[CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

Wed Dec 9 16:54:57 UTC 2015
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 08:54:56AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
<snip>
> Working with your employer to fix the "will not allow Fedora into the
> premises" part seems like a good start.
<snip>
Why? Fedora is a development, rapid change distro. I just bugged one of my
users yesterday that I'm *GOING* to update and reboot his system, since it
hasn't been rebooted in about a year and a third. And we've got cluster
members that they won't *let* us update, because it might break the
software that's running on them. Around 6.3, I think, one user found an
issue with the results from an updated system, and reran a completed job,
and the update did *not* give the correct results. We had to downgrade - I
forget what packages.

And some of these users have jobs that on bare metal (forget VMs, we can't
spare the cycles) run one to two *weeks*... and that's on clusters with
512 or over 1100 cores, or the boxes with *two* Tesla cards. Yes, we are
talking very serious scientific computing.

Absolute stability is what matters. For production machines, I worked out
a once a month maintenance window, to update and reboot.

In an environment like this, why would we want to do fedora, with its
how-many-updates in the last two days? This is why we're on CentOS, which
is *stable*.

         mark