Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[Roger Heflin]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Roger Heflin wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> Fedora ships buggy kernels. As stated previously this is more
>>>> upstream's fault, 
>>>
>>> Beg your pardon, but just because someone writes broken code that 
>>> _does not_ force a distribution to ship it.
>>>
>>
>> The problem is that the enterprise OS's ship buggy kernels too,
> 
> Yes, but they very, very rarely introduce new bugs in an update that 
> breaks a previously working system.
> 
>> I have found at least one bug in most of the recent enterprise kernels 
>> (RHEL3, RHEL4, RHEL5 and SLES9-never tested SLES10), and some of those 
>> bugs were very very ugly had at least one of them had long since been 
>> fixed upstream, and at least one of those bugs *NEVER* existed in the 
>> kernel.org kernels at all.
> 
> And the timeline between reporting the bug and getting the fix was...?

Wait 3 months for the next update, and even there you had to change a kernel 
parameter (after the new update allow the parameter to even be adjusted), and 
this was for a bug that could be reproduced by "dd if=/dev/zero of=filename 
bs=1M", all it took was a machine with 32GB of ram or more.

> 
>> And lets take RHEL5 initial release, it did not support file systems 
>> larger then 8TB (ext3 only, no XFS), it did not support Areca and 
>> 3ware PCIe controllers even though those drivers had been out for 6+ 
>> months at the time they shipped RHEL5, and those are most definitely 
>> enterprise boards.   And the second you add a driver and/or XFS on to 
>> RHEL5 you are now tainted and *UNSUPPORTED*.
> 
> Do you have some point here - like a system that always supports 
> everything and never fails?  I usually don't have as much of a problem 
> having to fiddle with a new machine where you obviously aren't already 
> relying on it or getting known-supported hardware when I don't have time 
> to fiddle as I do with updates breaking previously working things.  But, 
> have you tried the Centosplus kernels that put xfs and the drivers that 
> rhel removes back?
> 

Yes, and typically to support anything recent you have too many add-ons on the 
enterprise OSes, if you are in a fast moving enterprise environment RHEL won't work.

RHEL is probably quite good for any of the nice simple static enterprise 
environments, but most would argue there you should probably lock everything 
down so tight that few kernel updates/userspace are even required for anything, 
the problem is in an environment were you are constantly having to bring in new 
hardware that does not work on the older release, where you cannot wait 6 months 
for RHEL to catch up.  If you are really worried about stability on anything you 
have to carefully cherry pick just the security fixes, and the fixes for 
problems that you know that you have, you don't risk adding anything that you 
don't need, everyone that is bitching about the Fedora updates breaking things, 
but applies *ALL* of the updates without checking to see if it adds any features 
that they need or fixes any problems that they have is just asking for trouble, 
whether on a desktop or a server.    If you manage fedora this way you can run 
it as a server successfully.