Accessing A Fedora 7 Box FROM The Net

[Sharpe, Sam J]

2009/5/6 Paul <jpb at entel.ca>:
> Not everyone is such a whiz that they can just go and do an in-place upgrade
> of any given Linux distribution. Windoze is bad enough with things breaking
> on an upgrade, Fedora can be a nightmare, and that is on a stock distro
> without manually updated or installed packages.

Explain, without hyperbole. I've done many many many anaconda upgrades
and a few preupgrades and not encountered any serious issues.

> This is why I personally
> find the Fedora policy of tossing out a new distro every so often and
> scrapping the one to or three places back so abhorrent. Have you seen the
> uproar M$ has gone through over retiring XP? Responsible would be keeping
> one version and keeping it patched as long as possible, not throwing out the
> baby, bathwater and tub every six months. There is no actual need to do
> this, it is just a choice made by the Fedora maintainers, to do it this way
> rather than make the individual updates to each package, kernel included, as
> they are brought out by the developers, and tested for use in the distro.

It's a question of resources. There are now 10 versions of Linux
released by the Fedora project. There will soon be 11. Would you
expect them to build packages for all 11 in response to a bug or
security update? How many of them should be supported? 1, 2, 4, 6, all
of them? Seriously, come on now - think of the resources and time that
would take away from development...

There are two Linux distributions closely allied with Fedora that
would suit someone in this position:
1) If you can afford to pay for it: Red Hat Enterprise Linux - 7 year
supported lifecycle
2) If you can't afford to pay for it: CentOS - exactly the same, but a
couple of months later in releasing and similarly supported.

Fedora is a reasonably fast-moving target, never designed for stable
servers and multi-year life expectancy - quit bitching.

(and I run vastly more RHEL machines, many with uptimes longer than a
Fedora supported lifetime, so I speak with some authority)

-- 
Sam