Greetings,
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
Thank you for any and all advice.
Max pyz@brama.com
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 7:47 AM Max Pyziur pyz@brama.com wrote:
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
I use Fedora Server in place of CentOS. I made the switch years ago. It was too frustrating trying to run a modern LAMP stack with a modern Wiki on RHEL or CentOS due to the antique software.
Jeff
On 10/31/24 06:59, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
I use Fedora Server in place of CentOS. I made the switch years ago. It was too frustrating trying to run a modern LAMP stack with a modern Wiki on RHEL or CentOS due to the antique software.
I found RHEL and friends too frustrating to use. They freeze their stuff so as to not have upgrade issues occur. Problem is they freeze the good and the bad. And it is like pulling teeth to get the to fix anything, unless you are a paid subscriber.
I don't use the server install of Fedora though. I use a Live USB. Then I dnf whatever server programs I want. That keeps me from having a tons of junk I don't use running.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 6:39 PM ToddAndMargo via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
I found RHEL and friends too frustrating to use. They freeze their stuff so as to not have upgrade issues occur. Problem is they freeze the good and the bad. And it is like pulling teeth to get the to fix anything, unless you are a paid subscriber.
Don't count on paid subscription mattering much at all, I have got the answer that it works the assinine/wrong/broken way upstream so they won't fix it (I have gotten that answer a couple of times).
Oracle when supporting the RedHat compatible packages will give the same sort of answer (it works just like it does on actual RedHat so we won't fix--they do not care that it actually is broken).
And note I was the person that worked the hard cases for a company with > 5,000 licenses, so if most senior linux resource at a company with that sort of licenses are getting this story then everyone else is screwed..
All paid gets you is the security updates and other new/package updates, the typical support is to blame the customer and give you the run around for months and maybe (or maybe not) fix it and/or simply hope the customer gives up. For almost everything else you are on your own.
On 10/31/24 17:16, Roger Heflin wrote:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 6:39 PM ToddAndMargo via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
I found RHEL and friends too frustrating to use. They freeze their stuff so as to not have upgrade issues occur. Problem is they freeze the good and the bad. And it is like pulling teeth to get the to fix anything, unless you are a paid subscriber.
Don't count on paid subscription mattering much at all, I have got the answer that it works the assinine/wrong/broken way upstream so they won't fix it (I have gotten that answer a couple of times).
Oracle when supporting the RedHat compatible packages will give the same sort of answer (it works just like it does on actual RedHat so we won't fix--they do not care that it actually is broken).
And note I was the person that worked the hard cases for a company with > 5,000 licenses, so if most senior linux resource at a company with that sort of licenses are getting this story then everyone else is screwed..
All paid gets you is the security updates and other new/package updates, the typical support is to blame the customer and give you the run around for months and maybe (or maybe not) fix it and/or simply hope the customer gives up. For almost everything else you are on your own.
When I switched over to Fedora, the difference was so great I almost giggled. Everything -- well almost everything -- worked!
And Bugzilla got things fixed!!!!
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 18:27:43 -0700 ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
And Bugzilla got things fixed!!!!
Not everything. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451562
Reported 2008, now listed on the historic bug register :-).
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 9:37 PM Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 18:27:43 -0700 ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
And Bugzilla got things fixed!!!!
Not everything. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451562
Reported 2008, now listed on the historic bug register :-).
Oh man, that's awful.
Jeff
On 10/31/24 18:51, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 9:37 PM Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 18:27:43 -0700 ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
And Bugzilla got things fixed!!!!
Not everything. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451562
Reported 2008, now listed on the historic bug register :-).
Oh man, that's awful.
Jeff
I just add myself to the Cc list out of curiosity
On Thu, 2024-10-31 at 19:16 -0500, Roger Heflin wrote:
And note I was the person that worked the hard cases for a company with > 5,000 licenses, so if most senior linux resource at a company with that sort of licenses are getting this story then everyone else is screwed..
All paid gets you is the security updates and other new/package updates, the typical support is to blame the customer and give you the run around for months and maybe (or maybe not) fix it and/or simply hope the customer gives up. For almost everything else you are on your own.
Reminds me of that court case where a business sued a computing company over a product that never worked right. They *won* their case arguing that they got the runaround, forever being asked to try updates that didn't do much good, and, in their view, based on all their prolonged experience, it was *never* going to get fixed.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 11:40 PM Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, 2024-10-31 at 19:16 -0500, Roger Heflin wrote:
And note I was the person that worked the hard cases for a company with > 5,000 licenses, so if most senior linux resource at a company with that sort of licenses are getting this story then everyone else is screwed..
All paid gets you is the security updates and other new/package updates, the typical support is to blame the customer and give you the run around for months and maybe (or maybe not) fix it and/or simply hope the customer gives up. For almost everything else you are on your own.
