Submitted by CentOS, with almost 30% of all Linux servers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived distro is #1 according to Web Technology Surveys.
CentOS, with almost 30% of all Linux servers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived distro is #1 according to Web Technology Surveys.
I have installed some servers with CentOS and it is really fast. The only concern is to newer hardware, as the kernel is not recent – you have to take care on this.
This said, since May the version 5.5 is out. I tried to submit a news here on June, but probably I made it wrongly, as the article was in the pending list for a week and was not accepted.
Part of CentOS success must be credited to Red Hat, that provides the source code and the only thing they asked to was removing the references to their company name in this distro.
Long Life CentOS – and RedHat too.
Don’t be confused by old version number for kernel. Red Hat backports lots of things, especially hardware drivers. RHEL 5.5 which have 2.6.16-based (or something) kernel actualy supports POWER7 and Nehalem EX (Xeon 7500) iron which just come out.
Only problem with CentOS is that lags about 2 months beyond RHEL in releases and updates, and that includes security updates too. That means: When RHSA (red hat security alert) alerts paid RHEL customers to update and patch newfound security issue, you have to wait ~2 months for that patch to lend in CentOS. So you’re leaving a window of opportunity for hackers. But luckily, there is always workaround for security issue, so you typically just need to block some port or do some kludge to secure your server until patch lands. And security issues that show up in RHEL are usually not severe anyway. It is just Red Hat, trying to make it perfect.
2 months is not the average, that’s a gross exaggeration.
I hope your opinion isn’t based on that of Caitlyn Martin, the Linux security consultant and transsexual who has a vendetta against CentOS. I remember a while back when her example of a lagged patch was for Firefox 3.
There hasn’t been a single case of hosting companies having a mass hack due to using Cent instead of RHEL.
But if you are really that worried then just cough up a hundred bucks a year for Oracle support.
Someone’s sexuality or physical/medical state has nothing to do with whether they’re right or not.
No but I find humor in a ham-radio expert transsexual being the bane of an all volunteer software project.
If average level of discussion among centos users is at this level (~ youtube comments), I don’t see them competing on “community” merits at least. I guess parasites of RHEL don’t need to care about such fluff.
Parasites? They’re just embracing the magic of the GPL.
Red Hat does most the work and everyone downstream is guaranteed a free clone.
Nothing has stopped Red Hat from forking a BSD and creating their own proprietary Unix. However they decided to embrace the GPL and CENT is the result.
So is Unbreakable Linux which is very easy to switch to and can offer big savings over Red Hat.
There are a lot of business people in Red Hat that hate the fact that CentOS exists. They just don’t get it. The developers there I have talked to do understand.
1. While Red Hat writes A LOT of software, they dont write it all. You have to give to get.
2. The people using CentOS are the same people working on Fedora, which is mostly done by volunteers. It would be kind of two-faced for Red Hat to accept all the free help they get with regards to Fedora, and slap the hand of the CentOS users.
That is not true. Red Hat folks don’t hate CentOS, and they very well get that is better for them when people use CentOS then when they use something which is not derived from RHEL. (Like WIndows for example). I think you misunderstood Red Hat “Business people”. Red Hat refuse to talk about CentOS in public and that is from obvious reasons: They don’t want customers to hear about CentOS from them. If they want free clone, they can get it, but they don’t want to make confusion that Red Hat in any way, shape or form support or endorse CentOS.
1. Red Hat is already giving away everything. All products they distribute to customers are open source under GPL or GPL-compatible license. (with exception of RHEV-M which Qumranet wrote in C#, so Red Hat is redoing it in Java, and then they will open source it). So practically every RH product can be Cented.
2. That would be two-faced, but they are not doing it. They are not doing anything that could undermine CentOS. They could stop giving SRPMS freely and let only subscribers have them (they can do that under GPL). That would force CentOS devs to buy one RHEL Advanced Platfrom subscription so they can get source. But that is petty and it would be shooting it the foot, so Red Hat is not doing it. Red Hat could stop making easily rebuildable SRPMS at all, and start giving only tarbals with source. That would take even more time for CentOS to put up releases. But they are not doing that either.
