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Long term Linux servers following the assassination of CentOS


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Long term Linux servers following the assassination of CentOS
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-05-07, 08:50

CentOS is dead.
I only learned about this as a side note from one of Brad's posts in the recent past. This is a huge blow to me given I'm RHEL/CentOS trained and it has been my go-to distro for more than ten years now. Never mind the fact that it is a clear money grab that isn't going to get as much money as RH hopes.

What are you guys moving too? At this point I feel like I'm forced into Ubuntu LTS. I can't really go with CentOS Stream since it isn't really "production". My old boss loved FreeBSD, but I can't stand it. Too many gotcha's and processes to do simple things. I'd have to look up guides for every single thing I do on those servers.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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Dave
Ninja Editor
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Bay Area, CA
 
2021-05-07, 12:44

Other than Ubuntu LTS?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...-alternatives/

I think their #3 — Cloud Linux— has been renamed to AlmaLinux. If not, I’d add that to the list, too. Also, if you have 16 or fewer production servers, you can just use RedHat for free. They changed their licensing when they canceled CentOS.

When I was a kid, people who did wrong were punished, restricted, and forbidden. Now, when someone does wrong, all of the rest of us are punished, restricted, and forbidden... and the one who did the wrong is counselled and "understood" and fed ice cream.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-05-07, 12:58

Yeah I could limit to fewer that 16 that run RedHat, but I'd rather not have some limit I forgot about when I needed to spin up a new server.

I've seen those articles looking around and they all seem to want to point to a "CentOS/RHEL" like linux distro. I'm not bent on sticking with them at this point. I guess this is why I end up leaning to Ubuntu. Plus, it is easier to train subodinates how to do basic things since it is so widely supported. Plus, for work, we are cheap and don't want to pay for things.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote
chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2021-05-07, 14:46

I've been on Ubuntu Server for many years and it seems… fine.

Not flawless, though.

One of the things it's really dumb about (maybe they fixed it a while ago?) is that it defaults to a relatively small boot partition, and if you don't reboot it for a while, it'll fetch multiple updates to the kernel until there is too little space on the boot partition to either 1) install any of the updates, or 2) reboot into a new version. If you're not careful, you render it unbootable (by the sheer act of… not having rebooted it).

The thing that screwed me over even harder is when a `sudo do-release-upgrade` decided to remove support for older OpenSSH ciphers, and… locked me out. Completely. Without warning. Wow, thanks folks.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-05-07, 14:50



Thank you for the heads up on that one! I don't reboot that often for these servers but I'll have to pay attention at least. I normally run Zabbix monitoring which specifically monitors free space and all so I should be good there and at least get some notification of some sort from it.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote
Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2021-05-07, 14:51

Yep. I also severely lament the loss of CentOS. I "grew up" learning on Red Hat Linux (before Enterprise) in the early aughts, and continued with RHEL and CentOS in professional and personal settings.

The Ars post Dave linked has an excellent description of how CentOS Stream is built, and its list of RHEL alternatives is pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately, I wouldn't really recommend any of them for reasons varying from trust (Oracle? LOL please) to age/maturity and general adoption rate.

I don't have a lot of long-running Linux machines today, but I'm probably going to slowly transition anything I maintain to some flavor of Debian, maybe Ubuntu if I can cleanly rip out all its telemetry. AppleNova's server here is running a relatively old version of CentOS that has gone through many changes over the years, and I've been meaning to upgrade for a while anyway, but at this point, I'm far more likely to trash and rebuild the whole damn thing clean on Debian stable.

On the professional side, pretty much all my work in recent years has been in Docker containers. Some have been built on UBI (basically "bare-bones RHEL"), alpine, fedora, or any other distro I don't know or care about since it's part of another base image. RHEL or CentOS rarely enter the equation any more.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-05-07, 14:57

I'm starting to delve into Docker now so what do you run the for the Docker Server? I'm toying with Photon right now since mine is primarily in a vCenter environment and it works well with it... shocking I know.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote
Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2021-05-07, 15:06

In case you're not familiar yet with Kubernetes but are interested in Docker images/containers, allow me to blow your mind.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/...is-kubernetes/
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/...ew/components/

Basically, k8s (the common abbreviation for Kubernetes) is this whole open-source orchestration framework/platform/tool for deploying and running containers in a server capacity. There's a lot to learn here, but it's a rabbit hole that I suspect you would enjoy digging through.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if VMware/vCenter has some kind of support for k8s. It's the go-to technology in this space nowadays, and all the major hypervisors, cloud providers, etc. have some flavor of support or integration. Red Hat has a product called OpenShift that's basically k8s with extra features, but I would encourage starting with "plain" Kubernetes before looking into OpenShift.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-05-07, 15:09

I'm glad you mention this! My boss asked me to get familiar with AKS, or Azure Kubernetes Service!

I'll start digging now.
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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2021-05-07, 15:35

Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle View Post
My boss asked me to get familiar with AKS
That sounds like sexual harassment to me!




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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2021-05-07, 15:46

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if VMware/vCenter has some kind of support for k8s.
I know recent versions of VMware have some Docker integration, but not k8s, I think.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-05-07, 18:46

I'll have to check. Production we are still running 6.7 so I'm guessing they don't support it there. I'll dig into that on company time though Monday.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote
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