Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?

[Les Mikesell]

David G. Mackay wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 20:51 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> 
>> There's losing and there's really losing. If Fedora won't boot, you have 
>> the services of neither until it's fixed.
>>
>> A little shore of Best Practice.
> 
> I don't think that anyone was talking about HA-Linux and redundant power
> supplies here, John.  It's fairly trivial to set up a separate partition
> with a fallback OS.  I routinely do this with Fedora on one of my
> machines, and then rotate versions of Fedora between the two partitions
> as the releases become available.  If an update makes the newer version
> unbootable (extremely rare that you can't just use grub to boot the
> previous kernel), then there's always the old version to boot into.

There was a point in mid-FC5 where an update kernel would not boot on an 
IBM Xseries 225 (fairly mainstream dual-xeon boxes, I thought) without 
doing a motherboard bios update - after which the older kernels wouldn't 
boot. And of course there were no warnings about this or much of a 
reason to expect it to work after doing the bios flash either.  And 
there have been several updates that failed to boot on popular Dell and 
IBM MPT scsi controllers - even one late into FC6 which was otherwise 
pretty stable.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com