Red Hat does not hate CentOS. They are just don’t supporting it and don’t want to be associated with it, and why should they?
I would strongly disagree with that. I almost never see anyone involved with Fedora in CentOS forums. That’s one of the things I *really* like about CentOS. It’s why the CentOS forums are so useful and pleasant.
Given the fact that RedHat goes out of its way to help rebuild RHEL (E.g. by releasing SRPMs instead of tarballs and patches, making EPEL free-for-all, etc), I fail to see any evidence to this supposed opposition.
I care little what some people in RedHat -may- or may not think, I very much care about what RedHat -does-.
Bullshit. Pure and simple.
I -really- suggest you do some reading before posting.
Start by learning the difference between Fedora-proper and EPEL.
P.S. We use large number of CentOS/EPEL machines for development and use RHEL machines for production. This is not an attack on CentOS in any way.
– Gilboa
Edited 2010-07-29 07:02 UTC
Pay no attention to jerkface. He is, after all, a jerkface.
Seriously, the Centos community is pretty cool. A tasteful and considerate bunch, by and by. I strongly suspect you’d like them.
To my knowledge, the user known here as nt_jerkface is not associated with them in any formal way.
CentOS tends to have serious users, and not embarrassing fanboys. But… there are always exceptions.
Dude what are you smoking? Did you even read my post? You attacked me for something that someone else said? Because someone else’s vendetta against centos? Really? I didn’t read what that Caitlyn Martin said. Have a link?
I don’t have a problem with CentOS security, I wouldn’t be using it otherwise. I already said that lagging 40-60 days behind RHEL is not a big deal. You would know if you read the post.
If you want a flamewar, find somebody else.
You said:
you have to wait ~2 months for that patch to land in CentOS
and I said that’s a gross exaggeration.
Maybe you don’t know about Caitlyn Martin but she/he has brought this issue up numerous times without specifying any examples other than a late Firefox patch.
http://ever-increasing-entropy.blogspot.com/2009/08/end-of-centos-n…
I said it because it’s a fact. That Caitlyn Martin is exaggerating a little bit. But CentOS is really not good for mission critical stuff in big enterprise (it is crazy to go without support there) but it is enough for home server, development servers, hosting providers, and such. That is a fact. Why you have problem with that?
Maybe because you want to push CentOS everywhere, and don’t want anyone to buy RHEL? Growing and profitable Red Hat sh1ts all over your “open source can’t make money” agenda, so I understand your buthurtness.
PS: Oh, and I wouldn’t recommend Oracle Unworkable Linux even to an enemy. Oracle support is worse than useless, any money thrown in their direction is wasted. Better go with CentOS than OEL.
No it isn’t a fact, both you and Caitlyn haven’t provided an average from an adequate sample size.
No I have endorsed CentOS in the past for two primary reasons:
1. Conservative update policy
2. Software/Hardware compatibility
And then Caitlyn the “Linux security expert” comes along and writes multiple articles lambasting CentOS for delaying critical security updates and cites a Firefox update for her netbook as the only example.
They have a rather impressive customer list including Dell and Yahoo:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9046978/OpenWorld_1_500_comp…
It’s also been endorsed by the Edison group:
http://www.appsinsight.net/2009/01/16/realize-true-cost-savings-wit…
Yeah Oracle made a PR splash when they introduced OEL but they didn’t really made any sucess. Those are not customers. They just took OEL and use it, like they would use CentOS. Onl a few of those 1,500 actually pay support. Oracle’s support is useless, especially if it is not large scale multi-milion $ deal in question. They are usually more interested in asking about other (unrelated) software you’re using (so that they can send salesdroids to hook you up at more of their stuff) then actually helping you with your problem. I hear that they also ask about hardware and storage since they bought Sun. It is better not to call them at all and not buy support from them in the first place. Anyone who dealt with them will confirm this.
