Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[John Summerfield]

David G. Mackay wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 10:07 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>> There was a point in mid-FC5 where an update kernel would not boot on an 
>> IBM Xseries 225 (fairly mainstream dual-xeon boxes, I thought) without 
>> doing a motherboard bios update - after which the older kernels wouldn't 
>> boot. And of course there were no warnings about this or much of a 
>> reason to expect it to work after doing the bios flash either.  And 
>> there have been several updates that failed to boot on popular Dell and 
>> IBM MPT scsi controllers - even one late into FC6 which was otherwise 
>> pretty stable.
> 
> I'm not arguing that it doesn't happen.  I've experienced a few.  The
> original post was directed to a fellow who wants to run a home server on

The original post was by valent.turkovic and  actually referred to a 
document written by someone who'd decided Fedora was a poor choice for a 
server, and invited comment.


> his desktop.  And, I haven't seen anything yet that would cause more
> than a few minutes downtime while switching to the backup partition
> after noticing the problem.
> 
> Now, if we're talking a system that's handling financial transactions
> that has to be available 24/7, then it's another situation entirely.
> I've been in shops like that, and am aware of the practices necessary to
> sustain that.  I don't, however, need a disaster recovery plan with a
> hot backup site for my video and music collection.

I would think that a home Linux user running a server controlling his 
Internet connexion and maybe providing mail and http caching is fairly 
common. While maybe not life-threatening, its sudden lack might be 
pretty inconvenient.

_Mine_ is running CentOS4 and is on a UPS (the UPS because used good 
ones can be bought pretty cheaply at auction).


-- 

Cheers
John

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