On 22/02/06, Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
Hi all, I hope I'm not starting a flame war. I'm installing Centos 4.2 for a mail server. I've been experimenting with, Centos before, and now wanting to put it into a real action as mail server.
Can someone pls tell me the up and down between Centos and FC? I'm familiar with FC4 and some things that I like from it:
- The available packages are abundant. Very easy to find packages for FC4.
- The user list is very active and friendly too.
The main advantage to running an EL distribution like CentOS is the release cycle.
FC4 will be EOL in, what, about a year after its release? That means no more official updates apart from those provided by Fedora Legacy for as long as they choose to support it.
Updates for CentOS 4 should be available for another 5 years or something like that. This allows you to manage servers without having to constantly rebuild them in a running-to-keep-up fashion, or leaving them to rot unmaintained and potentially insecure. Which is what will can if you run FC on more than a handful of servers.
CentOS might not have quite the abundance of packages FC has but for a server you generally don't need the latest and greatest of everything. Servers are there to do a job, as long as they accomplish this reliably and securely that's all you need.
If you absolutely need package X then between RPMForge, CentOS Extras/Plus/Test and Jpackage you should be pretty much covered. Failing that, grab the SRPM for FC3/4 and try rebuilding for CentOS.
Will.