Fedora Core brevity vs server upgrades

[Pedro Fernandes Macedo]

John Summerfied wrote:

> It may be "very easy" but only when you know how. I've installed a few 
> Debian systems, and it's impossible to avoid the opportunity to choose 
> a local mirror.
>
> First, it asks "What country..."  and that promptly weeds out .fi, 
> .il, .ru and .mx.
>
> In contrast, nothing in FC asked me what to use, and I've not seen any 
> documentation on the topic. Nor, it happens, do I know a near-by mirror.
>
> It seems some of the mirrors used by Yum are beorkn - I often get 404 
> errors.
>
> I'm not a fan on Yum.
>
It's not a yum related problem. If the server is incomplete , it means 
that apt , yum and any other other app that does something like yum/apt 
do , they'll have issues with broken mirrors.
There's no easy way to fix this. If you find one , please post it , 
since keeping several mirrors in synch is certainly something very 
difficult, specially when you dont have control over them.

>> I think most are usability improvements for the desktop, and probably
>> not really needed on servers.
>
>
> I note that there have been several kernel updates, and that he latest 
> is broken (on my laptop it doesn't shut down, gets an oops instead). 
> Not good for transporting.
>
For a good description of the updates , subscribe to 
fedora-announce-list. Usually the security updates are listed with the 
[SECURITY] tag in the subject , but sometimes a security update goes by 
without any special mention besides the entry in the changelog saying 
something like "Fixed CAN #.... ".

>
>>> I'd not like such a volatile selection of software on my server, I'd 
>>> be perpetually worried that something will break, and if a server 
>>> breaks then the whole enterprise (school in my case) is affected.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, for example there was a recent util-linux update that
>> "broke" (though there was a workaround that could be used) client-side
>> NFS mounts to older servers, though an updated update was released the
>> day after.
>
>
> This justifies my hands-on update policy.
>
> The option to log software updates would be good - email (preferably 
> to another box) and a printed report are good options.

Then the approach you need is something different: configure your 
machines to download from a local mirror. And only put in that mirror 
the packages that you have already tested on your network.

--
Pedro Macedo