For the past few months, my department has been a pawn in a varity of
political games. This has effectively derailed or delayed every project I
was working on or would have started at the end of the spring semester.
About three weeks ago, decisions were made, changes were coming. I was
faced with the prospect of having to assist in the dismantling of the
technical infrastructure I had built up. Once finished with that, I would
be left with a very different set of duties than I had been doing over the
last two years.
No longer would I would be the person making all (or even most) of the
technical decisions. No longer would I be able to dabble in every aspect
of IT. No longer would I be researching and developing the policy.
Worse than all that though, was that I would be asked to do work that
didn't interest me intellectually.
With encouragement and assistance from a good friend, an opportunity
was presented to me that my wife and I were unable to pass up; a job that
would be a challenge, in a land of nearly perpetually nice weather. So
with less than 3 weeks notice, I find myself leaving America's Dairyland
and heading for Silicon Valley.
This of course means that I am leaving the happy-go-lucky world of
academic freedom and entering the world of non-disclosure agreements.
What this means for this blog is yet to be worked out. I would expect to
continue to be able to continue to write the types of pieces I have been
writing. There will definitely be a break for awhile as I find my feet in
a new job and in a new city.
I simply don't understand why anyone would use Fedora Core in a workplace, let alone
on servers. I can understand wanting to avoid paying yearly per system
licensing fees for Redhat Enterprise Linux, but major upgrades and
bleeding edge software every 6-12 months is not something that should be
done in a business.
There are however alternatives to those two extremes. There are a
bunch of RHEL
Forks. Each project builds a distribution based on the source
rpms made available by Redhat for Redhat Enterprise Linux. Each project
has slightly different goals. Scientific Linux for example
endeavors to be RedHat comatible while still adding in various
clustering goodies used by researchers. My current choice for a
straight forward, staying true to RHEL distribution is CentOS.
Using this type of project however, is not for everyone. Red Hat
provides support options and the percieved stability of security updates
and patches coming from a company; these might be an issue for some
managers. The other big issues, are all about mitigating your level of
risk when using a completely volunter community project.
What would happen if the project weren't to put out security patches as
fast as you need? Do you have the knowledge and skills to rebuild the
source rpms yourself? What if the project collapses? How quickly would you
be able to migrate to another distribution? (One option, is to migrate in
place with these
instructions as a guide.) And the most devasting of possible issues; What
happens if Redhat stops releasing source rpms? Would you be able to hand
patch the services you maintain until you could migrate to another
distribution?
If those risks scare you, perhaps you will be more willing to pay
for the licenses from Redhat. These
risks don't bother me because 1) we don't have to be a 100% uptime
workplace and 2) I have the skills needed to maintain it all myself as I
worked on a migration plan.
