Fedora - The Wrong Hat

I've come to realise that I've made a mistake in moving to Fedora after somebody posted on http://www.fedoraforum.org/ about the imminent release of Core 7 and I asked how people go on for upgrading/reinstalling on servers when they can't afford much down time. The bottom line is that I shouldn't be using Fedora on such a machine.

It was explained to me (heaven knows how I'd missed it) that the whole idea of Fedora is that it is where all the front line cutting edge development is taking place and that while it's great for those who want to be involved with that, it's not the right choice for somebody who want's an as stable as it's possible to be platform on which to host business websites.

I was even more surprised to find that the guys on the forum suggested that I'd be much better off using CentOS i.e. the very OS that I've just moved away from (because I've always found it difficult to get information about it). Once again however, I've been making a big mistake in that my previous server was set up with CentOS and Blue Quartz and I failed to differentiate between the two. It seems that I must have done my searching on Blue Quartz because the only resource of any significance that I was aware of was bluequartz.org which is pretty useless. Had I gone looking for CentOS instead I would have found centos.org and two minutes reading the FAQ would have told me that CentOS is almost exactly the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux so any book on RHEL would have told me what I wanted to know IF it were not for the Blue Quartz interface. Doh! It seems therefore that what I should have done, rather than moving to Fedora, was to move to another server with CentOS but without Blue Quartz and bought myself a book on RHEL.

Now that I'm here, and tied into a 12 month lease, I guess I'll just have to live with it however this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Since moving to Fedora I've learned quite a bit about the command line and that should stand me in good stead for moving back to CentOS (or indeed any other flavour of Linux) at the end of the lease.

I have to say however that once again I find myself being a little bit miffed at the company from whom I hire the server because, given the nature of Fedora as I now understand it, I'm inclined to question whether or not it is appropriate for them to be offering it as an option.