[LUNI] Seen any good distros lately?

[Trev Peterson]

I have been maintaining a few CentOS 4.4 servers for a client for the
last 6 months.  In that time we've had the following problems:

1. SELinux is broken on CentOS4.4 and it is on by default (very bad
choice).  There are many reasons I say this and if you are interested in
a list let me know. 

2. As Larry mentioned the Apache package leaks memory (severely in some
instances).

3. Auto-updates break on dependency hell (yes we are using yum and it
still is unable to reliably update).  This has happened twice in the
first 3 months I was maintaining the servers.  Both times it left the
packages in a state that required considerable manual intervention to
correct (read more than 1 - 2 hours).  Choosing Sendmail and Bind as the
default mail and DNS servers make it even more important to regularly
update your system.

4. Limited packages and configurations results in much more software
maintained outside the package management system.  This adds to
increased support time/cost and even more upgrade headaches.

Compared to the Debian and even Gentoo servers the CentOS servers
require a lot more babysitting and have a lot more gotchas.  It seems
you have used CentOS enough to work around some of the problems (disable
SELinux, compile Apache from source, etc.)

All things being equal I recommend Debian to CentOS as I find it to have
lower admin costs and higher reliability.

On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 20:30 -0600, Branko Kotur wrote:
> 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.  
-- 
Trev Peterson <trev at advanced-reality.com>
Advanced Reality