Joe is right about the stability factor.
I have staff that try to ride the bleeding edge of FC on their desktops,
and most of the time it works fine. But, for my clusters I want a stable
and long term supportable OS. I can't afford an upgrade costing downtime
or lack of availability. I also can't afford major upgrades every 18
months. My number one desire is supported stability. My number two
desire is speed. Maybe this philosophy comes from all of my years in
unix world (21 and counting), but the idea of standardizing on something
that has the limited longterm support of FC scares me. We regulalry run
nodes for years without reboot.
Right now there are projects that are still at FC2 for their stable
versions (open-ssi for instance). But FC2 is dead. I think that the dev
version of open-ssi is FC3, but it's dead too.
I do not run diskless nodes. I test sample hardware for power usage,
heat output, and stability before purchasing it in quantity. A working
cluster is not the place that I want to experiment with "maybe's." Just
because an OS isn't the newest is not a bad thing.
Stability, stability, stability.
Mike Davis
Joe Landman wrote:
Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Sun, 15 Apr 2007, John Hearns wrote:
And re. the future version of Scientific Linux, there has been
debate on the list re. co-operating with CENTos and essentially
using CENTos as a base, and SL being an overlay of specific
application and library RPMs.
Pros and cons either way there.
IMO, most cluster builders will find it more advantageous to track the
FC releases instead of using RHEL or Centos or things derived
therefrom.
Only if they are not building clusters for commercial customers, or
customers with specific OS (distro) requirements. FC simply will not
fly in a shop that demands long term support. We deal with lots of
these.
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