Matthew Miller wrote:
But really, you're tempting fate to use any version Fedora on a production server. If you need free, CentOS fills this part of the ecosystem.
I have actually had better luck with Fedora on production servers. A few months ago I started converting machines from Fedora to CentOS for the slower pace and longer updates. It wasn't my personal choice, but CentOS fit with what my boss expected.
At first it went really well. Then I ran into a server with an old raid controller. The CentOS 4.x kernel doesn't support it out of the box. You have to hand compile it for each new kernel. Where as CentOS 3 and Fedora do. RHEL 4 would have the same problem though. Then I had one server running CentOS oops, but didn't get enough of the it to track it down. The next day I had another server running CentOS hang. Neither has repeatedly since then.
I started researching it, and found mention that Red Hat was compiling errata kernel with versions of the compiler from their beta channel, or later a completely unreleased version. People mentioned they suspected that some of the instability they have seen in CentOS 4.x kernels comes from not being able to compile the source rpm with the exact same version of the compiler Red Hat used.
