are you using Fedora in a production environment?

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 13:29 -0400, Max Spevack wrote: 
> Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? 

Yes. My primary mail servers are all running Fedora.

I tried setting up a mail server on a prominent Fedora-based 'server'
distribution recently, as a favour for a friend. It was the most
unpleasant experience I've had with Linux in a _long_ time.

With Fedora, you get current versions of Exim, SpamAssassin and ClamAV
_very_ easily. With that other distro, it was like pulling teeth. Even
getting up to date versions of spam and virus scanning software was hard
-- I had to build them myself. Although they were theoretically
available in some other non-standard repository, I had problems getting
that to work. I think I had problems even getting _yum_ to work, which
may have been a large amount of the problem. I don't remember well; I've
tried to blot out the experience.

More fun was Exim itself. Ok, I wanted a fairly esoteric feature which
was added to Exim recently, so perhaps I wouldn't _normally_ have been
trying to recompile a newer version of that -- but it was made horridly
painful by the fact that the owner of the machine in question had
installed MySQL 5, and MySQL AB have screwed up their RHEL packages by
including an incompatible version of libssl and not hiding the symbols,
so if you link against -lmysqlclient -lssl (in that order) you get
seemingly random segfaults, while linking in the other order is fine.
Another 6 hours or so of my life down the drain working that one out --
they add insult to injury because when I tried to report it to them I
seem to have achieved nothing except to add my email address to their
spam list.

My own machines, on the other hand, are _much_ easier to deal with. Only
today I upgraded one of them from FC4 to FC6 using yum, from about 1000
miles away. Obviously I'd downloaded all of Fedora Core 6 except the
'fedora-release-6' package last week, since it would be monumentally
stupid to wait until this week before downloading _any_ of it. But it
was only today that I built up the courage to install the fedora-release
package and run 'yum upgrade'.

It was, of course, seamless -- the machine kept web serving and routing
mail throughout. As some point I ought to reboot it onto the new kernel
but I'm out of the country at the moment and the person in whose data
centre it lives is also on holiday, so it can wait a few days. 

> What's your setup like?

Bog-standard Fedora install with Exim+ClamAV+SpamAssassin, git dæmon,
Apache and one or two other services. On i386 at the moment but I'm
planning to replace all the server machines with PowerPC in the near
future.

> What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to 
> something else?

Current software. And the fact that the "updating is painful" myth is
utter crap.

> What works well for you?

Er, all of it?

In particular, the fact that (almost) everything is IPv6-capable has
been a godsend recently. One of the machines in the cluster was deprived
of its IPv4 network, for reasons I still haven't quite understood -- it
had to move to a temporary home behind NAT. But it still had a proper
IPv6 address, and could hence still participate. Since it's the list
server that was quite important. It meant that one of the other machines
(which were listed as MX backups for it anyway) ended up receiving most
of the mail from the Legacy Internet and forwarding it -- but it was
fairly much seamless.

> What could be better?

Quicker updates of SpamAssassin. ClamAV updates are fairly much instant
already AFAICT, but SA could possibly speed up a little.

And Exim should be the default MTA, not one of the less capable MTAs.
That's one thing that Debian have right that we don't.

-- 
dwmw2