I will bring up your email at the next LUG meeting, we went with CentOS after discussion in our previous general meeting with our active members. MTU uses RHEL7 in the labs now so this is more like what the members will be using on campus, I like CentOS / RHEL personally -- but I have been using it in my work for years so I am biased and I know that I am biased -- this is my last year so I am fine with whatever the active members of LUG would like for their shell server, all of the choices on the poll came from our previous discussion of what the members may like to see on their shell server. In the end it comes down to what our members would like -- it is their org after all.
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:02 AM, dwfreed <dwfreed@xxxxxxx> wrote:
--Speaking as someone who works day in and day out maintaining other people's systems in order to have food on the table and a roof over my head (I work as a system administration consultant in the Bay Area), a decent shell server distribution CentOS does not make. First off, yum and rpm suck; dnf is supposed to make things better, but you won't see that until CentOS 8, which likely won't be out for a while (and I can't verify this, because fortunately none of my clients are insane enough to run Fedora). Second, Red Hat does a lot of things that can result in all sorts of pain. Biggest example: the kernel in RHEL/CentOS 6 is ostensibly 2.6.32, but they backport features from later kernels, so it's actually some sort of hodgepodge somewhere in the 3.x range, but not all of the features are backported, so you can't even say it's a 3.x kernel either. The kernel is not the only package they do this with, either; they'll do it with any package where a customer shows a need for a feature that is not in the version they ship. Another example: there is no guaranteed migration path between versions; moving from 5 to 6 requires a reinstall, and moving from 6 to 7 at first was possible, but the tool to do it is experimental, and is now broken because there are packages in 6 that are newer than the ones in 7, and the tool apparently cannot handle downgrades. Other things I've run into: The RHEL 7 interactive installer is GUI only; when I ran it on a Dell server I was setting up for a client, it decided I didn't have network interfaces, and so I actually had to tell dracut how to set up my networking using the kernel command line, which was incredibly painful to type (and I couldn't copy/paste, because I was on an iDRAC remote console) because I needed to bond the interfaces, and then layer VLANs on top, before I could actually bring up an IP. Given that CentOS is basically rebranded RHEL, I suspect it has similar issues (though, to be fair, it has been a year since I did that; maybe they fixed some of those bugs). Oh, and dracut is an over engineered pile of shit, and it and plymouth, another Red Hat creation, both need to die in a fire and burn in hell for all eternity. Also fun: 7 defaults to NetworkManager for network configuration, and you have to jump through a few hoops in order to go back to the "old-fashioned" initscripts. All in all, I would only recommend running CentOS if you regularly work with RHEL systems, and want to keep yourself from getting rusty when working on your personal systems.Of the other options listed, I throw out FreeBSD because it is not Linux, and while it tries to provide Linux compatibility, there is no guarantee that this random Linux binary I found on the Internet is going to work (which would be a common use case on the shell server). I throw out Fedora and Arch because they are bleeding edge, and require too much babysitting for a server admin team that is made up of college students enrolled full time. Ubuntu would probably be alright, but it is more meant for desktops, not servers, and thus has the plymouth plague (also you'd want to wait until 16.04 hit stable, which is roughly a month and a half off). Debian is a rock solid distribution, designed to be used on servers, and the release frequency in the last few years has increased dramatically, such that stable is no longer way behind. On the plus side, for things that are more behind than you'd like, there's the backports repos, or you can pull individual packages in from testing or sid. Really, save yourself the trouble and stick with Debian.A guy who's been there,Doug
On Saturday, February 27, 2016 at 7:45:59 PM UTC-8, Brandon Ingalls wrote:CentOS was chosen as the next distribution for our shell server. Hopefully the sysadmin team will still be able to meet sometime tomorrow to get the new OS installed, I will work with them and try to help them in any way I can.
--Brandon Ingalls
Computer Network & System Administration Major
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Brandon Ingalls
Computer Network & System Administration Major
Computer Network & System Administration Major