Re: are you using Fedora in a production environment?

[Jonathan Dieter <jdieter gmail com>]

Max Spevack wrote:
> Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment?  Are you 
> using large deployments of Fedora, in some sort of "critical" 
> capacity?  Do you know someone who is, and will you forward this email 
> to them?
>
> If you are, I want to hear all about it.  I'm trying to gather data 
> for some Fedora myth-busting exercises, and also to inform some of our 
> decision making for Fedora 7.
I work at a school in the Middle East with approximately 1000 students.  
We have ~100 computers throughout the school.
> What's your setup like?
Our servers were originally running WinNT, but last year we transitioned 
to Fedora running samba for the servers.   We now have two FC5 x86_64 
xen servers running (between the two of them) two rsyncing fileservers 
(samba, nfs, ldap, dhcp, bind), a web server (apache, mysql), and a mini 
system that's only used to update our local yum repository.  We also 
have one FC4 x86_64 server (samba, nfs) running yet another backup of 
the primary fileserver

Our clients are all Win2K and Win98, though we are planning on 
transitioning to dual boot FC6/Win2K this year. 
> What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to 
> something else?
I started using Fedora at Core 2 and found the switch from Mandrake 7.x 
easy.  Fedora was the first Linux system I used that had an rpm 
dependency solver (yum).  At this point, Fedora does everything I want, 
is running cutting (sometimes bleeding) edge software, and I'm familiar 
with it.  I gave Ubuntu a shot last year (whatever edition was before 
Dapper Drake), but quickly returned to my FC5 setup when I realized that 
most things in it were equivalent to what I was running in FC3.
> What works well for you?
The system is pretty rock solid (especially compared to NT).  The only 
time I reboot the servers is for kernel upgrades.
> What could be better?
Updating Xen and the xen host's kernel has a bad habit of rendering the 
guests inoperable until I manually update their kernels.  On my FC5 
servers, I'm still on the 2.6.16 kernel because of this and the fact 
that the hosts became very unstable with the 2.6.17 kernel. (No BZ, sorry)
> etc, etc.  Anything you care to share with me.
>
> Reply on-list, reply to me directly, whatever works best for you.
>
> Thanks,
> Max
If you need anything else, let me know

Jonathan Dieter