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: 1. The available packages are abundant. Very easy to find packages for FC4. 2. The user list is very active and friendly too.
Thank you
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.
On Wednesday 22 February 2006 05:05 pm, Will McDonald wrote:
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.
Thank you very much Will, It's very nice to know the fact that you mention.
By the way, Can I take a screenshot during installation? I'm setting up RAID-1 and LVM and I'm planning to make a tutorial about it. Thank again,
On Wednesday 22 February 2006 05:20, Fajar Priyanto wrote:
By the way, Can I take a screenshot during installation? I'm setting up RAID-1 and LVM and I'm planning to make a tutorial about it.
Yes, you can do this. The easiest way is by installing over vnc; you run the vnc client on either Windows or Linux and take your screenshots from there.
You access vnc mode from the boot: prompt of the installer. The command line is something like (look it up in the Red Hat EL4 install docs, available at Red Hat's website): linux vnc vncpasswd=desiredpassword
The installer will ask you about networking; if you do not have a DHCP server on you will need to set up the networking manually. The installer will then tell you what to do; you then attach to the vnc session on the IP address you set up, and using the vnc password you provided on the command line. From there it is identical to setting up using a local GUI.
I've done network installs this way for a while; access the console just long enough to issue a 'linux askmethod vnc vncpasswd=' command line, point the network installer to an http repository of the files needed, and install through vnc graphically. Works great for serial console installs especially.
Will McDonald wrote:
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 bottom line is if you want a workstation with the latest of most things use Fedora, if you want a stable long life (but still able to do every task) server use Centos. RHEL (Centos) will patch a broken package, Fedora will replace it with the latest version (that fixes the break). For example I run a mirror server that distributes both Centos and Fedora (remotely), it runs Centos as it does the job flawlessly. If it ran Fedora I would have to always worry about applying updates as they make break it and seeing as it is 500Km away that would be a real pain.
Tony Wicks wrote:
If it ran Fedora I would have to always worry about applying updates as they make break it and seeing as it is 500Km away that would be a real pain.
It always amuses me to see hosting companies offering Fedora as an OS option. Fedora is a testing release, not suitable for hosting real sites.
On Wednesday 22 February 2006 4:35 am, Fajar Priyanto wrote:
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.
1. There is a decent selection of software for CentOS / RHEL. Especially commercial software. If you are brave, many Fedora Core 3 packages will work on CentOS 4. However, if you are looking for the newest mp3 player or latest version of bzflag, fedora will most likely have it, CentOS won't.
2. There's a much smaller CentOS user base (I suspect). However, the HUGE amount of documentation, training classes, and info on the web about RHEL applies directly to CentOS.
On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 06:57 -0500, ryan wrote:
On Wednesday 22 February 2006 4:35 am, Fajar Priyanto wrote:
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.
- There is a decent selection of software for CentOS / RHEL. Especially
commercial software. If you are brave, many Fedora Core 3 packages will work on CentOS 4. However, if you are looking for the newest mp3 player or latest version of bzflag, fedora will most likely have it, CentOS won't.
- There's a much smaller CentOS user base (I suspect). However, the HUGE
amount of documentation, training classes, and info on the web about RHEL applies directly to CentOS.
This is a good spot to quote some stats...
I think centos is bigger than most people think :)
We have more than 80 public mirrors around the world.
CentOS distributes between 2 and 3 terabytes of updates in the average week from our 16 servers. That does not include rsyncs to mirrors, ISO downloads OR updates from public mirrors ... that is just yum and up2date updates from the rrdns mirror.centos.org.
Total traffic of all our servers is about 6 terabytes per week.
We have between 70,000 and 80,000 unique IP addresses download updates from our servers every week. We have about 800,000 unique IP's served in the last year on mirror.centos.org.
We are ranked in the top 8 linux distros with nearly 100,000 webservers running CentOS. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html
www.centos.org has about 120,000 unique IP visitors per month, we get 8,500 individual visitors per day. We serve 1.2 million pages per month, have 7 million hits per month, and had 1.3 million visits to the website last year.
Our ranking on alexa.com is through the roof, compare centos to any distro out there, we are looking pretty good.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=centos.org
Now, if we could get people to make some donations :)
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
One point about Fedora is that while it is supported for 6 months and then for 1.5 years after that by the legacy team, the bulk of the distribution lies in EXTRAS in which they leave you COLD TURKEY after 6 months. This is a worse deal than the old redhat range which was supported for a year.
As noted above, the business of you paying big bucks for hosting and them giving you fedora is laughable. Nobody would pay for hostiing on OpenSUSE, so why fedora? Most VPS's are fedora 2.
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Jim Smith wrote:
One point about Fedora is that while it is supported for 6 months and then for 1.5 years after that by the legacy team, the bulk of the distribution lies in EXTRAS in which they leave you COLD TURKEY after 6 months. This is a worse deal than the old redhat range which was supported for a year.
More like COLD TURKEY after ~12 months, same as Fedora Core, Fedora Extras officially supports that last 2 Fedora Core releases.
-- Rex
Johnny Hughes wrote:
Now, if we could get people to make some donations :)
Johnny --
Do you think you could get the webmaster to set up PayPal subscription payments? You had that at one time and I somehow got "unsubscribed." I was sending more per month than requested and I liked sending money as a monthly, recurring payment.
I've been to the site to start donating again but now it appears as though the only choice is a one-time donation. I'd like to make mine a recurring one...
I emailed Lance but haven't heard back from him.
Barry
On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 16:35 +0700, Fajar Priyanto 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.
Thank you
This article explains the difference: http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/CentOS_4.2.pdf
On Thursday 23 February 2006 02:24 am, Johnny Hughes wrote:
This article explains the difference: http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/CentOS_4.2.pdf
Thank you all for clearing some facts about Centos and FC. Currently, I'm not able to make any donation because my country is not listed in Paypal (because of high rate of "cyber carding" I believe). When the time comes, I will certainly participate in it.
But through my site http://linux2.arinet.org, at least for now I can give back to the community by writing tutorials and articles. It's been running for about 3 years and has about 2000 registered users with a growth rate of about 5 users per day.
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Barry L. Kline -
Chris Mason (Lists) -
Fajar Priyanto -
Jim Smith -
Johnny Hughes -
Lamar Owen -
Rex Dieter -
ryan -
Tony Wicks -
Will McDonald