Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[Les Mikesell]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
>
>>> I haven't noticed any difference between CentOS and Fedora-8,
>>> which I'm running on my other machines.
>>> In fact, I don't know which I am on (when accessing remotely)
>>> except by looking at the name.
>> Based on past experience, you could expect the CentOS box to keep
>> running with nothing but occasional 'yum update's for 6 more years.
> 
> True (well, true after s/6/2/), but irrelevant to the point I was making.

 From http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/CentOS5
   "We intend to support CentOS 5 until Mar 31st, 2014"
After 2010 you only get security/maintenance updates, though.

>> Even 
>> if F8 updates don't actually break your working system (which is likely
>> to depend on your specific hardware) in less than a year you'll stop
>> getting updates and as soon as a new security issue is discovered you'll
>> be forced to re-install some wildly different version.
> 
> Personally, I keep both CentOS and Fedora up to date.
> No Fedora updates have ever "broken" my system,
> and I have been running Fedora since it started.

No firewire?  No MPT scsi?  No CIPE VPNs?

> I've never been "forced to re-install some wildly different version".

The FC1->2, FC3-4, FC6-7 transitions had huge differences. If you don't 
use any of the features you might not notice the difference.  Try 
relying on backups on firewire drives (broken in FC3, most of FC5, or 
connecting offices with CIPE vpn's (gone since FC1..).  The 
disk/partition names have changed, filesystem options have changed such 
that creating an ext3 file with current options makes something an older 
system can't read. Apache's mod_perl that was finally integrated 
correctly back in RH7.3 has been a mixed bag in fedora through FC6. 
Sound has been hit-or-miss with huge differences in each version. Fixing 
any of these things can take days - which may not sound bad but if you 
manage a few hundred machines, you can't keep up with a few days per 
machine per year.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com