Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[Les Mikesell]

Roger Heflin wrote:
> 
>> I can't recall ever being in a position of "having to bring in new 
>> hardware".  What scenario forces this issue on you?  I haven't noticed 
>> a shortage of vendors who will sell RHEL supported boxes.  But it 
>> sounds like you have an interesting job...
>>
> 
> More cpu power needed to do the job.   And the new boxes aren't 
> officially RHEL supported (and sometimes won't even boot with the latest 
> update-but will work with the latest fedora/kernel.org). 

Something faster than IBM could sell you?

> I had a subset 
> of machines (about 250 machines) all of which had reached about 500+ 
> days of uptime (the uptime counter rolled over)

Wasn't that fixed circa RH8?  I had some 7.3 machines roll over twice.

> The issue with all OSes is that no one tests enough to catch 
> these high MTBF issues, and in a big environment a machine crashing 1x 
> per every 1000 days of uptime, comes to 1 machine a day crashing because 
> of software, and typically the enterprise OSes aren't even close to that 
> level, and while fedora is worse, it is just not that much worse.

I don't think RH7.3 with its final updates or Centos3.x (where x>1) had 
anything approaching a software crash per 1000 days - at least not in 
the base system and common services.  I mostly skipped the 4.x series 
because I didn't trust the early 2.6 kernels at all, but 5.1 seems solid.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com