Fedora Core On Production Servers

[treedstang]

Since Redhat 9 is not longer supported by redhat . I wanted to know if anyone out there is using Fedora on any of there production boxes on the job.

I'm currently doing volunteer work at private school and I'm in the process of
implement a firewall / squidguard and other services .
I just want to see how fedora is used in field because I do have favor towards the redhat distro so I wanted to continue with the product if it's dependable enough for a production environment.

I know able the expensive Enterprise Redhat releases unfortunately that's not in the budget.

any info will be helpful

[kosmosik]

it is much better than RHL9...

from your post i assume you have experience with redhat based distros and the particular programs you want to administer, so to aswer your question, fedora is excellent for production servers and is used by many company, especially web-based companies such as valueweb. so if you have the necessary experience with your programs, using fedora will be like using an improved version of redhat 9 without commercial support. however, if you google for "fedora support" you will find this forum to be the (un)official fedora support site.
an easy to use firewall is firestarter
(always check yum for software before you attempt to compile something. that is if your looking for a quick and easy way to install new packages.)

[Ned]

You should have no problems using fedora in a production environment.

For firewalling, I would seriously recommend learning netfilter (iptables) rather than using one of the many gui frontends to it. It's not that difficult to learn and is immensely powerful and there are loads of good scripts/HOWTO's to get you started (do google on iptables howto)

With just the basics mastered you'll be able to set up a secure firewall very quickly and once mastered you'll be able to do all sorts of neat things with it.

Ned

[foolish]

Well, these forums are hosted on a server running Fedora. We're doing well now aren't we?

Fedora Core 1 is quite solid. Core 2 still has some issues to sort out. But Core 3 will be excelent I'm sure. The next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will be based on Core 3 and will be out by february I think. And if Red Hat can package Core 3 up with some extras and support and sell it for thousands of money, It will have to be quite solid.

[treedstang]

Thanks everyone for the responses..

[Jman]

If you don't mind being without paid support and having frequent updates I say go for it. Just do a test run before the real thing, if at all possible.

(Disclaimer: I haven't run any production servers yet.)

[Jaws]

Well, I use Fedora Core 2 to host my site, do perl programming, PHP programming, MySQL programming, and other things. FC2 has never given me one problem yet. Been running for about 2 months now, and it works great.

I say, yes, it is definately good for a production environment. Ive never used RHL before, nor do I know anything about RHL support, but I do know that FC2 support is well available on several forums, and even in live chat IRC channels.

-Jaws.

[Álvaro Reguly]

Well, Fedora is not quite stable as RHEL, but that's not a bug, that's a feature! Fedora is meant to be a test bed, with new packages comming in from upstream developer all the time, so it is not that much tested.

For instance, see kernel 2.6.7, I got network lockups with it, due a window scale problem. That is fixed in 2.6.8, but it gave me a lot of problems.

just my 2 cents.

[kosmosik]

my school's server was recently updated to FC2 it is 4 xenon SMP machine with loads of RAM, SCSI disk and so on. it is quite in production since it runs services for about 10000 users (mail, web, samba, LDAP, home-grown application for managing grades/payments etc., proxy, routing, vpn and few others) and it works normally. it isn't that my school has no money for RHEL line - if it would be good to buy this we will buy it (especially with academic discounts it is quite inexpensive), but we don't since Fedora does it's job great... we also have Fedora on almost every workstation (dual boot setups with XP)... so yes Fedora is production ready, it is just the case of people who will manage it.

[rmenezes]

In my company we use this servers:

qmail Mail Server running Fedora Core 1
2 Firewall(iptables)/Proxy(squid) running Fedora Core 2
Database (Firebird) running Fedora Core 1
2 Fedora Core 1 with my own systems
3 Apache Servers in Fedora Core 1 machines
1 Fax(efax) servers running Fedora Core 2

All the servers run full-time withou any troubles.

[Rolled_Gold]

One thing I've run into recently with using FC in production is Veritas's support. They don't support much of anything linux-wise for netbackup and FC2 deffinitally dosen't work while FC1's functionality is spotty.

For FC2 the issue with the 2.6 kernel and with FC1 the backups don't always decend into all directories properly.

This is with the latest 5.1 release of netbackup. Service rep stated there "might" be a patch for 2.6 support september/october.

Just thought I would add we overcame this problem along with budget problems by using whitebox linux.