[Catalyst] Re: Ubuntu / Catalyst

[Jon Schutz]

On Tue, 2007-11-13 at 11:16 +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> Peter Edwards wrote:
> > Centos 5 == Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
> > For production quality, you can expect it to be pretty stable and I have
> > corporate customers running it successfully. It's one of our development
> > platforms.
> > However, note mst's comments about the broken Perl on it. I found that quite
> > shocking considering it's supposed to be a premier Linux hosting platform.
> > As usual, compiling your own perl and Apache and providing your own PERL5LIB
> > dir per live application area is a sane way of going about delivering
> > standardised live applications you can roll out and support.
> > 
> 
> Possibly a bit OT now, but as I'm about to set up another production 
> server and was going to use CentOS 5, I'm a bit concerned. Matt 
> mentioned fstab and init, but not as far as I can see Perl - in what way 
> is Perl broken on CentOS 5?

We have some tens of production servers running CentOS 4/5, and apart
from the CentOS 5 perl issue (which was quite nasty) have been satisfied
with it as a production platform.  Its key asset is that you don't get
any surprises, like version upgrades that have incompatible
configuration files so your services stop working.

Personally I would not consider Ubuntu suitable as a production server
platform as it is too close to the bleading edge.  However, really any
O/S version could be used in production if you turn off automatic
updates and you're prepared to manage and test every upgraded and
security patched package on an individual basis.

Whichever platform you choose for production (presumably in an Internet
environment), getting your firewalling right, keeping your footprint
small, keeping your security patches up to date and knowing your
configuration baseline are probably the main criteria to ensure a
reliable software subsystem.

-- 

Jon