On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:38:17 -0500, Tim Holmes <tholmes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Good Morning Folks: > > I have just finished loading my first FC3 box, and the updates are > running right now. I will be testing this box for a period of time, but > what I am wondering is if FC3 is ready for production deployment at this > point, or if I should wait for a further period of development. We are > mostly a windows shop, and my normal time table is to not deploy an > operating system until it has gone through the first service pack > update, but there are exceptions to this rule. I am newer to using > Fedora and I don't have a good time table established for deployment. I > have 2 webservers (apache) a database server (MySQL) and a file server > (samba) currently deployed, as well as a Nagios box, one running cacti > and one that will be shortly getting mailman > > Your insights and thoughts would be appreciated This list entertains many questions about Fedora Core's stability. Most of the questions belie a misunderstanding of what "stability" means in Fedora Core's terms. So I'm writing back with a longer message I've been thinking about sending in to the list for a while. Thanks for the opportunity! Stability generally means two things: 1) doesn't crash/break. 2) doesn't change. The thing is, these two things cannot be completely independent of one another. Fedora, by design, aims for as much of #1 as possible, while going for as little of #2 as is necessary. That is, Fedora changes a lot. Most of the time this is OK but when there are major updates to some part of the system, the changes can result in problems for almost anyone who isn't staying on top of them. When an update gets into Fedora Core, chances are it doesn't have true bugs (the OOo update earlier this month was an exception), but it will change things and that's not necessarily what you want. The problems will be recoverable, but ask this question: can your server be down for an hour, once in a while, while you turn back the updates-clock a little bit? I would contrast Fedora's approach with Debian's (the best counter-example), where policy dictates that updates to the system go for both kinds of stability. That is, updates are designed not to change the system at all, whenever it's possible. So, for example, updates are divided up into "security" updates, which only fix bugs that expose potential exploits, and other updates that include feature changes that may require configuration file updates, etc. As far as I know, RedHat Enterprise Linux and its free derivatives (WBEL, Centos have been given as examples) do not enforce this same policy but instead work in a different way toward greater stability: updates are much more heavily tested before release than are Fedora updates (partly they are tested against Fedora Core--that is, Fedora gets the updates first, and if they work out, they end up in RHEL). So what does this mean? Basically: if you can get a Fedora Core system to do what you want it to do, it will probably continue to do that indefinitely, until something changes. In some circumstances your system will run forever (my compatriot here at work has a Fedora Core 1 machine that's been up for 400+ days, and that's a desktop he pounds on daily). But for a web server, you're going to want to stay on top of updates and that will take a little bit of governance and occasional problem-solving. You can't just "set it and forget it." It may sound like I'm recommending against Fedora in your case, but I'm not. I think Fedora is great. We don't run it on our servers, but that's because we're understaffed so we favor stability over features, and that's Debian's strength. We can turn on security updates, turn off all other updates, and rarely worry about those servers again. But this is a pretty high-level strategic decision and it wouldn't really take a lot more effort to use FC3 instead. Good luck, Matt
