[NCLUG] Suggestions for a distro change

[Sean Reifschneider]

Mike Jensen wrote:
> So even though it is only 1 year past product life time, the product
> versions do not change very fast.  At least that is my understanding,

The issues come out in two ways.

One is that even at 3 years life-cycle, that's almost half Ubuntu LTS and
well less than half CentOS/RHEL.  And that's best case, you get 3 years if
you adopt it on day 1.

The other issue is the size of the testing window you get to migrate from
one release to another.  With Debian, that's 1 year...  Which, if your
servers are running applications you've spent the last 10 years developing,
within hundreds of thousands of lines of code, or Subject Matter Experts
who have left the company and that you haven't had luck re-hiring, or a
small team, this can be a pretty short window to port your applications to
a new PHP, a new Perl version, a new mod_perl, a new MySQL release, etc...

This isn't a theoretical issue.  I can honestly say that I gave Debian a
serious chance at running for servers, and moved away.  I can honestly say
that the Debian servers I maintain have been a constant struggle to keep
them updated.  Issues that I have *NOT* had with CentOS.

So, YMMV, and it really depends on exactly what you're doing with the server,
but I have not had good luck with using Debian for the servers I've maintained.

Sean
-- 
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability

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