Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[John Summerfield]

Alan Cox wrote:
G'day Alan
I don't see the point of an off-list cc, I'm on the list and the round 
trip from here to RH and back is a few seconds.

>> The _only_ reason I will admit for its use as a server is for software 
>> development, where one is developing client or server against it, 
>> targetting a future release of RHEL. Then, I would use it as needed for 
>> that development, but not for other purposes.
>>
>> Then I might run Fedora and Rawhide, both, for development, and test 
>> against both.
>>
>> Just read this list and see how often Fedora blows up.
> 
> I think we should at this point try 'statistics for beginners'. You have
> a list consisting of people who are heavily involved and people who join
> because they have problems combined with a tendancy for those having
> problems to be the ones who post (why email 'my server is working today'
> to the list).

All that's true, but it happens fairly often that something, such as a 
kernel update, renders Fedora unusable, and it does not help that the 
default behaviour when installing a new kernel is to make the new kernel 
active for the next boot.

I maintain servers remotely, and while I might reboot one in the 
expectation that should there be a problem I have a cross-town journey, 
I really don't want the new kernel to be booted until my say-so.


> 
> Products such as RHEL are designed with a goal of avoiding regressions,
> so what works continues to work and for many uses that is far more
> preferable. To understand Fedora reliability you need to work out what to
> measure. The end result of that is that while RHEL might be far less
> likely to regress something that works well than Fedora, it is also far
> less likely to cure something than Fedora. 

Just a few minutes ago I was reading about a problem fixed in CentOS 
that Red Hat (apparently) wasn't interested in fixing.
> 
> I know a lot of people who run Fedora reliably on servers, including some
> I'd have expected to be running enterprise products. 

Presumably they know enough to not be surprised when it breaks.

-- 

Cheers
John

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