Also, that CW article about Yahoo isn’t true. It says Yahoo had 50,000 of RHEL servers. If they used basic subscription ($350) that would make $17.5m per year. That kind of money would show up on Red Hat bottom line. But it didn’t. OEL didn’t budge Red Hat. And Yahoo uses FreeBSD and CentOS, as far as I know. They never used Red Hat, at least not at that scale. They might had a few servers.
I laughed hard when I read one of the Red Hat guys (I think it was Brian Stevens, cant remember) saying: “In past 4 years, we lost 3 big customers to Oracle. One came back to us shortly after, one was Oracle itself, and one was acquired by Oracle so they had to switch”.
I tend to believe that he’s saying the truth.
Everything I said about CentOS, I learned from experience. I didn’t counted time, but after looking at Wikipedia, I guess I was about right. As for micro updates, I didn’t count that either. It is time passed from me seeing particular update at work (RHEL), ’till seeing that same update on home server(CentOS). It is always more than a week for micro updates. And more than a month for minor point releases (the 5.x).
You on the other hand, probably never saw a RHEL box and never logged to Red Hat Network in your life (not to mention that you didn’t compared it with OEL). You are only annoyed with Red Hat proving you wrong (that GPL’d software can make money) so you try to get back to them by promoting Oracle and unsupported Linuxes. Thats fine, I don’t care, have your petty buthurtness. I just cant believe how rabid you are, attacking people who say simple facts: that RH subscription actually have a value proposition over unsupported solution and that security updates come to RHEL first because they are ones making the damn thing.
On second read, I think Caitlyn has a valid point, and not exaggerating as I first thought. Thanks for showing me that blog. That link was only useful thing you shown it this discussion.
LOL only a few of those customers actually pay support? How deluded can you possibly be? Half the links in their high profile customer list have quotes from customers praising the support program:
http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/025990.htm#Activision
Why are you being so dismissive of their success? They clearly have some major companies that have switched from Red Hat. Does this bother you? Both companies are doing well financially so why are you trying so hard to downplay the success of Oracle’s program?
Sometimes companies will just pay for a handful of RHEL support contracts and then roll out updates internally to thousands of servers.
Funny how you didn’t seem to know that but then made this comment:
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
A couple of comments about Caitlyn Martin…
I went and read the links to the article she wrote about CentOS. Far from just complaining about an out-of-date Firefox, she made made some other very well-reasoned comments. It doesn’t sound to me like a vendetta. Among other online posts, she writes for DistroWatch, and her comments are usually well-researched. Most likely, far better researched than yours. However, if you don’t agree with what she says, feel free to respond IN AN INTELLIGENT MANNER, rather than character assassination.
Which brings me to this: as for Caitlyn’s sexuality and/or medical condition, that is totally out of bounds. You don’t know her, and you don’t know what she’s been through. Would you like us to have a public discussion about your sexual and medical history? What goes round comes round.
Edited 2010-07-28 03:25 UTC
You don’t see anything wrong with citing a single delayed desktop browser update as indicative of the overall timeliness of updates from a server centric distro?
How about at least a more relevant update like a vulnerability in openldap?
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0543.html
Oh look at that issued the next day on CENTOS:
http://lwn.net/Alerts/397020/
Based on the same sample size that Caitlyn used maybe I should conclude that Cent delivers updates within 24 hours of RHEL.
Do you ever research when you post?
From wikipedia:
CentOS RHEL
5.5 CentOS 2010-05-14 RHEL 2010-03-31
5.4 CentOS 2009-10-21 RHEL 2009-09-02
5.3 CentOS 2009-03-31 RHEL 2009-01-20
5.2 CentOS 2008-06-24 RHEL 2008-05-21
More over here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS
It is almost always more than one month, and sometimes close to 2 months. It looks like you are one having vendetta… against Red Hat… and there is probably again your old vendetta against GPL. You even admitted that in previous posts.
PS: As for LWN.net alerts, alert gets you nothing without patch. You only know that there is a problem, you still need to wait patch to come in CentOS.
