[LUNI] Seen any good distros lately?

[Branko Kotur]

On Sunday 07 January 2007 8:19 pm, Larry Garfield wrote:
> Avoid CentOS.  We've been trying to run it at work, and it's been very
> trying. :-)  Its SELinux implementation is b0rked to hell, and kept
> randomly causing Apache to spit out 403 errors for no reason.  It also has
> a kernel bug where periodically an apache process will spiral out of
> control and eat up a crapload of RAM.  When the process is killed, the RAM
> isn't freed.  The total system ram is listed as greater than the sum of
> free RAM and used RAM, which is quite not good. :-)  That's the case even
> after apache is shut down completely.  The kernel simply loses that memory
> completely until it's rebooted.  We're soon to be dumping it and switching
> to Debian Etch.

I've never had any problems with CentOS.  I've been using CentOS 4.4 for over 
a month now on 2 fairly active servers without a problem.  It's basically 
RHEL 4, just repackaged without support from RedHat.  I've also been using 
RHEL 3 for about 3 years or so without issues (well, hardware issues only).  
I don't use SELinux due to all the problems that I've heard from others that 
use the same specific software that I'm using on my servers.  As far as the 
Apache/kernel memory issues, I haven't see a single hint of something like 
this.  Then again, I don't rely on the distro RPM's for Apache/PHP.