Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[Simon Andrews]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Albert Graham <agraham at g-b.net> wrote:
>> Valent,
>>
>>  You get out of it what you put in it, this guy clearly could not be
>>  bothered to look into issues that he was having or why things had
>>  changed - which is called progress.
>>
>>  I have installed hundreds of servers using Fedora and I have to say I've
> 
> Why do you use Fedora and not CentOS for servers?
> What is the benefit for you using Fedora for servers? How often do you
> upgrade to latest version of fedora those hundereds of servers you
> installed?

Just to add another datapoint.  I do use Fedora for servers - 6 of them 
doing a variety of jobs, as well as for workstations.

All of our servers are running the latest version of Fedora, and are 
usually updated a couple of weeks after a new version comes out.  We do 
see some minor problems occasionally when updating, but we've never had 
to back out of an update, and the fix for all problems has always been 
simple.

Whilst these servers may not count as 'mission critical' by some of your 
standards I would get a lot of disgruntled users if they were to 
disappear for more than a day or so.

Having done upgrades (not reinstalls) on these machines since FC1 (for 
the oldest one) I've never yet had any downtime on any service due to 
problems from Fedora which required anything more than 5 minutes work to 
restart a service.

Personally I find the rolling updates an easy way to manage these 
machines.  The pain of updating comes in small, easily managed chunks 
with none of the major headaches you can get when doing a major update.

I reckon on losing about a days worth of uptime across all machines (ie 
a couple of hours each) every 6 months to do the update.  I'm sure that 
people with CentOS installs allow this much time for scheduled 
maintainance anyhow so I'm not really behind much on that front.

It's true that bits of Fedora blow up now and then, but if you're on 
common hardware (our servers are all Dell PowerEdge machines) anything 
major gets fixed very quickly.  Also, most of the things which break (X, 
sound, desktop applications etc) don't normally matter to a server. 
PluseAudio may be broken on my servers right now, but I don't really 
care.  As has been mentioned, most server software is very stable and 
doesn't often break these days.

I appreciate the ease of only having to deal with one platform and 
always having the latest version of everything I want to work with, and 
the downsides of that have never caused me any significant inconvenience.

Using Fedora for a server may not be as daft as some people think.

Simon.