On 04/20/2017 05:55 PM, Warren Young wrote:
... I find that most hardware is ready to fall over by the time the
CentOS that was installed on it drops out of support anyway.
...
James' point isn't the hardware cost, it's the people cost for
retraining. In many ways the Fedora treadmill is easier, being that
there are many more smaller jumps than the huge leap from C6 to C7. For
the most part, however, I agree with most of your post. I strongly
disagree with the paragraph above, though.
I have worked for non-profits for most of my career thus far, which
spans almost 30 years. Non-profits by their very nature live on the
slimmest of margins, and donations of hardware by individuals and
companies have been in my experience the bread and butter for obtaining
server-quality hardware. The typical donation will be at least one or
two generations old before the non-profit gets it; my current employer
is just putting in production some IBM BladeCenters with the dual-socket
Opteron LS20 blades (10+ years old). Given the spiky workload, these
blades are suitable for the targeted use, and the electrical
requirements aren't a problem (I've done the math; it would take ten
years or more to justify the purchase price of a new blade based on
power savings alone, and our power is quite inexpensive here). At least
I can use very recent blades, and the eBay prices for 5-year-old blades
are pretty good, so when I need that much more power I can get it.
Oh, and the LS20 blades are built like tanks. We have a couple hundred
of them that were donated, and we're going to use them.
For what it's worth, CentOS 7, once installed, works great as long as
the lack of a GUI console isn't a problem (something with the
BladeCenter's KVM switch and C7's kernel keeps the keyboard from working
properly).
And don't even get me started on networking equipment, where I still
have Catalyst 5500-series hardware in production. (going on 20 years
old and still trucking!)
And having said that, I just pulled out of service a server for another
non-profit that had a power supply fan seize. I posted about moving its
application Friday. It is an AMD K6-2/400 with a Western Digital 6GB
boot drive and a Maxtor 30GB data drive, running Red Hat Linux 5.2. The
Antec power supply was put into service in 1999. It stopped working
Friday, and could have probably been put back into operation with a new
power supply without a huge amount of work, but I decided it was time.
Heh, it was time ten years ago!
The 6GB WD drive was only 19 years old; while I honestly wanted to see
it turn 20, it was time (power supply glitches caused by overheating of
the power supply; worst-case for hard disk death in my experience).
Yeah, 24x7 operation for 19 years with minimal downtime. I'm going to
personally put it back into service for hysterical raisins, since the
VA-503+ board doesn't need re-cap and it runs very well for what it is.
I'm not sure what I'm going to run on it yet. (It will be in service
for the same reasons I'm going to put a Reh CPU280 running UZI280 into
service.....).
And that’s why I use *all* the major OSes and several weird ones besides. None of it is perfect, yet it all has its place.
I couldn't agree more.
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