Max Spevack wrote:
Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Are you
using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical"
capacity? Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email
to them?
We are primarily a Fedora shop. We have 9 Fedora Core servers, most of
them in critical production uses. One FC5 box is our primary SAN
controller that until early last week had been running FC2 for the last
2.5 years and controls 20TB of NWS Level 2 radar data. This system also
handles our Disaster Recovery solution and regularly handles 100s of GBs
of data a day.
We have 2 FC4 servers that receive NWS weather data from all 134 radars
in the US and feeds them to 6 universities, one for-profit organization
and the National Climactic Data Center here in Asheville, NC, which is
fed into the largest repository of weather data in the world. These two
boxes regularly receive and feed 20Mbps 24/7/365 which is then fed into
a couple of our supercomputers for weather forecasting by NCDC and the
Air Force Combat climatology unit.
We have 2 FC5 boxes that provide secure LDAP authentication, some web
services like Ganglia for cluster monitoring for our SGI servers and
external facing interfaces for console access to our internal servers.
We also have one FC5 box that runs Xen and has 4 guest OS's (3 FC5 and
one of another distro) for use by our customers and our team for
development and testing of new software packages.
If you are, I want to hear all about it. I'm trying to gather data
for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our
decision making for Fedora 7.
What's your setup like?
What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to
something else?
What made us choose it, that's easy. I've been a Fedora/RH user since
v3. It's always been stable and reliable, even with more 'cutting edge'
packages than other distros. In fact we have two Debian boxes here that
are being rebuilt with FC since we cannot get consistent Debian package
updates. And it's not only the OS that works. I have always been very
pleased with the FC/RH community (mailing lists, etc) as far as helpful
advice is concerned. Unlike a lot of other lists out there, a large
majority of the Fedora community have always been very knowledgeable and
willing to answer just about any question posted.
What works well for you?
Honestly? Just about everything that you would need in a server for a
production environment. I can't think of anything on our production
systems that didn't work well.
What could be better?
Here's my one beef with Fedora. Package file locations. I've noticed
that there have been times where a package document says a file is in
/xx/xxx and in Fedora it's somewhere else. While I'm not totally
opposed to that, it makes it really hard to have packages and compiled
source on the same machines. And please don't ask for specific
examples, I've wracked my brain and can't think of one off the top of my
head. Although OpenLDAP does come to mind. Hmmm....
And not a Fedora specific complaint, desktop functionality on ldaptops
need to be better. (General soapbox gripe, though.)
etc, etc. Anything you care to share with me.
<suckup>
One last, thing, thanks for giving me the chance to brag on a great
distro as well as give a big THANKS to everyone who gives their time to
make it that way.
</suckup> :)
Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
Thanks,
Max
--
Ceterum censeo, Carthago delenda est.
Mark Haney
Sr. Systems Administrator
ERC Broadband
(828) 350-2415
