[YLUG] Fedora as a server (was Grub)

[Alex Howells]

On 10/12/2007, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/12/2007, Arthur Clune <arthur at clune.org> wrote:
> > Sure. But that's begging the question. Most people aren't willing to
> > disturb a working server to upgrade to a whole new distro
> > (and deal with the resultant breakage).
>
> Maybe I am unusual - but the only server I run is at home - and I enjoy
> keeping it up to date - it is one way of forcing me to keep on top of
> changes at the bleeding edge. My wife can then run her laptop knowing that
> things should be both secure and up to date. I guess because it is a hobby
> rather than a job it is fun.  I suppose if you are a sysadmin looking after
> many servers the situation is somewhat different!

There's certainly ways to automate managing a whole bunch of servers,
including stuff like CFengine and Puppet - the biggest problem with
"bleeding edge" distributions on servers is that your 'Skynet'
management system probably doesn't have the knowhow to perform a
complete dist-upgrade (F7 -> F8) since it won't tolerate any
'breakage' :(

Day-to-day updates are fine, it's the new releases which may require a
complete reinstall which are a pain in the arse. Especially when you
have >100 servers and downtime needs to be kept to an *absolute*
minimum.

In some respects, distributions like Fedora are *worse* than the
oft-criticized Gentoo Linux in this regard -- that's simply because
with their ever-changing tree it's actually really easy to flip your
'profile' onto a new release, if you've been doing the "usual chores"
every week or two (automatically with Puppet) you already have the
latest packages.

*shrug* Your mileage may vary with any distribution, I guess.