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

[Scott Robbins]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 09:28:36PM -0500, David Lawson wrote:
> 
> On Nov 22, 2011, at 7:40 PM, Scott Robbins wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 07:20:01PM -0500, Isaac Levy wrote:
> >> On Nov 22, 2011, at 6:07 PM, "Matt Juszczak" <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
> >> 
> > 
> > As for 5.x vs. 6.x, everything new that we're doing is going with 6.x.
> > Some of the 5.x packages are really ancient by now.  
> 
> Yeah, I'd go for 6.0, depending on your application.  You're really not going to have stability problems because of the way they track upstream, but you may see compatibility issues if your project is going to have a lot of dependencies, it'll take a little while for third parties to start releasing 6.x packages.  If you're talking web app and the database you need is packaged and you can live with, worst case, using un-packaged deps for framework dependencies, go with 6.x, it'll save you pain in the long run.  The CentOS major version upgrade process is ugly and the officially packaged versions in 5.x are really elderly in most cases.

Note that RedHat does not (yet) support upgrading.  They recommend
backup and fresh install. 

One of the big reasons for this, especially considering how old 5.x is,
is that there are often _major_ changes in various libs. 

One of the downsides, in my opinion, is that in some cases, RH lets
Fedora be its testing ground, but Fedora is really aimed more at the
desktop user.  For example, briefly (very briefly, let's be fair)
packagekit, the GUI package manager, didn't require any sort of
authorization to upgrade already installed, signed, packages.  The
curses based installer has been crippled, in favor of more work on the
GUI installer.  
 

> 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. 

Additionally, many vendors are offering support for Ubuntu. 

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.

But at any rate, CentOS 6.x is proving to be quite stable for me.  (I
confess, that's what I'm using to write this--as most of my work these
days is RH/CentOS, my desktop-cum-server at home is running CentOS 6.)
-- 
Scott Robbins
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