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CentOS 6 making its way out to mirrorsCentOS 6 making its way out to mirrorsPosted Jul 11, 2011 12:21 UTC (Mon) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588)In reply to: CentOS 6 making its way out to mirrors by robert_s Parent article: CentOS 6 making its way out to mirrors
Perhaps you've never worked at a company that hired really good admins with the understanding it would be cheaper to hire 4-5 really good admins and pay them well instead of RHEL licensing?
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CentOS 6 making its way out to mirrors Posted Jul 11, 2011 16:52 UTC (Mon) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
Will those 4-5 sysadmins generate new packages to provide you with an upgrade path when the latest RHEL derivative (WhiteBox/CentOS/ScientificLinux) stops providing prompt updates?
Just to clarify, I'm not saying "only use a paid product" - I'm saying I'd trust something like Debian (which has a whole community governance & infrastructure to ensure it does stay around - rather than having a situation where, for instance, some disenfranchised developer may decide to fork and make off with the domain name) any day over one of these distros.
CentOS 6 making its way out to mirrors Posted Jul 11, 2011 17:00 UTC (Mon) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Business solutions are not always technical. Somehow I feel you aren't grasping that. Perhaps the company has 0 public infrastructure? Perhaps they build an internal distribution based on CentOS or (crazy) Fedora for their hardened and locked down appliance? I also think that the people who blindly update to the latest RHEL/CentOS updates are somewhat insane. I for one would not trust my job on redhat not futzing an update that breaks things. Look at the RHEL4.6 kernel NFS updates. It was a real mess when they tried to backport the newer and faster google nfs client into their kernel. All of that work is now upstream.
I can tell you for fact (I used to be an admin there) that Ticketmaster.com has a metric shitload of CentOS servers. For their 4000+ servers, they don't have any issues with not using RHEL. I guess you just place emphasis on the distro where I place emphasis on the people managing it.
I don't trust smith and wesson to make my gun drop proof or safe all the time. I trust my fingers to not pull the trigger or drop the weapon when it is or possibly could be loaded. Given enough smart admins, most if not all security issues can be mitigated or stopped cold.
Feel free to rip me up. This is not trolling.
CentOS 6 making its way out to mirrors Posted Jul 12, 2011 16:33 UTC (Tue) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
I'm not going to flame you. That's a very fair, and well-reasoned stance.
There's something to be said for the "if it ain't broke..." school of thought.
Yes, I personally wouldn't trust CentOS for an Internet-facing box -- mainly because I don't have faith in their ability to reliably push fixes. But that doesn't mean that there is no valid reason to run CentOS. On the contrary, there are plenty of applications in which the stability, predictability, and binary compatibility matters, but the speed of security updates does not.
Ticketmaster is one such example of a place that needs many of CentOS's features, but apparently doesn't require rapidly-available updates. I can't imagine they're the only ones though.
The nice thing about the various distros is that each fills a niche, and they're not mutually exclusive. If you want stability and support guarantees, you can pick RHEL. If you want the stability and don't care about support or rapid updates, but need RHEL compatibility you get CentOS. If you want stability and rapid updates, but don't care about support and RHEL binary compatibility, you pick Debian. Etc, etc.
So yeah, even if they are late, CentOS serves a purpose -- just as Scientific Linux does, just as RedHat does, and just as dozens of other distros do.
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