Cent OS migration

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Date: Mon, 9 May 2011 14:58:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>

> From: "Walter Vaughan" <wvaughan@steelerubber.com>

> You most definately will want to make sure your user id's are
> identical between the two systems, otherwise stuff like @CB will have wrong information.

Excellent point.

> Also, do you have any expertise maintaing a linux box? If you want
> something closer
> to SCO in mentality, FreeBSD and SCO have the same grandparents. Linux
> is like
> the cute girl that moved into town. Stuff isn't always where you
> expect
> to find it,
> and you may get a surprise if you reach into the wrong place.

Oh, don't *even* send him to BSD.

CentOS and SuSE 11 are the only rational free Linuces for business use.

*Any* of the BSDs are so much less well supported that they'll drive you
straight up a wall.

Depends on what he is doing. BSDs tend to be far more mature than any
Linux. They are poor systems for desktops or anything like that. They
are heavily used as servers by many vary large providers and as the
basis for many products like Ironport (Cisco) and JunOS (Juniper). (I'll
admit that I run FreeBSD on my laptop with great success, but you have
to REALLY want it.)

That said, the BSD community is smaller and the addition of features and
the latest hardware support is slower on BSDs.

If you are very concerned with security, I'd never hesitate to recommend
OpenBSD. For more general use, FreeBSD. For an "unusual" platform,
NetBSD. For a walk on the wild side, try DragonFly and Hammer.

That said, I run both Linux and FreeBSD regularly and they both have
their place. You want the right tool for the job.

The one Linux distro I don't recommend for experienced users is
Ubuntu. I don't like Windows because it presumes it know how I want to
do things better than I do and Ubuntu does the same. If my sister was
planing to play with Linux, I'd send her directly to Ubuntu, though.
(Tool...job. She does not get along well with computers.)

2

Cisco had an RHEL rebuild (internal) at one time, called, refreshingly enough, Cisco Enterprise Linux. Cisco also uses/used a Linux base for their Content Engines and subsequent ACNS-running boxen.

The rather high-priced ADVA-sourced Cisco Metro 1500 DWDM boxes used a 486 ISA single-board computer running off of DiskOnChip SSD for control and SNMP.

Having said that, I'd be just about as comfortable with a BSD as with a Linux.

And I do, and will continue to, run CentOS in production.

3

I'd rather run Scientific Linux over CentOS. Infact, I'd rather this so
much that we run SL instead of CentOS even on our cPanel boxes now.

Mind, for anything where we *don't* have to run CentOS, we use Debian
or Alpine.

Anyway, I was just wondering what the general consensus of NANOG is
regarding CentOS vs Scientific Linux. SL generally has faster security
updates and people are *paid* to work on it fulltime. CentOS on the
other hand is supported out-of-the-box by most software.

William

4

William Pitcock wrote:

Anyway, I was just wondering what the general consensus of NANOG is
regarding CentOS vs Scientific Linux. SL generally has faster security
updates and people are *paid* to work on it fulltime. CentOS on the
other hand is supported out-of-the-box by most software.

William

The two teams have different goals. Scientific Linux is designed to
create a common install base for labs. Which helps ensure repeatable
results and reduces the need for schools to develop and maintain their
own independent OS/software projects. SL uses RHEL as a base, but has a
different build environment, and may build against different versions of
libraries, as well as include packages which add or change functionality.

The goal of CentOS is to create a 100% compatible version of RHEL. Cent
tries to replicate the build environment of RHEL as closely as possible.
This ensures 100% compatible programs - bugs, regressions, and all.

For most, I suspect this difference in philosophy results in negligible
difference. However, some may need this. Especially if they test with
CentOS, and use RHEL in production, relying on the two to function and
perform identically.

I support CentOS, and hope the project resolves some of these problems
that have been lingering for the last year. As long as there are
individuals who support the project, there will still be a CentOS.

--Blake