• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
managed wordpress hosting

The CentOS Project

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 :)
 
Oracle Linux is nothing much difference than RHEL.
Oracle just take the source codes from RHEL and repackage them to become Oracle Linux.
Of course, Oracle did add something extra into this distro.
 
Oracle Linux is nothing much difference than RHEL.
Oracle just take the source codes from RHEL and repackage them to become Oracle Linux.
Of course, Oracle did add something extra into this distro.

Is it compatible with cPanel/WHM though? (Even though it's not officially supported). I was thinking of firing it up in a VM this weekend seeing how well they play together.

[JSH]John;1137793 said:
You could look at CloudLinux which is based on RHEL. http://cloudlinux.com/solutions/compare/

Sounds interesting. Do you use it? This LVE technology sounds every bit like virtulisation. Does it have any performance impact at all?
 
Sounds interesting. Do you use it? This LVE technology sounds every bit like virtulisation. Does it have any performance impact at all?
Yes we use it and I haven't noticed any performance impact. In fact it's improved the stability a lot compared to when we used CentOS. Another advantage is that the developers are there to help if you ever have a problem. The longest I've waited for a response was about 30 minutes, and that was just a query about their beta kernel.

If you want to try it out, there's a free trial and it's also very easy to switch back to CentOS if you wanted. I've switched back once just to see if it was actually possible with no problems.
 
I have been using centos on all of my servers and have never had any issues with stability. I have had issues with some newer things not working like php 5.3 wasn't supported until just recently, but nothing critical.
 
Sure sure, but there is a potential for issues if someone chooses to attack your server in a large window of time between when RHEL releases security packages and the CentOS team ports them over.
 
Back
Top