Upgrading kernel used in PXE boot

[Matt Fahrner]

Cris Rhea wrote:
> If you only wish to reload the OS on your servers every couple years, then
> (IMHO) Fedora is a poor choice-- RHEL/CentOS would be a much better
> choice because of the "long-term-supported distro[s]".
>   
While I agree Fedora is incredibly fast moving - with updates daily and 
very short cycles between "official" releases, in some ways I think 
you're comparing apples to oranges. Unlike RHE, SuSE, and others, you 
don't have to reinstall the server from scratch or do a CD based single 
user install to upgrade from release to release. It can be upgraded 
inline in multi-user via yum and done so in an a relatively 
non-intrusive way. I have no doubt in a "cookie cutter" installation it 
could be automated.

In the end the version number of Fedora is a bit arbitrary and it can 
almost be seen as a continuum of a single constantly updated OS (again, 
I have a server that's gone from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora 8 very 
seamlessly). I see it as being more incremental than forklift upgrade.

On the other hand, while I think it isn't a bad choice for a rapid 
development model where you want the latest and greatest, I wouldn't 
recommend Fedora for most server environments. If nothing else this is 
true because vendors like Oracle require quantifiable releases for 
support and Fedora is too fluid and not certified. That said, I have 
seen long waits for important fixes or dependencies out of the "stable" 
but supposedly "supported" releases that can be quite frustrating. I 
can't name the number of times we've been roadblocked on fixing a major 
issue by the fact that something like Oracle requires us to stay with an 
older but supposedly "stable" OS configuration.

- Matt

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Matt Fahrner                                    2 South Park St.
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