Reminds me of that court case where a business sued a computing company over a product that never worked right. They *won* their case arguing that they got the runaround, forever being asked to try updates that didn't do much good, and, in their view, based on all their prolonged experience, it was *never* going to get fixed.
In the US, that would likely fall under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and a breach of implied warranty. They are actually quite powerful for folks who know how to use them, like lawyers practicing in consumer protection.
Imagine if Subway tried to disclaim warranty by stating their sandwiches were not fit for human consumption (in fine print and low contrast font). The implied warranty ensures it is possible for a consumer who gets food poisoning to state a claim. Also see https://www.google.com/search?q=implied+warranty+fitness.
Jeff
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 10:40 PM Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, 2024-10-31 at 19:16 -0500, Roger Heflin wrote:
And note I was the person that worked the hard cases for a company with > 5,000 licenses, so if most senior linux resource at a company with that sort of licenses are getting this story then everyone else is screwed..
All paid gets you is the security updates and other new/package updates, the typical support is to blame the customer and give you the run around for months and maybe (or maybe not) fix it and/or simply hope the customer gives up. For almost everything else you are on your own.
Reminds me of that court case where a business sued a computing company over a product that never worked right. They *won* their case arguing that they got the runaround, forever being asked to try updates that didn't do much good, and, in their view, based on all their prolonged experience, it was *never* going to get fixed.
The company we bought from had the policy that you had to have paid support to download firmware updates after the warranty expired. The court case for them not being free would be pretty bad if they got sued, since after the warranty period they were still fixing bugs that cause the product to not work Really stupid stuff like whena raid5/6 disk starts getting bad sector errors the firmware returns WRONG data. The people coding it seem to assume the disk will fail to respond (rare) and did not write code to handle a simple common bad sector. The crappy code of course "passed" testing because testing did not simulate the real world and have bad sectors. Typical bugs are in the exception/error handling code. The worst scsi bug I found (that redhat fixed--actually it looked like a kernel.orig developer really fixed it, 2+ years after we gave them kernel dump details) was when a scsi command timed out and was being canceled (but competed while being canceled) then a kernel corruption/crash happened.
We had the bug often because we had multiple SAN arrays zoned to the same machine and sometimes under high load if 2 SAN arrays with say 8gbit ports each are trying to stuff data into a machine 8gbit port then data can be lost, and the SAN is designed for an unreasonable perfect world were data loss should not happen, but when it does happen it is pretty bad.
The computer companies are lucky so far that they have not pissed off any of their customers enough that they do sue them because the court case would be ugly for the manufacturer as this entire ship software out the door barely passing the simple basic test case (and failing if anything happens--even stuff that is expected to go wrong) is not good enough.
On Fri, 2024-11-01 at 06:49 -0500, Roger Heflin wrote:
The company we bought from had the policy that you had to have paid support to download firmware updates after the warranty expired.
You'd think (you'd wish) they'd get snared by the original release not being "fit for purpose" being against several laws that obligated them to providing something that was, and didn't let them weasel out after some arbitrary time limit.
We have such laws about real products. You buy a hammer, it has to do what a hammer is supposed to do, and last for a reasonable time for that product at its price.
Similarly, if you buy a database, you ought to be able to expect to do what a database is supposed to do, and work according to its instructions...
But if you actually try to pin a supplier down to the laws regarding faulty products, even when it's demonstrably failing right there in front of you, them, and witnesses, some companies fight tooth and nail and blatantly break the law to escape their responsibilities.
Unfortunately everyone's got used to bad software, and computer hardware, and nobody throws it back at their retailer for a refund. If everyone returned dud computing products the same way that they wouldn't accept a dishwasher that didn't work, they'd actually have to release properly working products to stay in business.
Tim wrote:
You'd think (you'd wish) they'd get snared by the original release not being "fit for purpose" being against several laws that obligated them to providing something that was, and didn't let them weasel out after some arbitrary time limit.
We have such laws about real products. You buy a hammer, it has to do what a hammer is supposed to do, and last for a reasonable time for that product at its price.
Similarly, if you buy a database, you ought to be able to expect to do what a database is supposed to do, and work according to its instructions...
But if you actually try to pin a supplier down to the laws regarding faulty products, even when it's demonstrably failing right there in front of you, them, and witnesses, some companies fight tooth and nail and blatantly break the law to escape their responsibilities.
Unfortunately everyone's got used to bad software, and computer hardware, and nobody throws it back at their retailer for a refund. If everyone returned dud computing products the same way that they wouldn't accept a dishwasher that didn't work, they'd actually have to release properly working products to stay in business.
