Fedora 17 Production Server

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debonair

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Just wondering if there is anyone here using Fedora 17 on a production server. I dev on Fedora 17 and I deployed my application on
a Fedora 17 box. no problems so far..
 
I wouldn't recommend using Fedora in production. It has a 14 month support cycle only and yum update can hose your system at any point. Maybe this has improved over the years but I have had to many support calls from customers who foolishly installed Fedora in production to trust it to do an update without problems. Just wait until you have to tell your boss that you cannot re-install nor update your fedora box because you can't find the isos or repositories for it any more.

Rather use Centos, Ubuntu LTS or Oracle Linux in production if you don't want to pay for subscriptions.

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CentOS is probably the best choice if you're used to Fedora, just add the atrpms & el*repos to the CentOS repos for maximum compatibility.

Always test any Centos updates on a non-production system first - they're not quite up to RedHat standards :).
 
Im ok with Fedora on desktops but not on productions servers. You end up spending all of your time updating them and if you dont then repos are hard to come by. If you like the Red Hat way of things then CentOS is best. 95% of my productions servers are CentOs with a few Ubuntu servers here and there.
 
I think what persuaded me to go the Fedora route was the packages in the repositories. They are the most up to date of all the distributions I have used. Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS. I must say Fedora has been very stable so far, I have not have any problems with it. When it reaches EOL, I will schedule some down time and update it.

I guess I like living on the edge lol :D
 
debonair said:
Just wondering if there is anyone here using Fedora 17 on a production server. I dev on Fedora 17 and I deployed my application on a Fedora 17 box. no problems so far..
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You're doing it the wrong way around. You should not choose your hosting OS based on what you develop on. You should choose your hosting OS based on what you need it to do, for how long you need it to do, and then develop on the same platform.

As others have said, Fedora is a poor choice for a production server. Apart from the short lifespan, it is Red Hat's development platform for RHEL (think of it as a very early beta release of RHEL).

If you need something Red Hat compatible, look at RHEL or SLES, or CentOS if you're cheap. Otherwise, Ubuntu LTS has a much greater variety of software available. Ditto Debian, although the lifecycle is 3 years roughly, rather than Ubuntu's 5.

If you have the Debian/Ubuntu chops, and you respect the way they deal with configuration files, dist-upgrades can be pretty trivial. I have one box that started life as Debian Woody (3.0), got dist-upgraded to Sarge (3.1), then Etch (4.0) then Squeeze (6.0) (skipping Lenny (5.0) entirely), and as of Sunday night, Wheezy, which is still a testing release but close to going stable.

All these upgrades happened in 30-45 minutes with nothing breaking. My biggest concern is that the hardware is getting old - the box dates from 2002...
 
I appreciate the advice, I am well aware of the risks, but I can assure you that Fedora is pretty solid. Its a good learning distribution, Lets you see whats in the redhat skunkworks. Its almost like running a source distribution like Gentoo. So Its not for the lazy or the faint of heart. So you are the one that ends up writing the tutorials as opposed to reading and finding a solution to whatever issue you are having.

My application is just a web application, with nothing complicated running there. and Its all on that one server. so I don't mind fiddling and tweaking everyday lol.
 
debonair said:
I appreciate the advice, I am well aware of the risks, but I can assure you that Fedora is pretty solid.
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And as someone who works for a large hosting provide and gets to see different distros in scale, I can assure you that Fedora is a pretty shaky choice for a hosting platform compared to RHEL. Just because you haven't seen any problems yet, it doesn't there won't be any. But then, that's your risk to take.

debonair said:
Its almost like running a source distribution like Gentoo.
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In my experience, people who choose to use Gentoo as their production server platform, with the exception of one, they all think they are pretty hot with Linux, and they're all wrong. I've lost count of the number of times when I've had to help Gentoo users fix fundamental problems with the way they set up their stuff.
 
koffiejunkie said:
In my experience, people who choose to use Gentoo as their production server platform, with the exception of one, they all think they are pretty hot with Linux, and they're all wrong. I've lost count of the number of times when I've had to help Gentoo users fix fundamental problems with the way they set up their stuff.
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Yeah, I dunno what would posses a person to run gentoo on a server. I'm not even fond of it on a desktop, emerge blah blah blah, oh fsck it broke! :D
 
Now now guys, gentoo has its place in this world... its place is under my coffee cup, as a coaster :p
 
An update broke my installation (all fixed though, with a few mins of googling) , sighs... Solution, you can run it as a server as long as you don't run any system wide package updates :D
 
What broke - desktop or server?

I haven't seen any funnies reported in recent F17 x64 updates other than gnome shell memory leaks (but they've actually been there for a while).
 
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My server when it did a lot of updates, i did a yum clean all and then yum update -y then all was well...
 
You didn't want to listen to the advice here about running Fedora on a production server so voel maar boetie. There is some solid advice given in this tread and I stand behind not running Fedora as a Production server. Get Centos.
 
CentOS is OK I have used it before on the amazon cloud. If I do experience show stopping issues I may consider it. The problem with most sysadmins is that you guys don't like to experiment. Distributions like Fedora can be very stable, they go through rigorous testing from people. If you take the time to learn whats going on you can configure a really solid environment and learn a thing or 2 in the process.

A distribution shows what its really made of when it is stress tested under the load of a production environment.
 
debonair said:
The problem with most sysadmins is that you guys don't like to experiment.
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Actually, we do. The difference is, we don't experiment on production servers, if we can help it.

debonair said:
A distribution shows what its really made of when it is stress tested under the load of a production environment.
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And that's I don't use Fedora on production servers. It has proven itself to be immature and unpredictable. I'm not saying it's a bad distro, but there's a significant difference between it and RHEL.

I like to sleep at night - not "learn a thing or 2" in the dead of night.
 
koffiejunkie said:
Actually, we do. The difference is, we don't experiment on production servers, if we can help it.

I like to sleep at night - not "learn a thing or 2" in the dead of night.
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^^This - and I'm a Fedora adherent. Put CentOS on your production server and experiment on your dev systems rather.
 
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