On 04/20/2017 05:55 PM, Warren Young wrote: > ... I find that most hardware is ready to fall over by the time the > CentOS that was installed on it drops out of support anyway. > ... James' point isn't the hardware cost, it's the people cost for retraining. In many ways the Fedora treadmill is easier, being that there are many more smaller jumps than the huge leap from C6 to C7. For the most part, however, I agree with most of your post. I strongly disagree with the paragraph above, though. I have worked for non-profits for most of my career thus far, which spans almost 30 years. Non-profits by their very nature live on the slimmest of margins, and donations of hardware by individuals and companies have been in my experience the bread and butter for obtaining server-quality hardware. The typical donation will be at least one or two generations old before the non-profit gets it; my current employer is just putting in production some IBM BladeCenters with the dual-socket Opteron LS20 blades (10+ years old). Given the spiky workload, these blades are suitable for the targeted use, and the electrical requirements aren't a problem (I've done the math; it would take ten years or more to justify the purchase price of a new blade based on power savings alone, and our power is quite inexpensive here). At least I can use very recent blades, and the eBay prices for 5-year-old blades are pretty good, so when I need that much more power I can get it. Oh, and the LS20 blades are built like tanks. We have a couple hundred of them that were donated, and we're going to use them. For what it's worth, CentOS 7, once installed, works great as long as the lack of a GUI console isn't a problem (something with the BladeCenter's KVM switch and C7's kernel keeps the keyboard from working properly). And don't even get me started on networking equipment, where I still have Catalyst 5500-series hardware in production. (going on 20 years old and still trucking!) And having said that, I just pulled out of service a server for another non-profit that had a power supply fan seize. I posted about moving its application Friday. It is an AMD K6-2/400 with a Western Digital 6GB boot drive and a Maxtor 30GB data drive, running Red Hat Linux 5.2. The Antec power supply was put into service in 1999. It stopped working Friday, and could have probably been put back into operation with a new power supply without a huge amount of work, but I decided it was time. Heh, it was time ten years ago! The 6GB WD drive was only 19 years old; while I honestly wanted to see it turn 20, it was time (power supply glitches caused by overheating of the power supply; worst-case for hard disk death in my experience). Yeah, 24x7 operation for 19 years with minimal downtime. I'm going to personally put it back into service for hysterical raisins, since the VA-503+ board doesn't need re-cap and it runs very well for what it is. I'm not sure what I'm going to run on it yet. (It will be in service for the same reasons I'm going to put a Reh CPU280 running UZI280 into service.....). > And that’s why I use *all* the major OSes and several weird ones besides. None of it is perfect, yet it all has its place. I couldn't agree more.