CentOS is on shakey ground

[WindnFog]

I may have been the only one using CentOS for weewx (before switching to a Raspberry Pi about a year ago.)  I note it's still mentioned as a distro in the weewx documentation, with RedHat and Fedora.  CentOS was to be supported until 31 May 2029.

Since the takeover of RedHat by IBM, this has been shortened to 31 December 2021.  If anyone is still using CentOS for weewx, it's probably a good idea to migrate to another distro soon.  There's a movement to replace CentOS with "Rocky Linux", but there's no timeframe for its deployment:

https://wiki.rockylinux.org/

The "strength" of CentOS was stability because it is a clone of RedHat.  I still use CentOS for other things than weewx, and rather than wait to see if Rocky Linux is successful, I'm moving to Ubuntu LTS 2020, which has at least 5 years of support/stability.

- Paul VE1DX

[vince]

It's a little unclear if IBM will keep to the centos-7 EOL date of 2024 or not, if that helps any.  While we know centos-8 will essentially become rhel-next-rolling-release-candidate, they haven't said what they'll do with centos-7 moving forward as far as I've heard.  Maybe that helps a little.

But fortunately weewx doesn't care what os you're on as long as you meet the python prerequisites.

I 'did' verify at $work that Oracle Linux seeeeeeems to be equally indistinguishable from RHEL like CentOS is, so that is definitely an option short term, if you want to deal with 'that' evil empire.   They also quickly published a script to convert your CentOS setup to a OL setup, but I didn't test that.   Personally I'd flatten+reload it if you wanted to go that way.  I found some upgrade scenarios didn't get quite an identical result under the hood as a clean flatten+load did.

[Mark Jenks]

I use CentOS for everything, except my home server.    At home I use Fedora, since it's RedHat based..

[HRM Resident]

I suspect a lot of web hosting companies use CentOS.  The outfit I was with in Florida sure did. No doubt there’s going to be a scramble to get Rocky Linux or equivalent going quickly. 

I am now hosting my weewx website on a VPS now using Ubuntu and Apache.  That way I have full control and don’t have to pay a fortune for someone else to do it.  It cost me $50 USD for the TLS certificate alone! Now I get my own and install it for free.  I used to use Fedora, but it’s really a beta version for RedHat and I got tired of the incessant bug fixes and updates.  CentOS was a great solution as it was familiar and mature. 

Anyway, I guess this is not really weewx related. 

- Paul VE1DX 

On Jan 3, 2021, at 6:20 PM, Mark Jenks <mjenk...@gmail.com> wrote:

I use CentOS for everything, except my home server.    At home I use Fedora, since it's RedHat based..

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[Mark Jenks]

Go back and look at Fedora again if you haven't used it in the last few years.    It's better than it used to be and is worth a look.

[WindnFog]

The reason I switched from Fedora to CentOS was stability.  Now that weewx is running on Raspbian and that's stable, there's no reason not to use Fedora for other things.  I like the familiarity of the RedHat/Fedora/CentOS distros, and the new "bells and whistles" introduced in Fedora are indeed attractive.  Perhaps that is a better choice for day-to-day Linux than Ubuntu LTS.

- Paul VE1DX