[ale] NanoPC

[Lightner, Jeff]

I was being facetious with the Fedora comment.

Fedora is bleeding edge and they tell you NOT to use it for Production as most releases are not supported for more than a year.  You’d be constantly upgrading and probably breaking Production.

It is however used as a test bed for what ends up in RHEL eventually.

RHEL is a bit different from other distros as it focuses on stability by NOT updating every package to the latest upstream version over time.  Instead it starts with a given upstream version of a package then backports bug and security fixes into their version to help insure you’re not suddenly not changing underlying tools used by your static applications.   For most businesses this stability is an important consideration which is probably why it is so successful.

We have the same issues with developers often saying “hey install the latest php” and having to explain to them we won’t do that if it isn’t provided in the standard RHEL repositories.

Another issue we see is most security scanning tools are brain dead and will flag properly patched RHEL versions of software as being vulnerable because they only look at the base upstream version and ignore the extended versioning RHEL puts its backported updates that address the same CVEs they’re flagging.


From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim Kinney
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 12:49 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] NanoPC

Small setup here. HPC stack is only 10 nodes with IB and Tesla cards. There are additional systems for specialty database projects and a VMware stack I'm slowly converting to Ovirt.
All total we have 2 full 42U racks with one rack of high density gear and the other rack of lower density storage gear. Main NAS is about 80TB. All running CentOS 5 or 6 or Fedora 19 (or esx with one windows server for the manager - blech!)
And I am the only admin. Plus I have the student lab room with an amorphous hodgepodge of crap running win7 or Linux (Ubuntu or Fedora) and lousy bandwidth back to the NAS for /home mounts.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu<mailto:allen at ua.edu>> wrote:
Ah, I didn't realize you were at Emory.
No, I'm at UA (University of Alabama main campus) in Tuscaloosa.  I'm the primary Systems Engineer for Linux Systems, and the backup guy for virtualization.  Luckily, the HPC stuff gets managed by someone else for the most part.
How big of a deployment do you have?
We've got 250+ datacenter Linux systems, and another big chunk for HPC/research.
Most of the datacenter stuff runs SLES, with a handful of other distros thrown in the mix because of vendor requirements.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama










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