On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 01:03:42PM -0500, Ross S. W. Walker wrote: > > [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Harris > > Because I don't want to play "patch catchup" when FC6 is no longer > > supported or have to rebuild to FC10 at some later point. I > Yes, patch catch can be a pain, but even with CentOS 4.4 I still play > patch catch, as well as Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD.... Umm, regular patching isn't what I meant. When a product is no longer supported (I specifically mentioned that) the onus is now on me to track all the components and recompile as necessary. Very soon the OS becomes hard to maintain since a lot of packages become replaced by non-RPM equivalents. I'd much rather "yum -d 0 check-update" in a nightly cron job to let me know that upstream has released a new version ;-) Yes, I acknowledge I have farmed out my risk to an "untrusted third party", but that's part of risk management; my evaluation is that tracking RedHat announcements and CentOS updates over the next 'n' years is safer than having a product unpatched when it goes out of support. > How long did you have your existing configuration running before you > came to the conclusion you need to blow it away for a new one? My existing solution is well overdue for replacement; I only kept it so long because of hotswap IDE problems with the 2.6 kernel. The new system is going to use USB drives instead for ofsite storage. > Doubt you even had it for a year. Biggest thing you can do for Umm. Your should doubt your doubts :-) My main workstation (also needs a rebuild, but that one will be a recent FC build because too many programs assume bleeding edge code versions already installed) is 2.5 years old. The server in question is approaching 3 years old. Neither are supported. Both have known security issues. My test box was rebuilt August last year (VMware testing on CentOS 4.4). I rebuilt my linode from FC2 to Centos 4.4 last month. > yourself is to give yourself an honest evaluation on your actual > needs. I've been doing this sort of thing professionally for 17 years. I've been using Linux since the boot+root 0.11 combo disks. I think I know my needs :-) Infrastucture servers should be stable and not need to be rebuilt with a new OS just because it's more than a year old. CentOS provides that stability. Fedora doesn't. -- rgds Stephen