On 12/11/09 10:48, Simon Andrews wrote: > Michael Pawlowsky wrote: >> >> Are there any other people using FC in a production enterprise >> environment? > > Production, certainly. We have 7 fedora servers all providing public > facing services over a range of different functionalities. All are > running F11. > >> The constant upgrades are driving me nuts. We have machines at >> FC8-FC9-FC10 and FC-11. > > It's a bit of a pain, but we keep all of our machines on the latest > release (usually update a couple of weeks after the release). We treat > each upgrade as an opportunity to do scheduled maintainance on that > machine and twice a year seems to work out pretty well. > > >> The main reason we are using FC is because one it's free (in a sense). >> The next one is that it does include more recent versions of packages >> that we use and are looking for the latest versions to take advantage >> of some new features and so on. > > Likewise. > > >> So basically we are in a never ending cycles of upgrades. And since we >> have had bad experiences trying to upgrade over the last version, our >> policy is to back up the data, re-install and put back in all the data. > > We went the other way. All of our upgrades are true upgrades over the > last version. We've never had a major issue when doing this (but plenty > of minor ones - all easily fixed). We've got at least one machine which > has done every release since FC1, others have been added along the way. > Our experience has certainly been that this causes less pain (and is > quicker) than a wipe and reinstall. > > >> Also, I am wondering why it is not possible to simply keep upgrading >> packages, kernel and so on, as opposed to coming up with new versions >> every six months. > > Well you can, sort of. One of our machines has been yum updated through > several versions. It's a pretty minimal install, but it's had no more > problems than the machines which did the officially supported updates. > > >> To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7. > > Surely you have scheduled downtime for any server? We just link our > scheduled maintainance to the dates for the Fedora updates and kill two > birds with one stone. > > >> Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production. > > It depends on your priorities. It actually works out really well for us. > >> I'm starting to want to try CentOS soon. Unfortunately this will mean >> not always being able to take advantage of the latest features in >> software and so on. > > Well that's the downside of stability. > > Hope this helps > > Simon. > That's a remarkable upgrade feat, I managed Fedora 7 to 8 and then 10 to 11, but all the way from Fedora 1, respect. Just curious did you upgrade your servers to fully functioning ext4? I did manage to upgrade to fully functioning ext4 without any trouble, so it can't be that difficult then, I'm an engineer and like things to be simple. JB -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines