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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