[BLU] Linux On Servers

[dgavin at davegavin.com (Dave Gavin)]

On Thu, March 16, 2006 1:15 pm, John Westcott IV wrote:
> What distro of Linux are people running on their production servers?
> Does anyone run open distros (like OpenSuSE or Fedora) on production
> servers?
> I am looking at a new HP server and wondering if the support of a
> commercial distro is worth it.
> -John
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>
 John,

  We run CentOS 4.1 on over a dozen production servers and Fedora Core 4
on several other servers that provide monitoring and other back-office
functions. I personally prefer the FC distro, but for stability and
long-term support the CentOS seems to be a better choice.
 We do have several Red Hat Application and Enterprise server licenses,
but we don't use them and they will be allowed to expire at the end of
the license cycle. Our experience is that we can get faster support from
the community than from Red Hat and we've also some very bad experiences
with RH support: wrong/misleading answers, un-necessary licenses bought
on their recommendation, etc.
<DISCLAIMER>
 I've been supporting various UN*X flavors for over twenty years and a
Linux user since SLS w/kernel 99.x. I started using and supporting Red
Hat distros somewhere in the 4.x releases and have always liked the
company, I just don't feel the support cost is justified for a small
start-up like ours.
 YMMV
</DISCLAIMER>

Dave Gavin