On Mon, April 24, 2017 10:52 am, Warren Young wrote:
On Apr 24, 2017, at 7:53 AM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
James' point isn't the hardware cost, it's the people cost for retraining.
Unless youâve hired monkeys so that you must train them to do their
tasks by rote, that is a soft cost, not a hard cost. If youâve hired competent IT staff, they will indeed need some time to work out the differences, but they will do that on their own if only given that time.
I've been through that, I agree almost on all counts with James Byrne, so I can give some comments from my chair here. Yes, I do consider myself a notch more intelligent sysadmin than a monkey, and it does cost me time to adjust to the differences, and it is annoying, and most annoying is to adjust to some changes in philosophy (whoever considers the last non-existent is allowed to re-qualify me back to the level of monkey ;-)
Note also that Byrneâs solution was to move to an entirely different
OS,
but we donât hear about the âretraining costâ involved with that.
Surely it was a larger jump from C6 or C7 to FreeBSD 10 than from C6 to C7?
Yes and no. Maybe it is just my case, as I stared migrating servers to FreeBSD even before C7 was released. FreeBSD feels closer to C5, whereas difference between C5 and C7 is more dramatic (in my by no means objective feeling). So, everyone who maintained C5 after quick "jump start" may feel at hone with FreeBSD. My case may be even simpler as as many older sysadmins I maintained a few UNIXes in the past, including FreeBSD.
He also seems to be sweeping aside the fact that FreeBSD major releases
generally stay in support for about half the span of RHEL and its derivatives.
True, but keeping your system incrementing in smaller steps that happen more often is not a big deal. But this is a question of taste: both long support life like RHEL and CentOS and shorter but smoother changes like FreeBSD or some Linuxes (Debian and its clone Ubuntu come to mind) - they both have their advantages and their place where they shine.
If he wants to stay on a supported OS the whole time that C7 remains in support, heâs probably looking at 2 major OS version upgrades.
I've been through several FreeBSD major version upgrades on servers I migrated to FreeBSD earliest, and they went smoothly, requiring just 3 reboots in the process. They all had a bunch of jails that were upgraded as well. Not a single major issue that I had to resolve in a process (call me lucky... knocking on wood ;-)
Itâll be interesting to see how much change FreeBSD gets in the next 7
years.
It really is. Unless my usual luck in choosing what I expect to be in a future fails me, not much change will happen to FreeBSD. I was thanking my luck big time for choosing RedHat (and continuing to Fedora, then CentOS) instead of Debian once when big flop in Debian (and all clones) was discovered that was sitting there for over two years (search for Debian predictable keys). My Debian friend was re-creating all his certificates, re-generating ssh keys, rebuilding systems from scratch (as you don't know who might have had root access to your box). And I was repeating myself, that RedHat never had such a big flop. So I hope, I will be the same lucky with my choice of FreeBSD as I was with my choice of RedHat (and clones) back then.
And while we are here: My big thanks to RedHat, and big thanks to CentOS team for the great job you guys are doing!! I wish I could help you more than just maintaining CentOS and centosvault public mirrors.
Valeri
In many ways the Fedora treadmill is easier, being that there are many
more smaller jumps than the huge leap from C6 to C7.
That depends on the organization and its goals.
If you have a true IT staff that exists just to keep servers up to date
and working properly, then yes, youâre right, smaller upgrades every 3-6
months are often easier to handle than trying to choke down 2-10 years
of
changes all at once, depending on the LTS release strategy and how many
major upgrades you skip.
If youâre trying to treat the OS as a base atop which you do something
else, and you just need something that will keep working for 2-10 years despite being continually patched, then choking that big ball of changes down every 2-10 years might be preferable.
My main point is that if youâre going to take the second path, donât
cry about how much change there is to choke down when youâre finally forced to move forward. You choose to put off dealing with it for many years; the chickens have come back home to roost, so there will of course
be a lot of work to do.
...dual-socket Opteron LS20 blades (10+ years old)...CentOS 7, once
installed, works great...
That doesnât really contradict my point.
First, I said âmostâ hardware, but youâve gone and cherry-picked
uncommonly durable hardware here; youâre probably out in +3 sigma territory. A lot of commodity PC-grade SOHO âserverâ hardware wonât
even last the 3 years between major CentOS upgrades before dying of
something. There was a period where Iâd budget 1-2 years for a Netgear
switch, for example. (They appear to be lasting longer now.)
Second, the application of my quoted opinion to your situation is that
you
should run that hardware with CentOS 7 through the EOL of the hardware
or
software, whichever comes first. That is, Iâm advising the change-adverse members of the audience to opt into the second group
above,
taking OS changes in big lumps when itâs time to move to new hardware
anyway.
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++