[NCLUG] Suggestions for a distro change

[Sean Reifschneider]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> saying it like you say it makes someone who doesn't know Debian think
> that they must be happening very often, or at least too often.

Ok, fair enough.  Debian stables seem to average around 3 years of support,
with a 1 year window where both the new and previous stable are supported.
I say it like it's too short because in my experience it definitely has
been too short.  As I said, YMMV.

However, this started off with a complaint about Fedora's 1.5 year
life-span being too short for servers, which I obviously agree with.

In that context, I still stand by my response that Debian isn't a good
choice as a replacement.

> For me updating stable servers every two years is about the right
> timeframe.  It is short enough that I can still remember what went
> into them.  It is long enough that I am not needing to spend too much

Again, it's a YMMV thing...  I don't know how many servers you deal with,
but let me give you an idea of where I'm coming from.  We're a team of 5
people that manages something around 400 servers and we have to deal with
something around 150 people if we were to update them.

Updating most of them is a fairly Big Deal (tm).  It's not sufficient
to have an update strategy of "apt-get dist-upgrade and try to remember
what was done 2 years ago", At the least, most system updates require us
to go through an audit of what's on the system, developing a migration
plan, review, scheduling with the developers, other admins, and/or users.

As I've said before, it *REALLY* depends on what you're doing.  If you have
few or no custom applications, with relatively simple setups, it's probably
not a big deal what you use -- doing a Fedora update or Debian "apt-get
dist-upgrade" and fixing it probably isn't going to be a big issue.  If it
takes 2 to 6 calendar months to get an update completed, 7 years of support
is quite welcome.

> usually easy.  When things get too much longer than two years old it
> gets harder to remember when 'find' added the -remove option or when

Welcome to my world...  :-)

> I think Debian Stable makes an excellent server system.

I figured you would.  :-)  I really respect your opinion, but on this we
will have to disagree to agree.

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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