OT Fedora in production (as nstallation Problem on Fedora Core 8)

[Jason Ede]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-
> bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Anthony Cartmell
> Sent: 12 December 2007 16:22
> To: MailScanner discussion
> Subject: Re: OT Fedora in production (as nstallation Problem on Fedora
> Core 8)
>
> > You miss read the grammar in my reply.
> >
> > We all know that Centos is not  supported by Red Hat, however it is
> > binary compatible, if you're not sure what binary compatible just go
> for
> > google.
>
> You missed my winking smiley ;)
>
> > Heres an article worth reading that looks at both sides of the
> argument:
> >
> > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1766350,00.asp
>
> Although that's a little old now, I agree with its sentiments. It even
> lists Wikipedia and Sourceforge as using Fedora for production servers
> :)
>
> > You also might want to read real world comment here:
> >
> > http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-255265.html
>
> I agree with those opinions that compare Ubuntu with Fedora rather than
> with RHEL. The points about stability being unrelated to the age of
> software are exactly what I'm talking about.
>
> > I think that by insisting its not a testing ground OS you are not in
> > agreement with everyone I deal with...
>
> Depends whether "testing ground OS" is a good thing or not. I'd have
> thought that the fact that RHEL is based on Fedora, and not, say,
> Ubuntu,
> was an indication that Fedora is indeed one of the most stable free
> Linux
> distros available.
>
> > If you use Fedora for production, then I'm glad I'm not relying on
> your
> > production servers.
>
> My only few downtimes over the last three years have been hardware and
> network related. I have never had any issues with Fedora, which has
> proved
> to be quite stable enough for production use.
>
> > To say that it is suitable for production comes down to experience
>
> I quite agree, I'm simply relating what I've personally experienced. If
> someone has run production web/e-mail servers with Fedora and has had
> problems with the OS I'd love to hear, in case I've been unusually
> lucky.
>
> Cheers!
>

I've been running Fedora for several years as a mail server. First on FC4 then 5,6 and finally 7. Not yet built one on FC8

Apart from 2 small problems with FC7 (one was a cron update that broke cron for a few days and the other a perl update with a faulty Scalar::Utils) they've been running fine. The only real problems I've had is with the yum updates conflicting with the MailScanner perl packages that means I need to remove some packages before running yum update (although that has really only been an issue on FC7). Generally, for reasons other than stability, the servers have been rebuilt every 12-18 months so far.

I've always made sure that I've turned off all services that I've not needed to minimise the exposure of ports and with one exception they've all been behind good firewalls.

I will be trying an install on CentOS 5.1, but that is mainly because of the rpmforge repository and it removes the problem of having a mixture of perl updates which has caused problems before.

Jason