Redhat to Fedora - up2date/RHN

Jef Spaleta jspaleta at princeton.edu
Tue Nov 4 15:47:43 UTC 2003


Charles Gregory wrote:
> Just my luck. This past spring our organization (a Community Net) did
> an in-depth evaluation of different flavours of Linux. We were looking
> for two critical factors, both rooted in the fact that our 
> organization often find itself lacking in technically qualified 
> personnel:

Unfortunately you asked the questions in the wrong order...let me use a
little cut and paste magic to make it a little clearer.

First, there is a lot of information in the About and Participate
sections of the webpage. (My one pet gripe about the webpage is that
expanding menu on the right hand side, seems a lot of people have
problems inuitively knowing that the Schedule page is under Participate
menu and even fewer people seem to want to explore the menus, for
exploration sake..a static expanded menu/sitemap would make some sense
as an option to the collapsed menu) 

> There is also no clear indication in the downloads page of which 
> versions are 'stable' and suitable for a production server 
> environment, and which ones are 'test' versions. Or I'm looking in the
> wrong place. To me there is a much stronger flavour of Fedora being a
> 'test' or 'development' site that than a place to obtain stable Linux
> distributions. But this can't be right, can it?

There is not a stable version YET. The name change to Fedora has
happened during the middle of a a beta/testing cycle for RHLproject
(which by the way was the original name change from RHL,
RHL->RHLp->Fedora..its a mad mad mad mad mad mad world.) General
availability of Fedora Core 1 seems to have slipped a few days, but last
i heard it should be available by the end of this week....but I'm still
catching up from being unplugged from the net for over a week. 

Now whether FC1 is going to be suitable for you production needs is
going to be a decision you will have to make. Hopefully it will be an
informed decision:
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/faq/
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/terminology.html
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/trademarks/

I think i heard some people were going to start a Fedora EOL policy
Blues Band, to travel the country playing soulful, cathartic laments for
packed houses of Red Hat users who are pining for an affordable(ie
without cost) solution with errata/update lifetimes of at least 1 1/2
years. But they all decided that have negative musical ability so
instead they are trying to build up the Fedora Legacy idea (as loosely
defined in the terminology page) as community solution to the short EOL
policy which is summaried in:
(http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html). 

Fedora Legacy has a mailinglist at:
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list

And by the way, the EOL issues with RHL and Fedora has been rehashed
about 17 billion times on the mailinglist threads, the /. headline about
the impending EOL doom, probably isn't going to help the signal to noise
ratio on any of the lists..sadly. I'm pretty sure from reading your post
that the EOL issue is going to be a stumbling block for you with Fedora
moving forward...so if I were you I'd take a good hard look at what the
Fedora Legacy (and similar attempts at a post-EOL world) are doing and
see if you can contribute to the Legacy effort in a meaningful way.  

> Now, less than a year later, Red Hat (basic) is being dropped, the RH
> "Enterprise Edition" is ridiculously expensive (for a small not-for-profit
> community net, anyways), and while everyone seems to think that this
> 'Fedora' project is an adeqaute replacement, there are no real documents
> on *how* to make this migration/transition, and whether 'up2date' will
> continue to work in the same way. Or how it *will* work if it is
> different.


Well, as of now in the test releases of Fedora, you should be able to
upgrade from RHL9 (for example) to a Fedora test release using the cd
media. Not very unlike how someone would upgrade from RHL8 to RHL9. (I
won't get into the works-for-me situations of using something like yum
to do the upgrade without using cd media...) I have not had any
indication that upgrading (using the cd media) from RHL->Fedora Core 1
will be especially more broken than previous upgrades from one RHL to
the next.  But I'm sure any lingering bug in the anaconda installer will
be construed by about 30% of the userbase (the ones who wear the tinfoil
hats and underwear) that its a malicious attempt to break the upgrade
path.

As for up2date, I'm not really sure if Fedora Core 1 will be using RHN
at all...but up2date has gained support for community based yum
repositories...and so has the rhn-applet (the graphical thingie that
gives you a big red middle finger when you need updates.)  So,
essential...right now, looking at what's in the test release of Fedora
Core....how i interact with up2date and rhn-applet as an end-user, isn't
very different. But, how up2date is actually working could be considered
significantly different. the up2date that makes it into Fedora Core 1,
might not work exactly the same (I'm not sure that it can grab advisory
text without rhn for example unless it has rhn support), but it should
get the update job done...you just might have to spend a little more
time configuring it to use your favorite fedora mirrors..but the fact
that you CAN configure it to use fedora mirrors is a pretty important
community oriented feature, and its important not to underestimate the
significance of broadening the up2date tool. 

> So, exactly how would I go about making a *smooth* transition to
> running Fedora (from RH9), and what manual procedures would I have to
> run to replace the functionality of the Red Hat Network, and keep 
> things 'trained monkey' simple.....?

Depends on exactly which functionality of RHN you are trying to replace.
Some of the more advanced features of remote update scheduling using the
rhnsd service, I don't think have been replicated.  But the real answer
is stay tuned.....
Any answer the community can give you now about how to use up2date with
Fedora Core 1..will be a partial answer at best...and worse it might be
the wrong answer for what you want to do...since you don't want to run a
testing box...and right now for the testing release, up2date is geared
to make testing easier. I am expecting some clarification on specific
up2date issues as part of the release. So my best advice to you is to
wait for the release annoucement, which should come out this week...then
read the announcement and the release notes...then drink a shot of
tequila and read the announcement and release notes again. Do that last
step a couple of times more, get a good night's sleep and then if things
still aren't clear enough, ask questions again a couple of days after
the FC1 release.

-jef"Conferences....bah humbug"spaleta
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