[nycbug-talk] OT: what version of RHEL/CentOS are you using in prod?

[David Lawson]

>> Or you can consider Ubuntu. ;)
> 
> Which is not such a bad idea.  AFAIK, they offer incident support (I
> have no idea how good it is or isn't) and Ubuntu server is pretty much
> Debian.   In some ways, it seems to me to be more of a server O/S than
> RH, which tends to (though this is improving) start up any service
> installed by default, and has a lot of documentation that assumes you're
> running a GUI.  (On the other hand, while most Ubuntu documentation is
> aimed towards the desktop, most of it is more or less Debian, so you can
> use that documentation. 

That was actually a completely serious suggestion, full disclosure I recently started working for Canonical, but I switched to largely working on Ubuntu systems prior to changing jobs and I've really enjoyed the transition.  There are a lot of aspects of Ubuntu that are significantly more modern, in my opinion, and the overall feel of the OS is more coherent.  It also feels a little more BSDish to me, but that may just be me.  It has some moderate quirks coming from RHEL, but like I said, I think it's more coherent and intuitive.  I also may be slightly biased. :)

Also, if you're deploying on Rackspace Cloud, I believe that does actually run on top of Ubuntu, so you may have more luck with the Cloud support guys at Rackspace if you're running it as well.

> Additionally, many vendors are offering support for Ubuntu. 

Yes, gratifyingly so, I'd say overall hardware vendor support is comparable to and in some cases better than support for RHEL/CentOS and third party package support is probably about the same.  I also prefer the PPA system to the way RHEL manages third party repositories.

> Anyway, they're all going to be pretty stable at least Ubuntu 10.0.4 
> (I think) Long Term Support server, haven't tried the later LTS server.

10.04 is the current server LTS, but 12.04 is intended to be a five year LTS release.  Unlike RHEL, upgrading Ubuntu is both possible and, honestly, pretty painless in my experience, so it's viable to install 11.10 at this point and then upgrade to 12.04 LTS after it comes out and you're comfortable with the stability.

--Dave