Hi All

We are about to commission a new server (dual 4 core Xeons), this server will handle the mail for 4 or more domains our web sites for 4 or more domains and our SQL systems.

We have used and been happy using FC we started with RH8 through 9 and into FC missing some releases on our old servers. Is there any advantage to subscribe to RHEL, does it offer more than we currently get from FC, if so in what specific areas.

Thanks in advance
Dave.

fedora is NOT for server implementations, more boxes to mess around with and peroidically nuke to try something else. if you don't want to fork out for RHEL, try CentOS instead.

Fedora is RHEL without official support and much more then that.You don't need that support anyway if you can browse the internet.Lot's of people are using Fedora as a server and I didn't see them complain about it.Here's a link where you can get some info.

yea CentOS is the way to go if you are cheap. 99.99999999999999% the same as RHEL but free :-)

Also if you are interested I have created a how to for updating RHEL from CentOS repos...

IMO, you want RHEL (or CentOS if RH support is not a requirement) for any critical service. Fedora is a great OS, but it's intentionally bleeding edge. You get all the good and the bad that comes with that.

Centos is the way to go, as long as you do not need the support.

There are a couple of issues that have not been mentioned about running Fedora. Any one version of Fedora is only supported for 13months, after that no updates of any kind (including security). Most of the sever applications are pretty mature and only marginal improvements are made in this time frame, so there is really no reason to go through a complete install every year. The second reason is becoming much more serious. Since F7 (roughly) Fedora has not been doing a very good job of cleaning up bugs. There are many bugs that were introduced in F7 that still exist in F10. RH is VERY aware of this situation and now has more people than ever working on Fedora. The normal release schedule for RHEL has been delayed in part due to this. RHEL4 was based on FC3, RHEL5 on FC6, RHEL6 could not be based on F9(as the pattern would indicate) and maybe not F10. RH has compensated in part for this in RHEL5.X by upgrading the versions of certain packages, something that they generally do not do for any release( moving from FF1.5 to FF3.0 among others). Hopefully RH will get this situation improved enough to move forward.

I would like to thank you all for your input. I have already started downloading CentOS in both x86 and x86-64 versions to trial on my test servers. Hopefully CentOS will be the path for us.

Thank again
Dave

I want to add one comment about CentOS now that I know that it is your choice. CentOS kernel builds do not match Red Hat kernel builds. You aren't going to see identical results for performance. It sounds like you are planning to run a fairly simple array of services on these servers so I have a lot of confidence that your solution will work. I work in server support and that means I have been there when "simple" turned out to have a bug that required a great degree of effort to reproduce, but it killed otherwise "simple solutions". When you need help and you need it immediately, you are going to want to go with a good support infrastructure so I urge you to be prepared to meet the requirements of that support model.

I offer up these guidelines as a suggestion.

1. Familiarize yourself with the requirements for service from your distribution of choice. In this case, with CentOS, you are basing your builds on a redistribution of Red Hat.
2. Match your version of CentOS to a currently supported version of RHEL and keep it that way. Do not rely on packages excluded from the supported distribution.
3. Ensure that your hardware is on the HCL so you do not face issues later with unsupported config's.
4. Use configuration management software and kickstarts to make it simple to move to a supported configuration for testing. This will also help with disaster recovery in the event that you must rebuild from the ground up.

Good luck with your decision. I hope that it serves you well.

CentOS seems more then fine for the requirement specified indeed. I have a mail server and MySQL running on CentOS and never really had issues with either. Since CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora goes down a similar path of originating as a test bed for RHEL and later becoming a seperated off development for desktop usage, things between the three are not too different.

Generally once up and running it's quite hard to take CentOS, other then bugs in setup (changing network files configurations incorrectly), I tend not to see CentOS problems too much and I work in a data center and the main OS I usually end out installing is CentOS .

Thanks for those words of wisdom Dave. I hope that for the time being I will not be suffering too much from the mismatch of version from RHEL. I assume that CentOS 5.2 is a match for either RHEL5.2 or 5.3 as 5.3 is just released.

I assure you that if my support model fails then this forum will be one of the first to hear about it.

Dave

When there is a major point release, Centos lags behind RHEL by about 3 weeks (roughly) as there are so many packages that have to be rebuilt and tested. Regular updates are usually ready in about 72 hours. Other than that, the version numbers match, RHEL5.2=Centos5.2 and RHEL5.3 will=Centos5.3(when ready). As a rough guess, I would say we are still a couple of weeks out for C5.3. You will be able to yum upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3 (on Centos or RHEL) just as any point release (5.X to 5.X+Y). There was a notation(if I remember correctly) that there will be a change in GCC between 5.2 and 5.3(from Fedora delay?) which is a little unusual. The note mentioned updating glibc right BEFORE upgrading from 5.2(read the upgrade notes).