Also note that LWN.net news are only accessible to paid LWN.net subscribers of in first 7 days. After 7 days expire, everyone else sees the news.
Edited 2010-07-28 13:12 UTC
Dude, those are major point releases. Those are complete rebuilds of every package from source. Plus testing. That’s a hell of a lot of difference than how long a single patch takes to make it through. Also, critical patches issued during that period bypass the process and are pushed out immediately. The only thing that is lagging is that Red Hat has gone SO long between RHEL 5 and 6. But RHEL 6 is going to have a heck of a lot of major changes from 5. Many major subsystems were replaced since RHEL 5.
Major point releases? You can call them that way, but RH call them minor releases. Major release is RHEL6 or RHEL5.
Then there is minor releases, 5.x and what you call minor releases are in fact micro releases (that’s how Red Hat is calling it), little updates with some fixes. Those come to centos quicker than minor releases but not that quicker. CentOS is late about 7 to 15 days with micro releases. It still needs a fair amount of testing to maintain 100% RHEL compatibility.
But don’t get me wrong, that is not bad thing. I would hate to see it come out same day as RHEL and then make some problem or even bork my server.
Those are major updates, not critical patches.
All Caitlyn cited was a delayed Firefox patch for her netbook which is too small of a sample size to substantiate her argument. She should have taken the last 10 critical updates and then taken an average of the delay time.
Oh I openly don’t like the GPL but I could care less about Red Hat. I think their support is a rip compared to Oracle but they produce a decent distro.
My issue with the GPL is not that it requires the source to be open but more the ideology that comes with it.
Dear Douchebag,
Maybe you’re not really a douchebag, I’m sure you have some redeeming qualities, but right now you’re acting like a douchebag.
For someone to come out as transexual takes a lot of courage, courage because the world isn’t terribly accepting, and often outright hostile to who they are. You see, courage is when you do something even though you’re afraid of the potential consequences. I say this because little pricks like you don’t usually know what courage is. Instead, cowards like you make cowardly asinine comments like the one you just made.
A lot of transexuals end up in technology, because it’s full of geeks, geeks who know what it’s like to be different, to be deridded for being who they are. But sometimes cowards like you don’t learn the right lesson, which is to be accepting. Instead you cope by finding someone more different than you, and picking on them. You probably thouht we were all like that too, bringing up her sexuality as a tactic to garner more support for your side. But we’re not pathetic little cowards like you, so that backfired.
In summation, you’re a coward. And I suggest keep your arguments technical, because if you went up against Caitlyn in a battle of class or a battle of guts, you’d lose embarrassingly. You don’t have the guts Caitlyn has.
Regards,
Tony Bourke
(claps and wipes tears from eyes)
Yes I find humor in a transexual ham-radio operator who also claims to be a Linux/Unix security expert.
You find satisfaction in your morally indignant condemnation of my provocative comment.
At the end of the day, which response is healthier?
But if you are really offended by me pointing out a transsexual on the internet then by all means file a complaint with your therapist who might be able to explain why you take anonymous internet posts so goddamn seriously.
P.S. Your Oscar winning speech would have had greater effect if you didn’t formally address someone named Jerkface as Douchebag. But way to be #9283 to walk into that ladder.
My work ‘standardized’ on CentOS for the reason that a lot of our proprietary vendors specify it as the only thing they support. It’s also the most ‘Microsoft-like’ out of all the Linux distros, which I think makes Windows Admins a bit more comfortable.
My problems with CentOS are pragmatic. I understand the philosophy behind it… and disagree entirely. Stability through obsolescence might have made sense years ago (debatable), but now it really doesn’t.
Take my recent project, for example. I had to design and replace an aging server application (serving XML queries) running on redhat 9. The old design was a process forking mechanism, and quickly destroyed the memory on the system (1.2gigs of memory at 200 users). In order to cut development time down, and increase speed, I opted to use Qt. Since I needed certain features (like talking to a MS SQL database), I had to have any recent version of Qt from the last year or two.
