Fedora vs RHEL

[Bill Oliver]

On Mon, 15 Apr 2013, Thomas Cameron wrote:

>
> If $799 per year for support of the infrastructure that you run your business 
> on is too much, I'd say your business is pretty freaking shaky.
>
> I've personally started two small businesses, and I've been involved in 
> several other startups. Even on a pretty skinny shoestring, we did not trust 
> our business critical systems to no support or community support.
>
> My experience may be different from some, but I don't think that $799, or 
> even several thousand dollars for multiple servers, is exorbitant at all.
>
> We're talking about the core infrastructure of your business here.
>
> TC
> --

I think we have very different experiences with community distros.  I've run mission and business-critical tasks on community distros for years and never had a problem, starting with Mandrake back in the day, then Mandriva, then Fedora, with short episodes of Suse and Mint.  While getting a distro *installed and running* has been a hassle -- more in the past than now, once it's up and going, they've all been solid.  I get the impression from you that your community distros have been flaky.  The ones I've run have not, and I've never been burned *because* something was a community distro.  I think the thing is that for a solid box, you just don't install all the wacky packages.  There's no need to install the latest eye candy and shoot 'em up on your firewall.

But, really, once you have mail running on your mail server, it's not likely to just explode, even if it's Fedora.  You come in, read your logs, check for intrusions, do the once-in-a-blue-moon sendmail update, make the occasional backup, and send out an invoice.  Hell, I've had machines I didn't even turn *off* for three years, and only did it then to do a clean install upgrade.

The only real downside I can see for community distros is the need to upgrade frequently, which goes back to the "installed and running" part.

billo