[CentOS] Centos vs FC

Wed Feb 22 10:05:10 UTC 2006
Will McDonald <wmcdonald at gmail.com>

On 22/02/06, Fajar Priyanto <fajarpri at 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:
> 1. The available packages are abundant. Very easy to find packages for FC4.
> 2. 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.