Folks
I'm sure the Centos team has done a yeoman's job getting Centos7 ready, and that the Redhat team has done marvels in creating rhel7, but here's a little voice from a personal hobbyist user.
Background: ('ve been maintaining several remote servers since Redhat 6 days, migrating from that to Whitebox, then Centos, and things have been running as expected including the current version of Centos6. As an experiment, I've tried to play with Centos7 on an in-house virtual machine (VMWare on Win7), and have encountered a collection of annoyances greater than I've even seen. Below is a note about them. If someone has some elegant solution, I'd love to try, but Centos7 is still unusable for me.
1: Firewall changes The change in firewall technology forced a complete re-do of my scripts which maintain firewalls, respond to attacks, etc. I think I've programmed my way around the issues, but it wasn't easy.
2: Apache changes These were subtle, but again were solved.
3: Service -> systemd The change from object-oriented view of service: (service httpd restart) to function-oriented (systemctl restart firewall) seems to be unnecessary, and counter to the way stuff is generally done in the modern world. Nonetheless, it was possible to solve that with some adaptive script programming.
4) Something with Unknown lvalue 'ControlGroup' in section 'Service' I don't know what to do with this. I constantly get the diagnostic: [/usr/lib/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service:32] Unknown lvalue 'ControlGroup' in section 'Service' and attempts to browse the internet for solutions come across barriers that require some paid subscription to view. This is currently a progress-stopper. The messages I see deal with boinc, which does not show up on my system using "rpm -qa | grep -i boinc".
5) Sendmail is out, postfix is in. This is a huge change, since I had lots of scripts that tailored the Sendmail system for spam protection, dealing with SmartHosts that required SMTP-AUTH and others required weird configurations, etc. Whether this is working yet I don't quite know, but it seems the scripts can accommodate the change.
6) Installation I have no idea why, when using the net-install, one must explicitly turn on the network. It seems unnecessary.
7) Lack of 32-bit support I think I understand this. After all, 32-bit machines may become "unusable" when the clock overflows, but isn't that a few years away, and couldn't some solution be found, even if kludgy? Some of the 32-bit hardware was of very high quality, and still runs perfectly. I'd hate to spend a few hundred dollars each to replace all those systems.
8) And more ...
I haven't got a server or desktop running to my satisfaction yet, so I don't yet know what pitfalls await. Any advice would be appreciated.
David in San Francisco