[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

Tue Jul 5 17:44:22 EDT 2011

I think some of us include Lifespan under the monacer of "stability".  I have boxes that are running RHEL4 and we're planning a migration for it's end of life next February.  These are 6-7 year old boxes, and I'm getting some pushback.  If I tried to update every 11 months I'd be taken to the parking lot and beaten...daily.

Also, while Fedora may be stable in terms of outages, it's software packages do flux a fair amount.  When there's a new kernel, you get it as an update.  New GCC or php, update.  The bad thing about this approach is that sometimes there are bug regressions, or worse, setting/config changes between versions.  I'm friends with Spot, the Fedora Engineering Lead, and when he took that job, Fedora had all kinds of issues like what I'm mentioning.  I know he has done a lot to try and raise the awareness about this in the community and the packagers for Fedora.  But it still happens.  I can't take a production outage because some php function is no longer supported and my php written website won't function.

Rik  van Reil did a presentation a couple of years ago at summit entitled 'the tale of 2 kernels' where he talked about the fast moving OSS kernel and the slow RHEL kernel.  On average, the OSS kernel has 10,000 bug regressions per version.  Contrast that with a RHEL kernel that averages 4.  That's stability.

Fedora stops publishing updates for the -1 once the latest beta goes test2, so I think the practical lifespan is closer to 11 months, unless you want to go with Fedora Unity or Fedora Forever.

Then there's the ISV support.  Shoehorn Oracle onto Fedora, then call Oracle support, or you SAN vendor, or your PC vendor, or any other vendor that advertises Linux support.  Very few of them would help you or even let you past tier 1 with Fedora.

Again, I'm a fedora project contributor, and I love Fedora.  That said, I'm not going to run an enterprise application, or an application that needs long-term lifespan on Fedora.

-Scott

On Jul 5, 2011, at 4:19 PM, "Michael H. Warfield" <mhw at wittsend.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 15:07 -0400, Lightner, Jeff wrote: 
>> The philosophy between Fedora and RHEL is different.
>> 
>> In Fedora they are doing bleeding edge so you MUST upgrade every 6
>> months or so or risk running an EOL version that isn't getting any
>> security or bug fixes. Requiring an upgrade is not a sign of
>> "stability" even if the upgrade is painless.
> 
> I would respectfully disagree with you there.
> 
> 1) Fedora is stable.  It's not bleeding edge unless you are on Rawhide.
> That myth is promulgated by people arguing against Fedora.  Fedora is
> very much like Ubuntu 6 month.
> 
> 2) You can run at least 13 months.  The Fedora edition is not EOL'ed
> until the initial test versions of the +2 edition are posted.  F15 is
> out.  F14 is certainly supported and nobody has to upgrade.  F12 was
> past it's shelf life and no longer receiving updates, this is true.  But
> the repositories are all still out there and I had no problem doing a
> smooth, seamless upgrade to F14, passing momentarily through F13. 
> 
>> In RHEL stability and supportability are the main drivers.
> 
> Another myth.  I've already dealt with that.  The main drivers are
> commercial product deliverables.  Put the stability myth in the dustbin
> where it belongs.  You want stability, you got it with Fedora if you go
> -1 on the release version.  RHEL 6 is going to have it's amusements and
> just WHY do you suppose CentOS has not released version 6 yet?  Yes, RH
> made life miserable on Oracle and a couple of others but those others
> included CentOS.  Stability is NOT their main objective. 
> 
>> People that are putting their large production installs (especially of
>> 3rd party applications/databases) do not want to have to upgrade every
>> few months because that usually requires doing some major testing and
>> or porting to insure what ran on the old stuff runs on the new stuff.
>> Therefore in RHEL rather than having each subversion go to higher base
>> releases they stick with lower base releases and backport bug and
>> security fixes (and the occasional enhancement) into that base
>> release.   This is why RHEL5 runs BIND 9.3 even though 9.3 is EOL.
>> The 9.3 run on RHEL5 is actually RedHat's version with several
>> modifications that they put from upstream higher base releases.   This
>> way even if ISC, the maker of BIND, doesn't support 9.3, RedHat does
>> so long as it is their 9.3 package.   So you can upgrade from
>> RHEL5(.0) to 5.6 (or any other 5.x version) without any issues and
>> what you are getting are these modified base!
>> releases with additional RHEL versioning on them. More than once I've
>> had to show that some security CVE that is addressed in a later
>> upstream version of a package is actually also addressed in the RHEL
>> version we're currently running. This is because most security
>> scanning software looks only at base versions and not the extended
>> versioning provide on RHEL.
>> 
>> You CAN actually put newer kernels and newer base versions of packages
>> on RHEL - it simply won't be supported by RedHat any longer. Most
>> folks using RHEL are using it specifically because they want a vendor
>> supported version of Linux and one that is shown as supported by
>> whatever 3rd party app or hardware they are using with it. Sure the
>> app or hardware MIGHT work with other Linux flavors with enough
>> tweaking but the manufacturer/distributor doesn't support it in that
>> other flavor.
>> 
>> If you're rolling your own for everything you can use LFS, Ubuntu,
>> Slackware or whatever but if you're looking for a "stable" system that
>> has "support" you have to use RHEL or Suse and more 3rd party
>> (commercial) apps are supported out of the box on RHEL than on Suse.
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of James Sumners
>> Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 1:52 PM
>> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
>> Subject: Re: [ale] Red Hat upgrades?
>> 
>> Yes. But every other distro also supports upgrading between major
>> releases. Red Hat seems to think this is some impossible task, and
>> would rather subject their users to days of wasted time.
>> 
>> On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Wolf Halton <wolf at wolfhalton.info> wrote:
>>> Red Hat wants their users to update sequentially.  Doesn't every other
>>> distro do something similar?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> James Sumners
>> http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/
>> 
>> "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
>> pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
>> is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
>> drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
>> 
>> Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
>> CH:D 59
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
> -- 
> Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
>   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
>   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
> PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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