Upgrades driving me crazy....

[Clint Dilks]

Michael Pawlowsky wrote:
>
> Are there any other people using FC in a production enterprise 
> environment?
>
> The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at 
> FC8-FC9-FC10 and FC-11.
>
> The main reason we are using FC is because one it's free (in a sense).
> The next one is that it does include more recent versions of packages 
> that we use and are looking for the latest versions to take advantage 
> of some new features and so on.
>
> But now since FC8 is no longer being supported, it has caused some 
> real issues. One main one is that yum is not updated and even rpm 
> packages that we create ourselves will no longer install on it.
>
> We've been through this before since we've been using FC ever since in 
> broke out of RH.
>
> So basically we are in a never ending cycles of upgrades. And since we 
> have had bad experiences trying to upgrade over the last version, our 
> policy is to back up the data, re-install and put back in all the data.
>
> I'm thinking of trying ESXi to make installing quicker. Reconfigure an 
> new image locally, clone it and push it to the virtual server.
>
> Also, I am wondering why it is not possible to simply keep upgrading 
> packages, kernel and so on, as opposed to coming up with new versions 
> every six months.
>
> To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7.
>
> Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production.
>
> I'm starting to want to try CentOS soon. Unfortunately this will mean 
> not always being able to take advantage of the latest features in 
> software and so on.
>
> So I was just wondering what other people in this situation do?
>
>
Fedora is just not a good choice in this situation, we tried running 
Fedora in this way for a time but it just becomes unmanageable.  One 
short term suggestion I would make is that you maintain your own copies 
of the repositories that you use  and have clients reference those 
rather than the public mirror so that you have some flexibility as to 
when you must upgrade.

In the Long Term I suggest that you look at moving to CentOS (still 
using your own local repos) or some other distro that meets your needs 
(ubuntu etc).  We moved to CentOS and we do occasionally struggle with 
versions of software.  But if you combine creating your own RPMS with 
some configuration management software such as CFEngine this can be 
automated.

Good Luck