run
software made by a partner, who only supports debian or when the client
requires FreeBSD).
Just as an example of our usage, one of the clients I'm responsible for
has a Fedora Core 5 mail server , built around postfix with Fedora
Directory Server, spamassassin, clamav and webmail through Egroupware.
Other fedora 5 machine runs samba and will run the usual LAMP setup for
their application (as soon as I get php4 compiled with MMcache). The
proxy is also Core 5, with squid , CBQ, openvpn for connection of their
other office and synchronization of the directory.
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
It's easy to install. Updates usually come fast. Full of
features that
other distributions may have only in the next release . And the security
record (at least for the machines I've worked with) is excellent. Not to
mention that FC + FE provides all the packages I usually need for
servers (for desktops, the other repositories provide what is necessary,
like support for certain problematic media formats). And it's a good
platform to test some software that we sometimes need to install on RHEL
servers (and the backporting needed is usually minimal or unnecessary
from our testing in FC to deployment in RHEL).
Ease to upgrade is another big plus. I've never made dist upgrades
between releases, but according to what I've read in this topic and
several other posts, this is fairly trivial.
What could be better?
IMHO, Kde could get a little more love,
as well as Evolution (specially
with the exchange-connector). I've had to fall back to using OWA since
the last two connector updates, because Evolution would crash every two
minutes (and I couldn't get a good backtrace to report this issue).
--
Pedro Macedo
8:14 a.m.
Hi,
Max Spevack írta:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
to them?
I am.
If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to gather
data
for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our
decision making for Fedora 7.
What's your setup like?
I am using it for an POS/backoffice software that
I wrote some years ago that was deployed on
RedHat 7.3. It is maintained also by me since that time.
(E.g. it was ported to using UTF-8 when RH8/RH9 came)
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
Mostly the comfort. As I knew and worked with RedHat
before, it was a no-brainer.
What works well for you?
I mainly care about a working PostgreSQL server and
the GNOME environment and it served well.
The PostgreSQL is performing well for the
sub-100 millisec serial protocols of the POSes
as it provides less than 2 millisec response times
even on a loaded machine.
What could be better?
I don't recall anything that wasn't solvable.
etc, etc. Anything you care to share with me.
Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
Thanks,
Max
Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi
9:36 p.m.
Zoltan Boszormenyi <zboszor(a)freemail.hu> wrote:
Max Spevack írta:
> Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
> using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
> capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this
> email to them?
OK, count me in. I'm running Aurora Linux (a Fedora upshot for SPARC),
currently Corona (their rawhide equivalent) on a Sparc Station Ultra 1
(yes, I know the machine is now of mostly archeological value, but I'm a
sentimental... and our first Linux servers were Red Hat on SPARC IPX, this
one was recicled for Linux from an Oracle server on Solaris when that was
discontinued, adding odds and ends in disks). The machine is physically in
my office.
> If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to
gather data
> for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of
> our decision making for Fedora 7.
>
> What's your setup like?
The machine is the NFS server for my account, an NTP server (the SPARC
clocks are very stable) for the department (and beyond). It is FallbackMX
(i.e., mail that can't be delivered directly is handled here, that frees up
the mail queues at the origin servers) for our mailing lists (some 4000
subscribers in all) and probably soon for all our outgoing mail.
> What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as
opposed
> to something else?
Mostly the comfort. As I knew and worked with RedHat
before, it was a no-brainer.
Ditto. When RH for SPARC was discontinued, I moved this machine to
Aurora. The (now PC) servers moved to Fedora (and then to CentOS, upgrading
them mostly in the midst of each term was quite inconvenient here...).
Adding a grain of sand to the SPARC kernel development (I follow Linus'
kernel on this machine). Ditto for a bunch of git tools.
> What works well for you?
Mostly NFS, sendmail and addons (ClamAV, spamassassin). The build chain to
get this working (I build my own RPMs on occasion). NTP is critical.
I'm currently using it as a testbed for a git server.
Being able to grab Fedora SRPMs and having them (mostly) work on it. I've
seen fixes for SPARC reported on the Fedora lists and in %changelogs, and
I'm very grateful for that.
