Chris Mauritz spake the following on 7/24/2006 8:56 AM:
Eduardo Grosclaude wrote:
On 7/24/06, *Chris Mauritz* <chrism@imntv.com mailto:chrism@imntv.com> wrote:
Jim Perrin wrote: > On 7/24/06, Eduardo Grosclaude<eduardo.grosclaude@gmail.com
mailto:eduardo.grosclaude@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hello, >> I want to compare CentOS to Fedora and other distros on a >> stability/network-dependance basis. Where should I look for some >> published >> statistics on updates? I mean probably megabytes per week (or whichever >> units, of published updates over time), per distro. >> Thank you in advance > > http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/CentOS_4.2.pdf > http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/whichlinux/ (CentOS is built from > the freely available RHEL source rpms, so arguements for RHEL on this > page also apply to CentOS, except for support and pricetag.)
I have a number of CentOS machines that have been up 24/7 in datacenter environments for years and were only rebooted on occasion as a result of security-related kernel upgrades (which would affect any linux distro). I can't recall EVER having uptime or network-related issues on ANY live CentOS server that wasn't the direct result of a hardwarefailure. It just works...and works...and works. :) The key is to beat up on any new hardware in a test environment first to make sure that you don't have any incompatible hardware bits (which hasn't bitten me often).
Thank you for your point, on which I wholly agree, but I was taking "stability" as "a measure of velocity in change" of a system's components-- here reflected in a shorter or longer life cycle for each version. Please correct me if I am wrong, I may be misusing the word (I am heading right to Wikipedia in a minute! :) ). We all want CentOS as a server system because of its "stability" which -at least for me- means few, controlled changes over an extended lifetime. As to the network-dependance problem, I was thinking of the "gee, I will really need a bandwidth here to cope with updates" feeling suggested, for instance, by Fedora.
Ah, in that case, I think the answer is "it depends". :-) Periodic updates and updates from one minor release to the next seem to use only a small amount of bandwidth and involve a small number of packages. It is approximately the same as you would experience with RedHat Enterprise Linux, which is the basis for CentOS. Compared to Fedora, the changes are significantly less often (except for security fixes) and probably a lot less bandwidth requirements (but I do not currently use Fedora so I am not positive about this part).
I hope that helps.
Cheers,
Chris
The biggest bandwidth use with Fedora would be downloading the ISO's for the new version because the support for your version fell off the face of the earth. Even Fedora Legacy is dropping Core 1 and 2.