Re: Best suiting OS

Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> Personally, I use Fedora, and my servers have been quite stable. One of our
>> main web servers running Fedora:
>
> It's not that there can't be stable releases of FC, it's that it's not
> the focus of that project. So, if you get lucky, great! I can't
> imagine running a production DB on FC, with it's short supported life
> span and focus on development and not stability.

I use Fedora, and it was a mistake. I am looking for a better solution. Fedora has been very stable (uptime of 430 days on one server), BUT...

Realistically, the lifetime of a release is as low as SIX MONTHS. We bought servers just as a FC release was coming out, and thought we'd be safe by going with the older, tested release. But six months after that, the next FC release came out, and the version we'd installed fell off the support list.

It takes almost no time with Fedora to run into big problems. Maybe there's a security release of ssh, you try to compile it, but it needs the latest gcc, but that's not available on your unsupported version of FC that you installed less than a year ago.

Or maybe you need a new version of PHP to pass audit with your credit-card processor, but again, your FC release isn't supported so you have to uninstall the FC PHP, get the source, and compile PHP from scratch ... on and on it goes.

Fedora is a very nice project, but it's not suitable for production database servers.

This discussion has been very helpful indeed, and we appreciate everyone's contributions. I'm leaning towards a stable Debian release for our next upgrade, but there are several other well-reasoned suggestions here.

Craig