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Tim Starling wrote:
Would it be a
dumb question to ask if anyone considered CentOS 5?
Yes it was on the list. Note that the migration problem is not Red Hat
versus Debian, rather it's source install versus package. We could have
migrated to Ubuntu and used the same source install scripts, slightly
modified for the new build environment. But we decided to use packages
instead.
It is, alas, harder to create and update custom-patched packages than
whipping together quickie patch && configure && make && make
install
scripts.
However packages are usually nicer to deploy, since the package manager
can deal with dependencies, and our customized packages don't need to
conflict confusingly with the ones in the base distro. New-server
installation is faster and easier; particularly for servers which don't
maintain state data -- like plain Apache/PHP boxes and Squid proxies --
installation and upgrades are a cinch.
The transitioning of old web servers though is complicated by the way
we've mixed text-storage nodes in with the web servers -- we can't
simply do a bulk wipe-and-reinstall or we'd lose the data.
This remains a work in progress. We've decommissioned nearly all of the
old 32-bit servers (and all of those in the Apache core cluster),
leaving us with a consistent x86_64 hardware platform. (Yay!) Mark and
Rob have been working on finishing up the software consistency,
migrating more of the old Fedora machines as we figure out the best way
to do it without breaking text storage.
- -- brion
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