Hello fellow hosts. My apologies for not being around here much as of late, however I really wanted some opinions from others in the business about the issue of CentOS.
For those not following the project very closely, there have been a lot of problems in the last year or so with important security updates not making it into the packages until the 5.6 release several days ago. This alone is a significant worry for any web-host.
On top of this, CentOS 6 has the biggest single delay of any version since the dawn of the project, and it is possible that EL6.1 will be release before CentOS 6, and further chronic delays to follow.
To combat this, you will see a lot of highly experienced people (and I mean with over 10+ years in the industry) have been offering significant man-hours to the CentOS project on their mailing list for the last 2-3 months - only to be told (effectively) that the real work is done by the CentOS core team, which apparently is off-limits to the community.
With those of us choosing to run cPanel, the choices are basically CentOS or FreeBSD, unless we want to fork over significant cash for RHEL.
My question is, how has everyone been dealing with this situation or how do you plan to deal with it in the future? Has anyone packaged their own security updates to deal with their delays before 5.6 came out? Is this something we might have to do in the future? Should we get together and run our own repository on top of CentOS' to get security updates faster?
I also recently learned about Oracle Linux, and it's much cheaper fees. However I don't know whether it's meant to be 100% binary compatible with EL nor can I figure out whether updates are free or not. Does anyone know much about it and whether it would be a good alternative? I'm not a big fan of Oracle, however this may well be a good choice under the circumstances.
I'll appreciate any opinions anyone knowledgeable has to throw my way
For those not following the project very closely, there have been a lot of problems in the last year or so with important security updates not making it into the packages until the 5.6 release several days ago. This alone is a significant worry for any web-host.
On top of this, CentOS 6 has the biggest single delay of any version since the dawn of the project, and it is possible that EL6.1 will be release before CentOS 6, and further chronic delays to follow.
To combat this, you will see a lot of highly experienced people (and I mean with over 10+ years in the industry) have been offering significant man-hours to the CentOS project on their mailing list for the last 2-3 months - only to be told (effectively) that the real work is done by the CentOS core team, which apparently is off-limits to the community.
With those of us choosing to run cPanel, the choices are basically CentOS or FreeBSD, unless we want to fork over significant cash for RHEL.
My question is, how has everyone been dealing with this situation or how do you plan to deal with it in the future? Has anyone packaged their own security updates to deal with their delays before 5.6 came out? Is this something we might have to do in the future? Should we get together and run our own repository on top of CentOS' to get security updates faster?
I also recently learned about Oracle Linux, and it's much cheaper fees. However I don't know whether it's meant to be 100% binary compatible with EL nor can I figure out whether updates are free or not. Does anyone know much about it and whether it would be a good alternative? I'm not a big fan of Oracle, however this may well be a good choice under the circumstances.
I'll appreciate any opinions anyone knowledgeable has to throw my way