Cent OS migration

[Fairlight]

Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Boaz Bezborodko done said:
> 
> 7.  I have never heard of stability problems with CentOS.  It is 
> basically RHEL.  CentOS 5 is the most recent version.  Mark (Fairlight) 
> speaks well of their stability which (to me, at least) is high praise.

Yeah, I'm not known for praising things easily.  :)

I've used CentOS since 5.3, and I've upgraded multiple servers all the way
through 5.6, seamlessly.  Zero noticeable bugs, zero migration/update
issues.  They tend to be a -little- slower than Novell in terms of security
patches, but the overall software engineering is something I have far, far
more confidence in at this point in time.

In fact, I've installed the last SuSE/OpenSuSE systems I'm going to, unless
someone really wants to override my decision at a client site.  Novell took
the enterprise platform down the drain, Novell can't even keep their
licensing straight to the point you can use the update system twice in a
row without having to entirely re-register a server half the time anymore,
tonnes of connection drops on update grabbing, and I've actually had it
take 6hrs of actual retries to re-register a system successfully and
rebuild the repository update source on the server.  They are -horrible-
over at Novell.  OpenSuSE blew it with their "in place upgrades" at 11.1 to
11.2.  Nothing -near- the stability of CentOS...in fact, it'd be far less
expensive to do a fresh migration than try to fix what the in place
upgrades do to the poor servers.

CentOS...is basically Red Hat without the pricetag -or- the bugs.  CentOS
doesn't have the bugs that Red Hat comes with.  Like RHEL coming with a
libexpat against which you cannot build XML::Parser, because they did
something messed up to it.  There are multiple issues with RH like that,
and CentOS doesn't have them.  The thing is like a brick--it sits there,
and unless you go out of your way to take a sledgehammer to it, it just
plain works solidly.

Ohyeah...and compared to SuSE (Enterprise), you actually get SRPM access,
which will be a big deal when you need to hold a system together with duct
tape and baling wire after EOL and before migrations are done, if your
clients dawdle a bit.  That alone can save thousands in admin time.

The list is pretty sizeable, but CentOS does so many things right that SuSE
does incorrectly.

The only thing I don't really care for about CentOS is the fact that it
-only- uses LVM2, and no longer has the option to use the traditional fdisk
method for partitioning.  Not a big LVM fan, myself.  That said, it's
really not been an issue.  I just really prefer to know all the subsystems
involved with a high degree of certainty, and LVM, even though I understand
the concepts, is not so much a black box as just overly complex for my
tastes, given how rarely you need that degree of flexibility and power.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.