[lug] Re: LTS for the server

[Sean Reifschneider]

Neal McBurnett wrote:
 > I'd think that if you prefer Debian, you'd use Debian for production.

As I mentioned in my previous message, my experience has been that Debian
as a production distribution is not a good choice.  Again, it's because
it's got such a short life-cycle for updates.  Some sites *MAY* be able to
keep up with having to re-roll their production environment every 18
months, but things can change in 18 months and maybe then you will prefer
to be working on client-facing issues rather than re-qualifying and fixing
your applications for the latest Debian.

At the very least, something like a 5 or 7 year support cycle is going to
give you the option of not rolling with it.

 > If you prefer Ubuntu, use Ubuntu LTS for production servers, and

I didn't mean it as a slight to Ubuntu, it's just still that from what I
see people think of Ubuntu and Debian in a similar category, and a lot of
the Ubuntu users seem to be those that otherwise were using Debian.

The astute reader will notice I haven't mentioned SuSE.  The problem with
it is that the "Open" release has very short life-cycles and there is not
long life-cycle release that is freely available.  So you either need to
commit to spending $400-ish/box/year or you need to commit to upgrading every
18 months.  That's a bit high of a price to pay just for the security
updates.

 > Does RHEL or CentOS have backports in the Ubuntu sense?

Not specifically.  In some cases newer versions of packages may make it
into something like the EPEL repository, which is Fedora Extras for
RHEL/CentOS, to install beside the existing version.  Debian and Ubuntu
seem to have taken this much farther than Fedora/RHEL/CentOS has though.

Backports is pretty nice.  If you really need a newer version than what is
there, it's much better than having to maintain your own.  However, it's
not clear that updates to backports are likely for the same term as the
base release -- like a 5 year cycle for a backport on LTS.  You're still
almost certainly better off than having to roll your own though.

 > Is there any difference in practice between CentOS and RHEL?  E.g. are

The primary difference is support.  If you have CentOS you aren't going to
get the support from Red Hat.  If you put Oracle on CentOS, you may run
into support issues with Oracle because they only guarantee it to run on
RHEL, not CentOS.  Of course, if you're paying $70k on Oracle, I don't know
why you wouldn't buy the distro to put under it...

This is a case where CentOS is kind of at a disadvantage.  Because CentOS
is named so differently from Red Hat, but OpenSuSE is named almost the same
as SuSE Enterprise Linux, we've had customers select OpenSuSE over CentOS
because an upstream vendor "supports SuSE but doesn't support CentOS".
When in truth they don't support OpenSuSE, only SLES.

OpenSuSE has a much shorter support cycle than CentOS, so you're probably
worse off.

I have never personally run into any technical issues that cause CentOS to
not work for things designed for the same version of RHEL.

 > there applications only certified for RHEL, or are there any support
 > issues that many customers really care about?

If you run your business on something and you are at the mercy of an
upstream support provider that says "thou shalt use RHEL", then you
probably should be using RHEL.  For example, Plesk the "control panel"
software -- we have a client that runs their entire business off that.
Plesk only wants to be on RHEL, and this customer has had to have a number
of Plesk support requests, so they really need to be on RHEL.

 > Is RHEL/CentOS getting into the mobile space at all, like e.g.

I have no idea.  It's not something I really follow.

Sean
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability