On Sat, October 20, 2018 10:22 am, Yan Li wrote:
On 10/20/18 7:42 AM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
I would like to hear the reasons of those who chose to use Fedora on their server. Specifically what advantages one has found compared to other alternatives. And also what kind of server that is. Single user/home/family one? Serving some department or similar (say 100 people, who may need services 24/7/365)? I know, this is just my curiosity, as I did make my own choice, but curiosity grossly fueled by the fact that my choice is grossly different.
Always happy to hear different [from mine] opinions which may be based on different objectives.
We are running about 50 development servers for the Storage Systems Research Center in the University of California, Santa Cruz. All Fedora. We will be updating all machines to F29 as soon as it is released. The reason is that we want the students to have access to the latest development toolchain, libraries, and other tools from the Linux world in a reasonably stable fashion. Fedora is the best fit. Not bleeding edge, but not outdated either. Our infrastructure servers, such as file sharing, cluster management, etc., are all Fedora machines too, for homogeneity and simplicity.
We don't need 24/7/365 uptime, but in my memory, there has been no downtime caused by anything in Fedora in the past decade. And we always do in-place upgrading when a new Fedora comes out. Upgrading from one Fedora to the next never failed us in the past decade either in my memory.
Occasionally, one or more machines will be loaded with CentOS 7 for a few months for running Lustre or some other CentOS/RHEL certified software.
This is unrelated to the campus-wise Linux clusters that are managed by the university IT department, which maintains hundreds of CentOS machines for the whole campus.
I also know colleagues who maintain Fedora as servers from my other jobs. These were for all kinds of services: email, file storage, development, etc. Why Fedora over CentOS? I guess Fedora is more fun to play with and is stable enough for these applications. As I said before, in-place upgrading for Fedora is pretty reliable. And doing it once a year (or every 6 months) to get the latest software is a good bargain for a techie.
Oh, great, I now can see the world with your eyes! And last part about servers life cycle wise doesn't sound much different from what I do using FreeBSD and jails. The only difference is maybe in how frequently I have to reboot Linux (any flavor) due to kernel or glibc security update compared to reboot of FreeBSD.
Thanks a lot!
Valeri
-- Yan Li _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++