On Thursday, December 09, 2010 05:00 AM, Warren Young wrote: > On 12/8/2010 7:13 AM, Christopher Chan wrote: >> >> Such [periodic failures] are fairly common > > I'd say the main reason someone chooses CentOS (or another Linux flavor > with similar policies, like Ubuntu LTS) is that the distro provider has > made a long-term support commitment with minimal churn during a major > release. > > This is why we tolerate the fact that CentOS 5 still ships Firefox 1.5 > five years after Mozilla released it: not because we're troglodytes > unwilling to upgrade, ever, but because we don't want something as > random as a browser bug fix to break a formerly-working server. > >> and usually run manually. > > I assume you mean to advocate running updates infrequently, or at least > be around to fix them when the automated updates break. > > If the former, you're mad if that server is exposed to the Internet. > You're only slightly deranged if it's LAN-bound but in an organization > large enough to support ongoing internal strife. No, I advocate setting up SELinux properly which will take care of the automatic updates. Did you miss all the pointers to using semanage so that relabels will cover your non-default necessities? And that is not just from me too. > > If the latter, that's not practical for everyone who uses CentOS. I, > like many others I'm sure, support hundreds of boxes that are almost all > geographically distant from me. On top of that, the vast majority of > those boxes are in a different time zone, so that even though they're > only used during regular business hours, those hours may occur while I'm > off trying to have a life. Or sleep. See above. Again, the main issue is: Learn to use the thing properly!