Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[David G. Mackay]

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
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.

Dave