LVM is critical (I've got a lot of oldish, small disks (buying new disks
doesn't make any real sense here, does it?) hooked up on it).
> What could be better?
I don't recall anything that wasn't solvable.
Ditto. But don't take my word for it, I'm an old hand at Unix (since around
'85 as sysadmin) and a long-time Linux user (since late '91, believe it or
not). Handling such a beast today is trivial, specially when compared to
what we went through with propietary Unices (AIX on an IBM RT, later Ultrix
on VAX, then SunOS and Solaris on Sun). Linux handling has improved
tremendously since the early Red Hat days; and Fedora is leagues apart from
what I have had to put up with with propietary systems in general...
One gripe: The possible contents of the various files under /etc/sysconfig
aren't documented anyplace I can find. A pointer to the relevant manpages
(or even webpages) as a comment in them would be nice. For example, you can
tie the name of an network interface to the MAC using the ifcfg file, but
to find this out you have to google for it.
Oh, and on bugzilla: It would be nice if there was a shortcut to look at
the bugs for the selected component. I believe this would have prevented me
from filing repeat bugs a few times.
Hum... might be just "never tried it before" and "didn't bother keeping
up
with new capabilities", but I was /very/ positively surprised when I found
out I could install a package with yum giving the name of an included file
only, or stuff like "Perl(SVN::Ra)".
I'm also using Fedora as my day-to-day work environment here (rawhide, for
added spice ;-). Works fine (unless it explodes, that is).
Computer labs around here use Fedora for workstations, as do many single
users. Mostly for up-to-date software and latest bling.
Many, many thanks for all the hard work! It has been fun, and I certainly
look forward to more.
--
Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 2797513
2:58 a.m.
Max Spevack wrote:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using
large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical" capacity? Do
you know someone who is, and will you forward this email to them?
Sort of ... using it as a development test bed.
What's your setup like?
A few oddball PCs and small servers.
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
The idea was that by testing our stuff on Fedora we would get early
feedback on what would happen when deploying on RHEL.
What works well for you?
The C/C++ development support is good, the Java support is
getting much better. Yum works well.
What could be better?
Fedora Legacy: with something on the fly on a host which becomes
vulnerable, sometimes you get in a situation where all your
choices are inconvenient.
Fedora Extras and/or coordination with other repositories: mixing
repositories is sometimes necessary but often a pain.
Thank you for your consideration,
Davide Bolcioni
--
There is no place like /home.
3:38 a.m.
Max Spevack wrote:
What's your setup like?
We have one IT server (Fedora 5), performing the following services:
File server (on software RAID 1):
NFS
CIFS
HTTP
Subversion
Web services:
wiki
bug tracking
action item management
subversion browser
subversion webdav
MySQL for bug tracking/action item management
DNS
DHCP
NIS
Shell (ssh and vnc servers)
NTP (client and server)
Firewall/NAT
VPN (openvpn)
TFTP for network boot
Backup (tape changer)
Fedora repository mirror
Mail relay (postfix)
i386 chroot for compilation
About 5 desktops run fedora (5/6), 10-15 prefer Windows.
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
I'm used to it. It's free. We develop for Linux.
What works well for you?
Kickstart is excellent for network installation. We have 30-40
development servers, mostly running Fedora, and unattended network
install is great.
lvm/ext2online is excellent
Yum is great (but see below)
The development toolchain
Having tons of packages on a local mirror, so one doesn't have to
download/compile/install and then worry about updates
What could be better?
Single sign on: there are different user/password databases for ssh,
vnc, subversion, samba, vpn, the various web-based services, and
probably more. It's a total mess.
'Yum upgrade' should work well, and should be supported. It is the
natural way to upgrade. Currently it's quite a fight to upgrade an
x86-64 installation.
.rpmnew files aren't working. There are too many false positives to
inspect, so I ignore it and fix things when they break.
selinux stops working as soon as you do something unorthodox, so it's
disabled everywhere.
Disks changing names (hda->sda)
--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function
4:02 a.m.
