On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 13:29 -0400, Max Spevack wrote: > Are you using Fedora in a production or live enviornment? Yes. My primary mail servers are all running Fedora. I tried setting up a mail server on a prominent Fedora-based 'server' distribution recently, as a favour for a friend. It was the most unpleasant experience I've had with Linux in a _long_ time. With Fedora, you get current versions of Exim, SpamAssassin and ClamAV _very_ easily. With that other distro, it was like pulling teeth. Even getting up to date versions of spam and virus scanning software was hard -- I had to build them myself. Although they were theoretically available in some other non-standard repository, I had problems getting that to work. I think I had problems even getting _yum_ to work, which may have been a large amount of the problem. I don't remember well; I've tried to blot out the experience. More fun was Exim itself. Ok, I wanted a fairly esoteric feature which was added to Exim recently, so perhaps I wouldn't _normally_ have been trying to recompile a newer version of that -- but it was made horridly painful by the fact that the owner of the machine in question had installed MySQL 5, and MySQL AB have screwed up their RHEL packages by including an incompatible version of libssl and not hiding the symbols, so if you link against -lmysqlclient -lssl (in that order) you get seemingly random segfaults, while linking in the other order is fine. Another 6 hours or so of my life down the drain working that one out -- they add insult to injury because when I tried to report it to them I seem to have achieved nothing except to add my email address to their spam list. My own machines, on the other hand, are _much_ easier to deal with. Only today I upgraded one of them from FC4 to FC6 using yum, from about 1000 miles away. Obviously I'd downloaded all of Fedora Core 6 except the 'fedora-release-6' package last week, since it would be monumentally stupid to wait until this week before downloading _any_ of it. But it was only today that I built up the courage to install the fedora-release package and run 'yum upgrade'. It was, of course, seamless -- the machine kept web serving and routing mail throughout. As some point I ought to reboot it onto the new kernel but I'm out of the country at the moment and the person in whose data centre it lives is also on holiday, so it can wait a few days. > What's your setup like? Bog-standard Fedora install with Exim+ClamAV+SpamAssassin, git dæmon, Apache and one or two other services. On i386 at the moment but I'm planning to replace all the server machines with PowerPC in the near future. > What is it about Fedora that made you choose to use it, as opposed to > something else? Current software. And the fact that the "updating is painful" myth is utter crap. > What works well for you? Er, all of it? In particular, the fact that (almost) everything is IPv6-capable has been a godsend recently. One of the machines in the cluster was deprived of its IPv4 network, for reasons I still haven't quite understood -- it had to move to a temporary home behind NAT. But it still had a proper IPv6 address, and could hence still participate. Since it's the list server that was quite important. It meant that one of the other machines (which were listed as MX backups for it anyway) ended up receiving most of the mail from the Legacy Internet and forwarding it -- but it was fairly much seamless. > What could be better? Quicker updates of SpamAssassin. ClamAV updates are fairly much instant already AFAICT, but SA could possibly speed up a little. And Exim should be the default MTA, not one of the less capable MTAs. That's one thing that Debian have right that we don't. -- dwmw2 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
