SDL instead of CentOS, trying to convince management

[Tony Albers]

Hi all,

So, running a couple of small hadoop clusters, I'm getting annoyed by CentOS's policy of retiring old versions to their vault. Some of our machines have to be locked in versions for maybe 6 months at at time, and that makes updating them when they're unlocked a nightmare because of dependencies to packages that have been retired.

The solution would normally be to just mirror the CentOS/EPEL repos that we need, but our IT operations do not have the resources to manage our repos too. They already have CentOS repos, but ours are different(because of hadoop, R, jupyterhub, oVirt, gluster etc etc.)

So, I'd like to just use SDL instead of CentOS. Especially since we're going to have to run our own mirrors anyway.

But what are the advantages in using SDL instead of CentOS? (apart from the excellent community that SDL has)

Anything I can use as an argument is welcome.

TIA

/tony

[Durval Menezes]

Hello Tony,

When I decided to migrate from CentOS to Springdale a couple of years ago, the former was in disarray and updates from 'upstream' (RH) were taking much longer to show up (a week or longer); Springdale updates were much prompter (sane day or 1-2 days max, if memory serves). 

I'm not sure that this is still the case as since them the CentOS project started being 'sponsored' by RH and should have tidied up their act, but you might want to check that and, if it's still true, use it as an argument.

Good luck and, if you can, please come back and tell us what arguments you used and how it all went.

Cheers,

-- 

   Durval.

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[Tony Albers]

Thanks Durval, I'll check if that is still the case.

Anyone else on the line?

/tony

[Predrag Punosevac]

Tony Albers <tony....@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Thanks Durval, I'll check if that is still the case.
>
> Anyone else on the line?

I carefully evaluated PUIAS (now Springdale), CentOS, and Scientific
Linux almost 10 years ago when I built my first GPU super computer with
my student. PUIAS came as a winner in terms of stability, consistency,
and quality of RPM repos.

Nowadays the things are much easier.

You have RHEL which costs money and Fedora (RHEL test bed) which is
unstable and impractical for serious scientific computing.

CentOS is bought by Red Hat. My feeling is that Red Hat is using
CentOS as a final testing ground for the changes they want to push in
the current RHEL release. Their repos are less consistent and in my
subjective opinion less stable than Springdale repos.

The guy who was doing Scientific Linux was hired off by Red Hat and
Scientific Linus is just community branch of CentOS.

IMHO either you have money to pay for RHEL or you should use
Springdale.

Unfortunately ROCKS is based of CentOS so if you run bunch of clusters
you might as well stick to CentOS. I wonder if people on this mailing
list know how to build ROCKS using Springdale as a base instead of
CentOS?


Cheers,
Predrag

[JP]

I should also add that at the end of the day it really should not matter much - if we are not 99.9% compatible we've failed.  Now, having said that, build procedures are hardly set in stone and you do find proofs that Red Hat's build roots are behind or just weird (e.g. for the longest there were a bunch of openssl using packages that just could not be built against openssl updates and sometimes not even the current release - I get it why but still). And, yet, somehow, things end up working pretty darn well anyway.

Regarding rocks - never used much or at least not recently, we have quite a few nodes and over time we developed a rather large puppet repo managing everything from compute nodes, install servers (puppet managed cobbler) to web servers and you name it.  Not that I don't see value in rocks, rarely do you have enough hands on deck and even more rarely are you asked to do less...

Josko

[Tony Albers]

Thanks guys, will keep you updated.

/tony