On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 11:38:23AM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
Single sign on: there are different user/password databases for ssh,
vnc, subversion, samba, vpn, the various web-based services, and
probably more. It's a total mess.
Is this a case of this being too hard to setup or just not
functionning at all ? While SSO is a pain to setup, I've found
it works quite well once it's up and going.
Emmanuel
4:09 a.m.
Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 11:38:23AM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Single sign on: there are different user/password databases for ssh,
> vnc, subversion, samba, vpn, the various web-based services, and
> probably more. It's a total mess.
>
Is this a case of this being too hard to setup or just not
functionning at all ? While SSO is a pain to setup, I've found
it works quite well once it's up and going.
I looked at openldap, but it had separate schemas for cifs and unix.
Can you describe your solution? Does it work for the other services?
Hopefully one day this will come working out of the box.
--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function
9:03 a.m.
On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 12:09:41PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
I looked at openldap, but it had separate schemas for cifs and unix.
An LDAP entry can have several objectClass-es.
The samba and unix schemas are different but use the same attribute
for the user's password so you'll only have one password for both
methods.
Note that LDAP will only solve part of the problem. It allows you to
centralize user information but your users will still need to enter
their passwords as often as before. You'll need Kerberos to have SSO.
Can you describe your solution? Does it work for the other services?
I work mostly on web-apps so I can only comment on WebSSO solutions.
Lemonldap[1] is usable (but a pain in the a$$ to get working).
I'm looking at Vulture[2] these days which seems to have more readable code.
Both of these work the same way, using Apache as a reverse proxy between
the user and the web-apps.
- User tries to load an app in his browser
- Lemonldap or Vulture catch his request and redirect him to an
authentification page
- User enters a username and a password. These are checked against an LDAP
database.
- Lemonldap or Vulture then add an Authorization header to the HTTP request
and send it on its way.
- User no longer needs to authentify himself for any of the web-apps.
This requires that the web-apps be modified to use the Authorization header
to identify the user. These changes range from 'trivial' to 'impossible',
depending on the apps themselves.
[1] http://lemonldap.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://vulture.open-source.fr/wiki/
Emmanuel
11:39 a.m.
"Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?" -- Yes!
We use it at "united dispatching control board of the power supply
systems". And yes, it sounds like it is more than just production
environment, it is even some kind of critical environments.
Use Google Maps and go to Saint-Petersburg (it is second big town of
Russia, it is placed near Finland, where Linus is from :) ). Do you see
that lanterns light somewhere in the streets? If yes, it means that our
"control board" works, which means that our Fedora systems work properly. :)
(Surely I know that these Maps are yet not online ;) )
The Using of Fedora in the critical environment might seem strange, but
there are some circumstances which allow it.
Such kind of environment implies an existence of high skilled engineers,
who do the support and who work full day immediately near the
corresponding hardware. These engineers must not trust any external
opinions, they must check out each update to be installed etc. And they
must be capable to fix (and hack) software when it is needed. Besides
they must create/support/etc. a lot of specific programs on the
supported platform too.
If so, it seems that they are capable to do the whole support
themselves, therefore they just not need any external support (like RHEL
support).
Such kind of environments implies high availability, which mean that
there are several servers for each critical application, i.e. atleast
two mail-servers, two dns etc. This allow to do the changes/updates
gradually, step-by-step. First, change something on one server. If
something failed, you have the second working server anyway. If all is
OK, do the changes on the second server, etc.etc.etc. "Several servers
for each application" allow to do changes that way faster and more
bravely. It means that we can forget about worries of too often changed
things in Fedora.
These two circumstances can help to explain, why we use Fedora, but "the
light is shining" :)
Why do we use Fedora?
First of all, it is for historical reasons. We used RH-5.2 initially,
then RH-6.0-6.2-7.1-7.3.
Even using latest release, we often actually needed some features of the
next upstream versions. Therefore we've rejected idea to switch to
CentOS and friends (and even to RHEL).
When RH line became Fedora, we've estimated our forces and have decided
to continue with this line.
What do we use exactly?
