RH 9 to FC1/FC2 and some questions

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

Sanjay,

On 13 Jun 2004, Sanjay Arora wrote:
> I plan to upgrade a production server from RH9 to FC1....or maybe FC2 if
> its stable now. Are there any major path changes or anything else that
> should make necessary a fresh install rather than an upgrade?
 
Many people have had success in upgrades, many others have not.  I 
personally prefer to avoid upgrade issues and always do a fresh install.  
When possible, I usually install a new HD and keep the old one installed.  
Then I mount the old one on the new filesystem and copy stuff over.  
That's just because I usually forget to back up something otherwise. :)

> How stable are FC1 & FC2 respectively....comparison with RH9.

Again, this is just my personal experience, but I've found FC 1 pretty 
good.  After trying out FC2, I won't put it on anything that I depend 
upon.  Again, that's just been my experience, others on this list are 
using FC2 and are doing just fine.

> Also, what do you people think of future of Fedora as a production
> platform rather than a testbed only for ES. How many of you plan to use
> it as a server platform viz-a-viz ES...and I am not talking of those who
> love the cutting edge technology...regardless of how much effort they
> have to put into it.

Personally, I'd recommend against any version of Fedora for a "production 
server" environment, for a few reasons.  First is the Fedora philosophy.  
It's simply not meant to be for production servers, and such is stated on 
Redhat's website.  It's more of an experimental distro, intended to try 
out new technologies.  While this can be very cool, it tends to break 
things as anybody who's been reading this list will realize.  

Secondly is the release schedule.  IMHO, not enough testing is/can be done 
to ensure production-server stability in the distro before it's released.  

Thirdly is the EOL schedule.  Currently it looks like security patches 
will be available from the regular Fedora project for a bit less than a 
year from release.  After that, support is supposed to be picked up by the 
Fedora Legacy project.  I haven't been monitoring it all that closely, but 
I've seen on their website that they've got enough manpower problems that 
they've already cut a few of the RHL versions that they'd planned to 
support.  Not bashing them, and if I was up-to-date on my programming 
skills I'd try to help them out, but the fact is that they don't have a 
track record yet and it looks like they're struggling for resources.

> You see I know a lot of people who are eyeing slackware as an
> alternative to a stable RH platform, should Fedora not be so. Am really
> looking to resolve this issue in my mind...so the Gurus please do
> comment.

I'm looking at http://www.whiteboxlinux.org as a possible replacement for 
RHL 9 on my home server.  It's one of a few distros that's taking the 
source code for RHEL ES 3.0 that Redhat is graciously donating to the 
community and turning it into a seperate distro.  (There are others in a 
recent thread, I can't remember them off of the top of my head.)

The beauty of this is that RedHat is going to support RHEL ES 3.0 for five 
years, and as long as they continue to release the source of their 
updates, whitebox and their brothers shouldn't have very much difficulty 
in releasing security updates in a timely manner.  This is a source of 
much reassurance considering that day-zero exploits are becoming more 
common of late.

Fedora is a very cool product/project.  You just have to realize that it's 
not intended for all applications.  Of course, there are many on this list 
who will disagree completely. :)

Ben