[ale] Fedora or Centos - which is more relevant for someone wanting Red Hat experience today?

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 16:02 -0500, Lightner, Jeff wrote: 
> Ditto what everyone else is saying.   We use RHEL for commercial
> purposes here and I have a CentOS workstation and don't see enough
> differences to matter.  For your purposes CentOS is the way to go.
> 
> CentOS on the other hand is a binary compile of RHEL sources as stated
> by others.
> 
> However, others are incorrect in saying Fedora is a RHEL wannabe.
> Fedora is a bleeding edge distro and its development is supported by
> RedHat.   Most things that end up in RHEL originally were tested in
> Fedora but not everything that was put in Fedora ends up in RHEL.  It's
> a good OS if you like trying the latest greatest but not one you'd want
> to use in Production unless you like the idea of having to upgrade a
> couple of times a year.

That's actually kinda funny and I always like to pick bones on that
point.

Yes, very true, Fedora can bleeding edge, early adopter.  I use Fedora
in production and I have CentOS and RHEL in production.  I've had to
upgrade all of them numerous times.

Fedora, you can update once every 6 months or once every 12 months
(taking a double hop).  But the updates are much less painful.  I
absolutely love doing "yum" upgrades, even when I have to resolve minor
dependency issues.  Some of my machines have not been rebuilt from
scratch since Fedora Core 1 days, doing live upgrades 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4
-> 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> 8 -> 9 -> 10 with down time only to get to the new
kernel (which you have to do anyways).

OTOH, RHEL officially recommends against "upgradings" between major
releases (3 -> 4, 4 -> 5, 5 -> 6) and recommends a full fresh install.
I may update 2 to 3 times more often than the guys I work with who run
RHEL servers on hard iron but they work 10 times as hard (with much
weeping and gnashing of teeth) each time.  My production servers are on
Fedora 11.  Still supported but one rev back.  When 13 comes out,
they'll be upgraded to 12.  My "bleeding edge" systems and test systems
are currently on 12 and will move to 13 then.  Contrary to some
derogatory comments I've seen in other forums, Fedora is not beta test
for RHEL, either.  Fedora has an alpha and a beta and a release.
Sometimes it's a little rougher than RHEL, and sometimes not.  Which is
why I keep my production systems 1 bleeding edge back, to knock off
those rough edges and to gain experience.  Bleeding edge = N.  Leading
edge = N-1.

For several years now, my base, hard-iron, systems all run Fedora with
minimal services to make upgrades even easier.  The CentOS and RHEL
systems are run as container style virtual machines ala Linux-vservers,
or OpenVZ or (now) LXC.  Then I can manage those "upgrades" in a virtual
environment where I create new machines, migrate the data, and do a hot
swap from the old to the new on the same live iron.  So I spend much
less time and effort upgrading my RHEL/CentOS boxes than do my brethren
who are trying to do that on hard iron (and these are remote systems, I
don't have hands on the console this entire time).

From experience, I wouldn't go back to running RHEL or CentOS on hard
iron except in very exceptional cases.  Where I need RHEL or CentOS, it
will be in a container running on a Fedora engine (side by side with the
Debian / Ubuntu containers I have running).

> All 3 have similarities because of the relationship (mainly in admin
> tools) but RHEL and CentOS of the same version are the closest to each
> other.   Fedora versions are released much more frequently so where both
> RHEL and CentOS are currently up to release 5.4 Fedora is up to Release
> 12.

> On a final note:  CentOS has an extended repository available.  If you
> use that then you'll be different from RHEL so for your purposes you
> shouldn't - just use the default CentOS repositories.

That's very true.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
> Michael H. Warfield
> Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 3:31 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
> Cc: mhw at wittsend.com
> Subject: Re: [ale] Fedora or Centos - which is more relevant for someone
> wanting Red Hat experience today?
> 
> On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 15:07 -0500, Jerald Sheets wrote: 
> > Eh?  I find them to be nearly identical.
> 
> RHEL includes some pieces which can not be redistributed.  If you're not
> using them, they are pretty much identical outside of cosmetics. 
> > ---
> > Jerald M. Sheets jr.
> > 
> > 
> >         - CentOS is basically RHL with all the RedHat stuff stripped
> >         out.  
> 
> Mike

Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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