are you using Fedora in a production environment?

[Horst H. von Brand]

Zoltan Boszormenyi <zboszor at freemail.hu> wrote:
> Max Spevack írta:
> > 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?

OK, count me in. I'm running Aurora Linux (a Fedora upshot for SPARC),
currently Corona (their rawhide equivalent) on a Sparc Station Ultra 1
(yes, I know the machine is now of mostly archeological value, but I'm a
sentimental... and our first Linux servers were Red Hat on SPARC IPX, this
one was recicled for Linux from an Oracle server on Solaris when that was
discontinued, adding odds and ends in disks). The machine is physically in
my office.

> > 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.
> >
> > What's your setup like?

The machine is the NFS server for my account, an NTP server (the SPARC
clocks are very stable) for the department (and beyond). It is FallbackMX
(i.e., mail that can't be delivered directly is handled here, that frees up
the mail queues at the origin servers) for our mailing lists (some 4000
subscribers in all) and probably soon for all our outgoing mail.

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

> Mostly the comfort. As I knew and worked with RedHat
> before, it was a no-brainer.

Ditto. When RH for SPARC was discontinued, I moved this machine to
Aurora. The (now PC) servers moved to Fedora (and then to CentOS, upgrading
them mostly in the midst of each term was quite inconvenient here...).

Adding a grain of sand to the SPARC kernel development (I follow Linus'
kernel on this machine). Ditto for a bunch of git tools.

> > What works well for you?

Mostly NFS, sendmail and addons (ClamAV, spamassassin). The build chain to
get this working (I build my own RPMs on occasion). NTP is critical.

I'm currently using it as a testbed for a git server.

Being able to grab Fedora SRPMs and having them (mostly) work on it. I've
seen fixes for SPARC reported on the Fedora lists and in %changelogs, and
I'm very grateful for that.

LVM is critical (I've got a lot of oldish, small disks (buying new disks
doesn't make any real sense here, does it?) hooked up on it).

> > What could be better?

> I don't recall anything that wasn't solvable.

Ditto. But don't take my word for it, I'm an old hand at Unix (since around
'85 as sysadmin) and a long-time Linux user (since late '91, believe it or
not). Handling such a beast today is trivial, specially when compared to
what we went through with propietary Unices (AIX on an IBM RT, later Ultrix
on VAX, then SunOS and Solaris on Sun). Linux handling has improved
tremendously since the early Red Hat days; and Fedora is leagues apart from
what I have had to put up with with propietary systems in general...

One gripe: The possible contents of the various files under /etc/sysconfig
aren't documented anyplace I can find. A pointer to the relevant manpages
(or even webpages) as a comment in them would be nice. For example, you can
tie the name of an network interface to the MAC using the ifcfg file, but
to find this out you have to google for it.

Oh, and on bugzilla: It would be nice if there was a shortcut to look at
the bugs for the selected component. I believe this would have prevented me
from filing repeat bugs a few times.

Hum... might be just "never tried it before" and "didn't bother keeping up
with new capabilities", but I was /very/ positively surprised when I found
out I could install a package with yum giving the name of an included file
only, or stuff like "Perl(SVN::Ra)".


I'm also using Fedora as my day-to-day work environment here (rawhide, for
added spice ;-). Works fine (unless it explodes, that is).

Computer labs around here use Fedora for workstations, as do many single
users. Mostly for up-to-date software and latest bling.

Many, many thanks for all the hard work! It has been fun, and I certainly
look forward to more.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513