The difficulty comes in defining "what {it} is supposed to do". If I buy an IC measuring less than 0.2 cm2, I get (or can get) hundreds of pages of documentation on what it does and does not do, exactly how it does those things, and test results. If I buy a piece of software as complex as a database, I get something called "getting started" and that's it. How can you prove they didn't do what they promised when they never really promised anything?
On Fri, 2024-11-01 at 22:28 -0700, Dave Close wrote:
The difficulty comes in defining "what {it} is supposed to do". If I buy an IC measuring less than 0.2 cm2, I get (or can get) hundreds of pages of documentation on what it does and does not do, exactly how it does those things, and test results. If I buy a piece of software as complex as a database, I get something called "getting started" and that's it. How can you prove they didn't do what they promised when they never really promised anything?
Well, databases used to (and still should) have a manual defining its functions, and the required syntax to use them. It's not the kind of software that you can randomly just see what it does. Of course it's up to you to construct sensible logic for how to work your data. That's the curly bit.
It's hardly the software's fault if you upset things by having a function that divides one data entry by another, and you never checked for and disallowed a non-zero entry. But if encountering an inputted zero causes it to have a giant meltdown and go on a rampage trashing all saved data, rather than simply fail a function, I would blame it for that.
And you don't expect a word processor to bomb out simply because you tried to make a highlighted word bold text. But we've probably all seen computer crashes just as stupid as that. I learnt to CTRL-S save as I go along, just about every paragraph, thanks to things like that.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 7:39 PM ToddAndMargo via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
I don't use the server install of Fedora though. I use a Live USB. Then I dnf whatever server programs I want. That keeps me from having a tons of junk I don't use running.
WIth the Server netinstall ISO you can control what gets installed. I would expect you to end up with less "tons of junk" than using a Workstation Live image, at the expense of having to select the bits you need. And if that isn't "less junk" enough for you, you could start with the "minimal" ISO.
On 10/31/24 19:08, Go Canes wrote:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 7:39 PM ToddAndMargo via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
I don't use the server install of Fedora though. I use a Live USB. Then I dnf whatever server programs I want. That keeps me from having a tons of junk I don't use running.
WIth the Server netinstall ISO you can control what gets installed. I would expect you to end up with less "tons of junk" than using a Workstation Live image, at the expense of having to select the bits you need. And if that isn't "less junk" enough for you, you could start with the "minimal" ISO.
All true. With the live iso, I get the UI I want and it is easier to install the other stuff.
I have done the minimal before. It was sweet.
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:59:56 -0400 Jeffrey Walton noloader@gmail.com wrote:
I use Fedora Server in place of CentOS. I made the switch years ago. It was too frustrating trying to run a modern LAMP stack with a modern Wiki on RHEL or CentOS due to the antique software.
The old software is bad enough, but the lack of software is even worse. The number of packages in RHEL+EPEL is a small fraction of what's in Fedora. There are also packages such as samba and qemu for which RHEL disables some sub-packages at build time making it very painful to get full functionality.
I also find it easier to manage small, frequent Fedora-style updates rather that the large and rare RHEL updates.
At work the servers are running rocky linux, but I am developing and deploying to Fedora containers.
Jim
On 10/31/24 6:47 AM, Max Pyziur wrote:
Greetings,
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
Thank you for any and all advice.
Max pyz@brama.com
Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can do so for zero cost.
Go to https://developers.redhat.com/ and sign up. Then you can download and use RHEL on up to 16 your development/personal use machines. You can use RHEL virtualization for as many guests as you want.
It's a fantastic way to learn RHEL, and Red Hat actively encourages folks to do so.
On 10/31/2024 2:49 PM EDT Thomas Cameron thomas.cameron@camerontech.com wrote:
On 10/31/24 6:47 AM, Max Pyziur wrote:
Greetings,
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
Thank you for any and all advice.
Max pyz@brama.com
Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can do so for zero cost.
Go to https://developers.redhat.com/ and sign up. Then you can download and use RHEL on up to 16 your development/personal use machines. You can use RHEL virtualization for as many guests as you want.
It's a fantastic way to learn RHEL, and Red Hat actively encourages folks to do so.
Thank you for the recommendation. Reviewing your link, I see that "Developer membership benefits" are available for only one year. Is this really the case or is it extendable in some way?
Per the other answer that I received on this thread, I'm inclined to use Fedora Server. The reason I was using CentOS was because I also leased a machined colocated at a data center that ran CentOS. In order to gauge the nuance of CentOS, I figured that it would be good to also have a test/backup machine running CentOS; with my shutdown/abandonment of the colocated machine, that no longer is necessary.
But I am open on the benefits of RHEL provided they are indefinite and not one years.
