back to Ubuntu 8.04

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009, Collins Richey wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>[ snipped a lot - re 6 month test cycle ]

[more snipped]
...
>3. None of the supposedly enterprise releases or even Debian stable
>suit my tastes, even for a critical server environment. RHEL is pretty
>reliable on the whole, but at some point during the use cycle you wind
>up needing some newer parts that the vendor is not willing to supply.
>I'm pretty sure that all the others (including Ubuntu server) are in a
>similar boat. In terms of reliability, we could be running RHEL4
>forever with no complaints. if only RH (in this case) would make
>available newer releases of some things ( PHP and Python, for
>example). I see absolutely no benefit to the requirement to replace
>everything in your environment just to run a later version of one or
>two packges. And, of course, by the time a package has been approved
>for the latest and greatest release, it's already missing some needed
>features. CentOS, OTH, does a fair job of bridging the gap by
>supporting newer piece parts on the same base release.

This is exactly why we have been using the OpenPKG portable packaging
systems since moving from Caldera to SuSE years ago.

The OpenPKG system allows us to ignore the underlying distribution's
packages for most things including gcc, perl, php, python, even berkeley
db, *WITHOUT* replacing the distribution's versions thus not breaking their
on-line updates.  By doing this we have complete control over all the major
server packages, postfix, amavisd, clamav, apache, openldap, openssh, and
so forth without either waiting for the distribution's updates or avoiding
broken updates.

For example, we generally have new releases of clamav built under OpenPKG
and installed on about 50 systems with 24 hours of the new release.

Updates on running systems are done by compiling from SRPMS so there is no
danger of installing binary packages with inconsitent libraries and all
dependencies are handled by the openpkg build process.  We do use binary
packages though when building new systems from kickstart installs where we
maintain consistent packages in-house for a given distribution and
hardware.

We run the same packages on production Linux systems ranging from SuSE
eDesktop and 9.0 Pro, through CentOS 5.x, FreeBSD, OS X, and even SCO
OpenServer 5.0.6a (on an old version of OpenPKG because porting to OSR5 is
a PITA so I only have the critical packages running on it :-).

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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