are you using Fedora in a production environment?

[Mark Haney]

Max Spevack wrote:
> Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?  Are you 
> using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical" 
> capacity?  Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email 
> to them?
We are primarily a Fedora shop. We have 9 Fedora Core servers, most of 
them in critical production uses.  One FC5 box is our primary SAN 
controller that until early last week had been running FC2 for the last 
2.5 years and controls 20TB of NWS Level 2 radar data.  This system also 
handles our Disaster Recovery solution and regularly handles 100s of GBs 
of data a day.

We have 2 FC4 servers that receive NWS weather data from all 134 radars 
in the US and feeds them to 6 universities, one for-profit organization 
and the National Climactic Data Center here in Asheville, NC, which is 
fed into the largest repository of weather data in the world.  These two 
boxes regularly receive and feed 20Mbps 24/7/365 which is then fed into 
a couple of our supercomputers for weather forecasting by NCDC and the 
Air Force Combat climatology unit.

We have 2 FC5 boxes that provide secure LDAP authentication, some web 
services like Ganglia for cluster monitoring for our SGI servers and 
external facing interfaces for console access to our internal servers.

We also have one FC5 box that runs Xen and has 4 guest OS's (3 FC5 and 
one of another distro) for use by our customers and our team for 
development and testing of new software packages.
>
> If you are, I want to hear all about it.  I'm trying to gather data 
> for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our 
> decision making for Fedora 7.
>
> What's your setup like?
>
> What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to 
> something else?
What made us choose it, that's easy.  I've been a Fedora/RH user since 
v3.  It's always been stable and reliable, even with more 'cutting edge' 
packages than other distros.  In fact we have two Debian boxes here that 
are being rebuilt with FC since we cannot get consistent Debian package 
updates.  And it's not only the OS that works.  I have always been very 
pleased with the FC/RH community (mailing lists, etc) as far as helpful 
advice is concerned.  Unlike a lot of other lists out there, a large 
majority of the Fedora community have always been very knowledgeable and 
willing to answer just about any question posted.
>
> What works well for you?
Honestly?  Just about everything that you would need in a server for a 
production environment.  I can't think of anything on our production 
systems that didn't work well.
>
> What could be better?
Here's my one beef with Fedora.  Package file locations.  I've noticed 
that there have been times where a package document says a file is in 
/xx/xxx and in Fedora it's somewhere else.  While I'm not totally 
opposed to that, it makes it really hard to have packages and compiled 
source on the same machines.  And please don't ask for specific 
examples, I've wracked my brain and can't think of one off the top of my 
head.  Although OpenLDAP does come to mind.  Hmmm....

And not a Fedora specific complaint, desktop functionality on ldaptops 
need to be better.  (General soapbox gripe, though.)
>
> etc, etc.  Anything you care to share with me.
<suckup>

One last, thing, thanks for giving me the chance to brag on a great 
distro as well as give a big THANKS to everyone who gives their time to 
make it that way.

</suckup>  :)

> Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
>
> Thanks,
> Max
>


-- 
Ceterum censeo, Carthago delenda est.

Mark Haney
Sr. Systems Administrator
ERC Broadband
(828) 350-2415