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
IMO, most cluster builders will find it more advantageous to track the
FC releases instead of using RHEL or Centos or things derived therefrom.
Hardware support is key, and Centos can get long in the tooth pretty
quickly in a cluster environment with any sort of annual turnover.
Bob,
at long last I can take issue with you.
I don't agree re. Fedora. We as cluster builders have to support
machines for at least three years, and are commonly requested to extend
support. I don't see how we can support a distribution which has a
'live' lifetime of six months (not sure how long updates are for after
that). After three years the distro is far, far out of date.
Your point re. hardware support of course is correct, and refutes my
argument above. We deal with this by backporting up-to-date kernels and
drivers, (and other packages such as dhcp server to RH 7.3 recently!)
If you reply that 'rolling updates' a la Debian would be possible, that
would be OK if well engineered (*) on academic sites.
But on commercial and secure Government sites machines are very often
operated on an isolated LAN, and stability (read 'don't change things
unnecessarily') is a key requirement there too.
(*) Ha. Well engineered?
Take the recent SuSE update which killed system logging on one of our
clusters. SuSE update RPM for syslog-ng now requires that the
syslog-ng.conf file is present (not present on the default install).
Yast quietly updates the RPM during the night last November.
System is rebooted a couple of weeks ago. We're asked to diagnose a
problem - and lo and behold no system logs.
(The fix is to use SuSE-config to create the syslog-ng.conf file and
restart syslog)
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