Fedora home server using core 9

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday 02 September 2008 22:29, g wrote:
> you did your research well. i commend you.

:-) It isn't like I was doing any research. I am aware of such details simply 
because I used to be a grid team member some time ago, so have some inside 
information... ;-)

> > means that SL will in time start lagging behind in being updated,
>
> _maybe_ to your thinking.

Well, this is a natural consequence of the "safe play" strategy of the grid 
teamleaders. There are several layers of software that grid depends on, and 
each of those layers is being developed and maintained by different teams, 
within different institutions. Hence keeping for example updates of os 
synchronized with updates of grid middleware is a nontrivial task, and that 
is precisely the reason of existence of SL distro.

Now, if all is well and everyone involved do their job on time and without 
mistakes and hickups, the SL distro *will* stay in sync with RHEL/CentOS. 

However, if any type of problem occours in any of the teams for whatever 
reason, SL will start lagging behind for however long a period neccessary, in 
order to provide all the teams enough time to resolve any problems before 
updating.

Given this strategy, I *hope* that SL will always be in sync with RHEL, but 
*expect* it to lag behind, as a potential (and realistic) situation.

So this is not just my thinking, it is a reasonable (and intended) conjecture 
based on the design philosophy of SL.

Predicting the future is never easy, and providing such a large-scale 
mission-critical infrastructure such as the grid on a 24/7 basis for several 
years is practically bound to have problems at some point. ;-)

> > If I were an ordinary user/admin of a system unrelated to Cern and/or
> > grid stuff, I would stick to CentOS and leave SL to people who really
> > need it
>
> as a user, yes. as an admin of any system greater than 1 box, i can see
> many advantages of having system software that is 'grid capable'.

There are two possible distinct situations here:

1) You are a member of a grid site. This means you are *required* to use SL, 
you have dedicated a number of machines to be a part of the grid, and you 
have the certificates to use the whole infrastructure for computing.

2) You are not a member of a grid site. This means you are not required to use 
any software, and may install grid middleware on top of some other distro 
(provided that you are able to resolve any problems that might occour in 
doing that). Using this grid middleware, you are able to roll "your own 
grid", and use its computing potentials as you see fit. But in this case you 
are not granted the certificates to use "the Cern grid", so have no access to 
their resources.

The bottom line is that you have no gain in using SL over RHEL/CentOS unless 
you are officialy involved in "the Cern grid", so to speak. Further, some 
serious folks will try hard to keep it equivalent to RHEL, but cannot (and do 
not) guarantee that for the future.

On the other hand, if you are ok with that, noone prevents you from using SL 
for whatever your needs may be. But there is *zero gain* (unless you are 
reseaching the grid middleware yourself) compared to using RHEL/CentOS. This 
is my sole point. :-)

Best, :-)
Marko