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What's wrong with enterprise Linux

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Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#81

Post by sam_lowry_ »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #29
darkhelmet wrote: post #7

There is another problem that wasn't covered in the article. The 10+ years of stability leads to behaviors and outcomes that remind me of the long-lived SSL certificate problem. Updating is done so infrequently that the "how?" is forgotten. As the 10 year support limit approaches, most of the old team members who did it last time are gone, tech debt is through the roof, few people know where everything is or how to b…

>> I'd like to see the RHEL stability model go away too and force people to complete their automation and solve the problems of being able to rebuilding on demand - and actually doing it. So how could this be accomplished? A Nix-OS style approach coupled with an immutable OS core? It is much harder to offer stability guarantees than to just publish updates in a rolling release fashion. And yet big organizations pay b…

ArchLinux-style rather thsn NixOS style. Just roll the updates when they are ready into your very own test, int, acc, and finally prod.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#82

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

darkhelmet wrote: post #7

There is another problem that wasn't covered in the article. The 10+ years of stability leads to behaviors and outcomes that remind me of the long-lived SSL certificate problem. Updating is done so infrequently that the "how?" is forgotten. As the 10 year support limit approaches, most of the old team members who did it last time are gone, tech debt is through the roof, few people know where everything is or how to b…

I agree but I don't think that's SUSE's or Red Hat's problem. If you deliver a solid and stable product humans will get complacent.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#83

Post by Kaytaro »

> Oracle has also publicly continued to commit to keeping “…the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available”. At this point their distribution has been around for 17 years, and they’ve never tried to restrict access to their source code in that time.

I’ll be impressed when they open source Oracle DB and let Microsoft fork it and sell support for it. It’s pretty easy to commit to “open source” a copy of RHEL. Especially when linux isn’t core to their business but a bait and switch to get their customers on Oracle’s platform.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#84

Post by geerlingguy »

maxclark wrote: post #67
darkhelmet wrote: post #7

There is another problem that wasn't covered in the article. The 10+ years of stability leads to behaviors and outcomes that remind me of the long-lived SSL certificate problem. Updating is done so infrequently that the "how?" is forgotten. As the 10 year support limit approaches, most of the old team members who did it last time are gone, tech debt is through the roof, few people know where everything is or how to b…

I have a customer with systems so old they weren’t at risk for heartbleed. He was excited about that.

Heh, same but for the Java Log4j vulnerability. "We haven't upgraded in 10 years, and it's secure from that!"

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#85

Post by iso1631 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #42
azlev wrote: post #8

What's not clear to me is that newer software is safer or just less tested. Although it's possible that newer versions are more secure, I couldn't find evidence of it yet. (Links are welcome).

Isn't an unknown vulnerability preferrable to a known vulnerabilty?

With a known vulnerability I can put in monitoring or countermeasures or work out that it doesn't affect me.

With an unknown vulnerability, I don't have any information about it, it could be affecting me right now.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#86

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

curt15 wrote: post #60
microtonal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using whatever Python your distribution needed is bad practice. Own your application environment, there are plenty of ways to do this, such as Nix and Docker, which make your Python environments reproducible across systems. Also, Enterprise Linus is one of the reasons (definitely not the only) that the migration took such a long time. Too many enterprise shops that stuck with Python 2 because it's the lazy thing to d…

>Using whatever Python your distribution needed is bad practice. Own your application environment, there are plenty of ways to do this, such as Nix and Docker, which make your Python environments reproducible across systems. How far down does "own your application environment" extend? How about libc? What is the role of the underlying OS?

>> How far down does "own your application environment" extend?

It depends on the needs of your application.

>> How about libc?

If you need to make sure the underlying libc has what you need, you must either bring your own libc or have sufficient feature test macros and adapters to account for possible differences.

>> What is the role of the underlying OS?

It depends on what the application requires. What operating system features, if any, do you require? Do you have any timing or scheduling requirements that are sensitive for your application? Do you need real-time responsiveness?

How does the operating system handle failure scenarios? What guarantees, if any, does it make when hardware fails? Is it okay for your application to crash if a portion of the computer's memory or disk borks?

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#87

Post by dogline »

filereaper wrote: post #56

>This collection of software will remain locked at its specific version throughout the lifespan of that Enterprise Linux distribution release – which is often 10 years or more. Is this 10 year assumption true? Are people running 10 year old versions of operating systems today in non-safety or non-high security aspects? 10 years ago today is when the following were roughly released: - Linux 3.8. - RHEL 6.4 with Linux…

Yes, these are very much alive deep in corporate data centers, and we've got to work with them.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#88

Post by cylo »

gjvc wrote: post #73

[flagged]

Hi. Author here. I’m not a sockpuppet and genuinely have no affiliation with Oracle. It’s purely my own technical opinion.

I only recently registered the site and set up the blog because I had nowhere else to post it and did not want to use a hosted platform like Medium.

I was watching the recent Red Hat debacle from the sidelines and had some thoughts to put together about the general Enterprise Linux model.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#90

Post by tmottabr »

filereaper wrote: post #56

>This collection of software will remain locked at its specific version throughout the lifespan of that Enterprise Linux distribution release – which is often 10 years or more. Is this 10 year assumption true? Are people running 10 year old versions of operating systems today in non-safety or non-high security aspects? 10 years ago today is when the following were roughly released: - Linux 3.8. - RHEL 6.4 with Linux…

Yes it is.. I have customers that are still on RHEL 6 today and are only migrating to RHEL 7 because they were forced to..
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