511–520 of 642 posts
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nothing is really free in this word! I think rollling your own distro is the only way to truly be free!
Agree! It is the beauty of open source to build it you own way. Google or other giants build their own distro as well, but they have enough talented people to maintain it
There's lots of negative reaction going on, but this has happened before. CentOS grew out of RedHat Linux going away and Fedora being the feeder for RHEL. At the time there were a bunch of competitors that were building the RHEL source. CentOS ended up "winning". I fully expect this to happen again. CentOS will wither and die because no one actually needs the cutting edge repo -- Ubuntu has a way better process for t…
i don't think in 10 years we will be installing distro on servers as we know it, watch this space!
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i don't think in 10 years we will be installing distro on servers as we know it, watch this space!
What will change...? A lot of F500 companies have a lot of infrastructure and changes are not fast.. HPC industry is another one of those. Unless you mean startups?
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I'd actually be interested to see those numbers. Do you have any evidence to support that claim? It'd be very interesting for us in terms of priorising supported distros. A bit of googling didn't lead to much. You could be biased by your own job/experience. Most IT doesn't run on the Cloud or in Kubernetes (yet).
https://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition Those are numbers for EC2 so a fairly accurate measurement.
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That already exists and is called CloudLinux. It is very cheap but not free. Other RHEL-clones: Oracle Linux (best one), Springdale Linux. Other alternatives: openSUSE Leap and Debian. I am not even listing Ubuntu because I hate it since snaps.
Oh cool. As for CloudLinux, "not free" probably scale for some hosting environments, including non-managed cloud instances. But something like Springdale, given resources, might be able to provide. They're still tracking RHEL 7, though. Debian and Ubuntu, which offer five years of Long Term Support are the next best thing available, and that's already kind of tight for long-term deployments of self-hosted, old-fashio…
Remember that, in Ubuntu, the majority of packages are actually ONLY supported for nine (9) months -- not the full 5 years!
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Its time for a new internet rule. If Oracle or IBM buys your vendor, you should be migrating.
Should probably add Salesforce to that list too. They’re basically the new Oracle.
A lot of justified complaints here but the Oracle build of RHEL is 100% free and always up to date (I.e. while CentOS still doesn’t have 8.3 out, Oracle had it out 9 days after RH). Yes, Oracle sucks but it’s a better RHEL build than CentOS was.
What is happening with open source lately. Just this today I am.reading about QT, CENTOS, MAPBOX, travis all ditching open source. Well I don't remember the qt story but yeah. What is the point of offering your software to the community as open source if the only end game is to make people dependent and then pull a fast one on them. Sigh
CentOS is not "ditching open source" in any respect whatsoever.
I read somewhere the founder of centos is thinking of forking. that'd be nice
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There's a silent but relatively big user base of CentOS in HPC and scientific computing. ScientificLinux and CentOS rules all HPC clusters. Clusters are like enterprise servers. Big, monolithic, rarely upgraded. They're upgraded in one big-fell swoop and left to run. There'll be another clone of RHEL since HPC can't accept CentOS Stream as the alternative. The whole infra is too big to move to Debian too. So with tod…
Okay, this is a serious question. For me, not an official RH position. In my time in HPC, nodes were baked with a specific image and then that basically never ever got updates. As I came to that as a sysadmin from other areas, I found that somewhat horrifying, but it seemed pretty universal. Have things changed such that applying patches regularly (like, more often than once a month or so except in emergencies) is a…
Scientific applications can be very picky about the libraries they use or need, down to minor version since the results they produce are very, very precise. Even if not very accurate, you need to know the inaccuracy. An optimization in a math library can change this and, it's not something we want. Also program verification and certification generally includes versions of the libraries used.
Piecewise upgrades are a no go too. Your cluster generally can't work well in heterogeneous configurations (due to library mismatches) and draining a node is not a straightforward task (due to length of the jobs). If your cluster has a steady stream of incoming jobs, reducing resources also means queue bloat and recovering it is not easy sometimes. If you want to drain the whole cluster, it takes almost 2-3 weeks so, you lose ~1 month of productivity. When you start an empty cluster to churn its queues, its saturation takes time so, it doesn't go to 11 directly.
Also, worker nodes are highly isolated from the user's point of view. No users can log-in, only known people submit jobs, etc. Unless there's a rogue academic trying to do nefarious things, the place is pretty safe and worry-free. In past 15 years, we got two rootkit infections due to a server which can be world-accessible by design. Other than that, nothing ever got infected.
At the end of the day, this approach has some valid reasons to be alive. It's not that we're a bunch of lazy academics who refrain from applying good system administration practices. :D
Addendum: The images generally get updated when new hardware is added, since new processors tend to work better with newer kernels. Also sometimes we bit the bullet and update all the cluster at once. XCAT helps a lot in this space. If your image is sane, you can install batches of 150+ servers in 15 minutes while sipping your coffee.
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> Does this mean that CentOS 8 is EOL come 2021? They've just eradicated almost all mentions of CentOS 8 from their main website. So: yes. > What about everybody who built their product on the assumption that there would be a stable CentOS until then? They just got what they paid for?
> They just got what they paid for? Not really. If you depend on CentOS it is reasonable you would contribute to it. There has to be a nonzero number of CentOS users that contributed to the project ("paid") that are now left holding the bag.
Not really.
Just TRY to "contribute" to CentOS. You can't.
CentOS hasn't been a "community" enterprise operating system for years.