My replacement written, and tested on my ubuntu and arch machines, I tried to put it on our CentOS server, which was just installed with CentOS 5.4. After a week of trying to get it to run, I gave up; there were too many random crashes and problems that simply did not occur on any linux distro that had the dependancies I needed; namely unixODBC, FreeTDS, and Qt. I convinced my work to use Ubuntu, and life was wonderful. CentOS simply couldn’t run a modern application stably at all.
Is CentOS a ‘bad’ distro? Eh. I won’t even go that far. But I know of no instance I would ever choose it over Arch (my preferred for it’s tiny install footprint), or Ubuntu (which, admittedly, is more production grade).
But hey, that’s the beauty of all of this; choice.
Have you opened the SELinux troubleshooter? CentOS is not Ubuntu, there is a lot of permissions to add for an app to get stable. But Qt 4.1 is old, it was probably the problem. CentOS is more stable than Ubuntu, but you have to think CentOS/RedHat to have something working. At first, it will just crash with lack of permissions on the various security framework.
But once it run, it will run for a long time.
Got to say that it’s bizarre you’d write an XML server app using the Qt libraries (which drag in a lot of dependencies, including X11 stuff that probably isn’t initially installed on a CentOS server). Surely there are more “obvious” libraries such as libxml2 or even how about PHP with its XML/SOAP support? Not forgetting Java (Sun’s JDK works fine on CentOS 5) too.
As for folks moaning about running CentOS 5 on the desktop, you have to be willing to keep some desktop apps up-to-date yourself (Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird spring to mind), though I see CentOS 5 finally updated Firefox to something pretty new (3.6.7) recently (I’ve already got the 3.6.8 RPM built and running on my work machine though).
If you pick Fedora for a work desktop, updates screech to a halt after 18 months, whereas work desktops tend to last 3-5 years typically. You would have to upgrade Fedora at least once and probably twice, which is a messy business at best (so messy, that on my home machine, I do clean installs of multiple Fedora versions in separate partitions) – warm upgrades are full of risks.
Hence, we went with CentOS 5 on the work desktop and apart from some manual RPMs we update, it at least will get updates throughout the entire 5 years of our desktops’ lives. And for free, which is I think the only model that works. If Windows offers free updates, all Linuxes should too, IMHO. Red Hat should separate out updates from support and offer the former for free for those who bought the base product and charge whatever they like for the latter (probably more than now to compensate for those who switch to the free updates only with no support).
So you write and test apps destined for a RHEL machine on Ubuntu and Arch? Makes sense to me!
Stability through obsolescence eh? I suppose you say the same thing about Solaris, Irix, etc? Some people just don’t get what it means to have an enterprise OS. But to top things off, Red Hat continues to innovate year after year. Bah.
as the de facto server standard.
Novell is up for sale while Red Hat is trading at a 52 week high.
The Linux world has been long overdue for some standardization.
Care to explain? RHEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux / Unbreakable / OEL) was de-facto at Oracle before Sun aquisition, now, it less clear.
Edited 2010-07-27 20:23 UTC
Not at Oracle but in the business world.
Cent/RHEL is clearly the safe choice now that Novell has a hazy future and Sun has been absorbed by an established and trusted corp that sells RHEL support.
Debian and Ubuntu are still growing as a whole.
Suse, Fedora and Gentoo seems to be loosing as webservers.
Fedora never has a place in the server space in the first place, CentOS is the Fedora derivative that has. Debian is losing ground and CentOS is eroding some corner of SLES while SLES is doing well in area where NetWare was strong. eDirectory is also doing good for SUSE, so is interoperability. But SLES as a general purpose server OS is losing, it’s just bad.
Ubuntu is gaining some ground in clustered cloud server, but not on the general server market.
That’s my own number, I work with those OS.
It’s only a matter of time before more admins get burned by Ubuntu. I actually went over this issue recently:
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2010/07/cent-vs-ubuntu-for-web-serving.h…