Jean-David Beyer wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> | Luke Lonergan wrote:
> |> Not to mention the #1 cause of server faults in my experience: OS
> |> kernel bug causes a crash. Battery backup doesn't help you much there.
> |>
> |
> | Well now ... that very much depends on where you *got* the server OS and
> | how you administer it. If you're talking a correctly-maintained Windows
> | 2003 Server installation, or a correctly-maintained Red Hat Enterprise
> | Linux installation, or any other "branded" OS from Novell, Sun, HP, etc.,
> | I'm guessing such crashes are much rarer than what you've experienced.
> |
> | And you're probably in pretty good shape with Debian stable and the RHEL
> | respins like CentOS. I can't comment on Ubuntu server or any of the BSD
> | family -- I've never worked with them. But you should be able to keep a
> | "branded" server up for months, with the exception of applying security
> | patches that require a reboot. And *those* can be *planned* outages!
> |
> | Where you *will* have some major OS risk is with testing-level software
> | or "bleeding edge" Linux distros like Fedora. Quite frankly, I don't know
> | why people run Fedora servers -- if it's Red Hat compatibility you want,
> | there's CentOS.
> |
> Linux kernels seem to be pretty good these days. I ran Red Hat Linux 7.3
> 24/7 for over 6 months, and it was discontinued years ago. I recognize that
> this is by no means a record. It did not crash after 6 months, but I
> upgraded that box to CentOS 4 and it has been running that a long time.
> That
> box has minor hardware problems that do not happen often enough to find the
> real cause. But it stays up months at a time. All that box does is run
> BOINC
> and a printer server (CUPS).
>
> This machine does not crash, but it gets rebooted whenever a new kernel
> comes out, and has been up almost a month. It run RHEL5.
>
> I would think Fedora's kernel would probably be OK, but the other bleeding
> edge stuff I would not risk a serious server on.
I haven't heard much one way or the other about Fedora's kernels.
Because of the way their release cycle is staggered with the other major
community distros, they tend to be a number behind, say, openSUSE.
openSUSE 11.1, for example, just came out with 2.6.27, while Fedora came
out with 2.6.26 only a couple of weeks before that.
The things I care the most about -- kernel-level performance metrics --
pretty much guarantee that I'm going to run a bleeding edge kernel as
soon as it's good enough to live through a couple of days without losing
data on the hard drive. And on my laptop, anything that recognizes my
wireless and sound and leaves some of my 512 MB for applications is OK. :)
>
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.