Thank you again,
Max
-- Thomas
NOTE: I am a Red Hat employee, but this is my personal opinion. I am not representing Red Hat on this list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
On 10/31/24 3:43 PM, Max Pyziur wrote:
Thank you for the recommendation. Reviewing your link, I see that "Developer membership benefits" are available for only one year. Is this really the case or is it extendable in some way?
Per the other answer that I received on this thread, I'm inclined to use Fedora Server. The reason I was using CentOS was because I also leased a machined colocated at a data center that ran CentOS. In order to gauge the nuance of CentOS, I figured that it would be good to also have a test/backup machine running CentOS; with my shutdown/abandonment of the colocated machine, that no longer is necessary.
But I am open on the benefits of RHEL provided they are indefinite and not one years.
Thank you again,
Max
At the end of the year, you just have to log in again and it renews your developer subscription. Easy peasy. I've had a developer subscription for my personal use for well over 5 years, if I am counting correctly. It's dead bang easy.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 3:44 PM Max Pyziur pyz@brama.com wrote:
Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can do so for zero cost.
Go to https://developers.redhat.com/ and sign up. Then you can download and use RHEL on up to 16 your development/personal use machines. You can use RHEL virtualization for as many guests as you want.
It's a fantastic way to learn RHEL, and Red Hat actively encourages folks to do so.
Thank you for the recommendation. Reviewing your link, I see that "Developer membership benefits" are available for only one year. Is this really the case or is it extendable in some way?
Per the other answer that I received on this thread, I'm inclined to use Fedora Server. The reason I was using CentOS was because I also leased a machined colocated at a data center that ran CentOS. In order to gauge the nuance of CentOS, I figured that it would be good to also have a test/backup machine running CentOS; with my shutdown/abandonment of the colocated machine, that no longer is necessary.
But I am open on the benefits of RHEL provided they are indefinite and not one years.
Thank you again,
Max
The only use case I see for using RedHat or Oracle Linux(I retired from Oracle, and have significant RHEL5/6/7 experience with support both from Redhat and Oracle) or Centos is if you have software that was specifically written for it and won't work on newer and/or is only supported on it, and/or need to have a solid defined/tested/approved NIS security standard. Otherwise I would run Fedora as the enterprise distributions a mess of older packages that it is difficult to get anything newish working right on.
Use Debian: CentOS8 would not run on my newest AMD Processor Boards!
On 10/31/2024 11:49 AM, Thomas Cameron wrote:
On 10/31/24 6:47 AM, Max Pyziur wrote:
Greetings,
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
Thank you for any and all advice.
Max pyz@brama.com
Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can do so for zero cost.
Go to https://developers.redhat.com/ and sign up. Then you can download and use RHEL on up to 16 your development/personal use machines. You can use RHEL virtualization for as many guests as you want.
It's a fantastic way to learn RHEL, and Red Hat actively encourages folks to do so.
On Thu, 2024-10-31 at 07:47 -0400, Max Pyziur wrote:
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
That may depend on your reasons for using CentOS. You (in a later message) mentioned one reason being because you also used a CentOS machine elsewhere. But was that only only/main reason? For some people (including me), we used it because it had a longer lifespan than Fedora.
For me, it was a local web server, mail server, file server, dhcp server, etc. It didn't have to do much else, so having the latest and greatest wasn't *as* important as not having to deal with an all-too- regular upheaval of updating the entire OS on a system that I relied on to just grind away at doing its job.
Before finding CentOS, I did use Fedora as my server, and having to deal with that upheaval *was* a major pain, not just a potential concern. So, often, the server was left to run a very out of date installation for a long time (which is still a possibility if you don't feel the system is vulnerable to attack *). And now, like you, I find myself in that same position again.
* I have an ancient Mac from 2009 next to me that cannot be updated. All it has to do is video editing. It can carry on doing that until the hardware actually dies.
On 10/31/24 7:47 AM, Max Pyziur wrote:
Greetings,
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
There is AlmaLinux which provides a path to upgrade from 7 to 8 following Centos.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 07:47:22AM -0400, Max Pyziur wrote:
My personal setup is three Fedora machines (two laptops), a Windows 10 laptop, and an older desktop used for backup/storage.
The last has been running a variant of CentOS for the longest time; backup is done hourly on the Fedora machines using rsync.
CentOS 7 went EOL in June. To that end, what does the Fedora community recommend as a replacement/alternative?
For the backup machine, I'm of mind to upgrade to large capacity SSDs (probably should have done so a while ago); but that's tangential.
Rocky linux is a good replacement for CentOS systems if you want to stay with a RHEL based OS and have a very stable system. It's based on RHEL, but doesn't have the issue that CentOS stream does - where CentOS Stream follows the latest development code for RHEL, so it's not as stable as CentOS 7.
If you want to upgrade it could be tricky getting from CentOS 7 -> Rocky 9.
-- Patrick