Application servers (postgresql, mysql, httpd, php, perl), domain
control (OpenLdap + Samba), mail (postfix based), routers/firewalls,
dns/dhcp, proxy, web-sites, ntp (gps), vlc (multicast) etc. And a lot of
Fedora servers with specific software (either bought or own (including
GPLed)). Several desktops. Certainly I cannot report the exact amount of
servers, but using "whois" you can see that we have at least 512 extern
IP addresses... :)
What do we do to provide local Fedora support ourselves?
We have a local yum repository. (Surely with some packages fixed :) ).
Updates go to corresponding machines automatically, but downloaded only.
All installs/updates are manual, after the all needed checks. Normally
we wait a little after an update is shipped, for possible "update for
the latest update" :)
Sometimes we are compelled to change standard package, sometimes go back
to the previous version, but most often just forward to the next version
from upstream (even under latest Fedora).
We do upgrades just one time per year. Yep, we jump for it through one
Fedora release, i.e. FC1->FC3->FC5. The "6 month" schedule is too fast
for us. Moreover, we try to skip releases with some changes which seem
too global for us to be used at once, i.e. FC2 (kernel 2.4->2.6 switch),
FC4 (gcc 3->4) etc.
What problems we feel recently?
The main problem is that in the context of production environment, the
Fedora community seems to be unpresentable now.
When there was "RedHat Linux-->Fedora Core" switching, "production"
people have read the words "enthusiasts, developers, not cricial" etc.,
and have read the schedules (one release per half of year). All this has
frightened them a lot. Therefore as soon as some free RHEL-clones have
appeared, they were switched to them. Now they "enjoy stability",
degrading as specialists. :(
People who have remained with Fedora, are normally busy (as production
environment implies that there are enough issues besides writing
bugzilla/maillist report). It decreases presentability too.
Another problem is conservatives.
Doing good changes forward, the old features/details should be saved
(whenever it is possible). I know several people who install new RH or
Fedora version, see some changes, try to adapt new version for their
habits, have failed, become angry and switch to another distro.
The solution to just ignore such kind of people is not good.
Let consider, who are this people actually? "Conservatives" implies that
they are not too young, they have some skill and they have some habits
which they cannot refuse. Now, let try to guess, what a role they play
in their companies?.. You have guessed -- they are managers/experts
etc., i.e. "make decision men".
Including decision whether to use Fedora or not...
What changes we would like?
- RH people should stop consider Fedora as some kind of testing
environment (i.e., try in Fedora, if no reports, put in RHELbeta). FC
maintainers (mostly the same for FC and RHEL) should feel Fedora as same
stable as well as RHEL, just the changes and updates are faster than in
RHEL.
- Update policy should be consistent. Do not throttle useful stable
changes in rawhide, ship the update immediately. Ship the update if
upstream ships new release and you do not see anything dangerous in the
"diff -Nrbu" output.
On the other hand, do not trust upstream and don't ship an update
automatically, if you see a lot of unclear or too complex changes.
- IMHO it would be better to change EOL policy. For example, instead of
EOL'ing FC5 at FC7test2 time, we would prefer FC5 EOL at least 1 month
later after FC7 is released. This way will help people who skips one
Fedora release. (The current speed of Fedora Legacy work is too low to
consider it as a solution for production environments).
- Do not offend conservatives. Do not consider them "too rare". People,
making decisions for million dollars, is "too rare" too.
Regards,
Dmitry Butskoy,
Leading expert,
United dispatch control board of the power supply systems of the Northwest,
Saint-Petersburg, Russia
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DmitryButskoy
6410
days inactive
6415
days old
19 comments
16 participants
participants (16)
-
André Kelpe -
Arthur Pemberton -
Avi Kivity -
Daniel Veillard -
David Nielsen -
David Woodhouse -
Davide Bolcioni -
Dmitry Butskoy -
Emmanuel Seyman -
Horst H. von Brand -
Jancio Wodnik -
Jonathan Dieter -
Max Spevack -
Oisin Feeley -
Pedro Fernandes Macedo -
Zoltan Boszormenyi