On Tuesday 25 March 2008 11:44:05 Bradley Pursley wrote: > Valent Turkovic wrote: > > http://www.mjmwired.net/linux/2008/02/11/fedora-makes-a-terrible-server/ > > > > What is your experience ? > > > > Cheers, > > Valent. > > My main concern / problem is that it doesn't seem like the updates are > very well tested thereby *CAUSING* crashes, lockups, etc. Until this > lack of concern is fixed, I would not recommend Fedora for servers. > Something that might help is by allowing updates to be undone > automatically if there is a problem and then to "lock out" that update > from being applied again until the next generation of that update comes > out. > > Another problem I've noticed is that when new software is being > installed, there are no tests done to verify that it installed and is > working correctly, which has been a big problem on my system. I've had > to manually "fix" quite a number of the installs and sometimes when it > updates the software, it undoes my fixes and I have to re-apply the fix > again, which is highly aggravating. Updates should not automatically > mess with the configuration files, especially if they've been manually > changed, unless it prompts the system user and gives you the option of > whether you want the updated file or just want to adjust the current > one. For programming, this would be easy to implement without changing > packaging requirements (don't overwrite older non-executable files, just > rename them or move them to a "backup" location and advise user of the > change). > > Just my ten cents worth. > > Bradley It seems that it depends on the complexity of either the server or the services being run. For example, I've run a redhat-and-then-fedora server for about 7 years. It only uses apache, mysql, cups, ypserv, dovecot and serves my family's enormous music and digital photograph collection. Fingrz-Cr0$$d as I type, it has only crashed once and that was as a direct result of my fiddling with lvm. At work, I have a server that had run fedora 4 since this was the latest version. It hasn't been patched since f4 stopped being supported and it never crashed - in fact it was only re-booted twice in three years - when it needed moving or extended electrical supply work was needed. I've upgraded it to f8 in the last week and now it only stays up for around 15 mins before dying with no diagnostic. I'm hoping that yumming it up-to-date (presumably in 15 minute chunks!) will get rid of the problem. Am I about to abandon Fedora server? Probably not, I'm a full-time teacher and only a part-time system manager now. I don't have the time or the inclination to cope with two distros, even if Centos is based on fedora. I just make sure that I have a good backup and nothing critical on the horizon when I run yum! My ha'pennyworth. Nick
