At this time we have 5 departmental servers. Last January I rebuilt 3 of the 5. As long as I was doing this rebuild, I thought I’d try to make the boxes as similar as possible to reduce administration overhead. The three boxes serve very different needs, but their core installs are exactly the same.
All of our servers are Linux based and have been since day one. For our Linux distribution we’ve always used some version of RedHat Linux. In 2003, RedHat announced that they were going to change how they do their releases. They were going to focus on their enterprise version, so they spun off their general distribution into Fedora Core, most commonly known as Fedora or the initials FC. Fedora had the goal to be mostly community driven and supported. The downside to Fedora is that it would have a new major version every 6 months or so and only the current and last versions were going to be generally supported. For servers, having “official” support for only 6 months to a year doesn’t make me feel good. In contrast, RedHat’s enterprise (RHEL) version has a support life of 5 years.
Because RedHat’s enterprise distribution and all of their installing tools are open source and available by RedHat (to comply with the GPL, among other licenses) a few people have taken the source and built it into a RHEL compatible Linux distribution. All of our servers are currently clones of RHEL3. At first we were using White Box Enterprise Linux which is built and supported by one or two people. That worked well, but I felt that only having one or two people supporting that distribution would slow down security updates and the like. When RHEL4 came out, White Box ended up being way behind the curve. As I was looking to an RHEL4 clone for home, I came across the The Community ENTerprise Operating System aka CentOS project. Like White Box, this is a RHEL clone, but they have more of a community behind the project, and they do RHEL4 as well as RHEL3. Since White Box and CentOS are both clones of RHEL3, it was easy to migrate from getting security and app updates from one to the other.
At this point, RHEL3 is getting a bit long in the tooth and some of the packages, particularly MySQL, are vastly out of date. The servers that are on RHEL3 will still be on it until there is a compeling reason to upgrade or until we hit Aug 2010, which should be its support end of life. However, any new servers that we would need to setup would be RHEL4 or one of its clones.
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