[CentOS] Centos7 Annoyances

Fri Oct 31 01:30:14 UTC 2014
Fred Smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 05:45:58PM -0700, david wrote:
> Folks
> 
> I'm sure the Centos team has done a yeoman's job getting Centos7
> ready, and that the Redhat team has done marvels in creating rhel7,
> but here's a little voice from a personal hobbyist user.
> 
> Background:
>  ('ve been maintaining several remote servers since Redhat 6 days,
> migrating from that to Whitebox, then Centos, and things have been
> running as expected including the current version of Centos6.  As an
> experiment, I've tried to play with Centos7 on an in-house virtual
> machine (VMWare on Win7), and have encountered a collection of
> annoyances greater than I've even seen.  Below is a note about them.
> If someone has some elegant solution, I'd love to try, but Centos7
> is still unusable for me.
> 
<snip>
> 5) Sendmail is out, postfix is in.
>  This is a huge change, since I had lots of scripts that tailored
> the Sendmail system for spam protection, dealing with SmartHosts
> that required SMTP-AUTH and others required weird configurations,
> etc.  Whether this is working yet I don't quite know, but it seems
> the scripts can accommodate the change.

FYI, you can install sendmail, it's still available if you want it,
it is just no longer the default:

	yum install sendmail

someday when I move my home system (combined workstation, play-on-it
system, and server) to EL7 I'll be installing Sendmail, simply because
I want to "leverage" all the pain I went through over the years to
create my own sendmail.mc file, and don't feel like going thru it
again with another MTA.

> 
> 6) Installation
>  I have no idea why, when using the net-install, one must explicitly
> turn on the network.  It seems unnecessary.

I have quibbles with the new installer, and that's only a small-ish
one. I think a "guided" install (like the old Anaconda) is much better
because you don't have to guess what should be done next.

> 
> 7) Lack of 32-bit support
>  I think I understand this.  After all, 32-bit machines may become
> "unusable" when the clock overflows, but isn't that a few years
> away, and couldn't some solution be found, even if kludgy?  Some of
> the 32-bit hardware was of very high quality, and still runs
> perfectly.  I'd hate to spend a few hundred dollars each to replace
> all those systems.

I believe there are people working on this, it's just not yet ready
for prime time. It's probably harder than it would have been simply
becauase RH did not provide the info/scripts/tools for doing a 32-bit
build.

<snip>

-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
                    The Lord detests the way of the wicked 
                  but he loves those who pursue righteousness.
----------------------------- Proverbs 15:9 (niv) -----------------------------