On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Kelvin Raywood wrote:

> Some comments from TRIUMF's perspective.  We use CentOS on servers and SL on 
> desktops so my comments are heavily biased towards what our desktop users 
> need.

Just a note to add that the T1 Centre (separate from TRIUMF central computing)
is a heavy user of SL: except on a handful of Red Hat servers, the Tier-1 data
centre uses SL on all of its Linux nodes - some 40+ servers, 20+ xen guests,
and 230+ worker nodes.

SL vs CentOS
   What we like about SL that differentiates it from CentOS is that we
   can stay at a sub-release and update to the next minor release when
   convenient for us, because of SL's policy of providing security updates
   on previous releases.  I always grit my teeth when our RH 4 servers bump
   up to the next minor release - a flood of updates follow, and on
   production servers it can be an adventure to decide what to update
   without putting services at risk.
   I think it is good that SL continues as a separate entity (from CentOS) -
   more diversity in the ecosystem.

Java
   I am also in favour of dropping Sun's java rpms.  I do as Kel does - generate
   a jpackage-style java RPM (without the desktop stuff) for gLite services
   and dCache servers.  Otherwise, on SL5 nodes, I use openjdk where I can.
   Who knows anyway what Oracle's java rpms will look like in the future?

Repositories
   Because we are constrained by gLite/LCG/EGEE/EGI software requirements
   we need to control carefully which repositories we expose to our servers.
   So we use a custom t1-yum-conf rpm that obsoletes any yum configuration
   rpms in SL and tailors our configuration as required.   So from our
   perspective, it doesn't matter what SL does with yum configurations as long
   as we can override it without too many problems.

Kernel Modules
   I like the kmod-style of kernel modules.  I have been experimenting with
   them and generally like the idea.

cheers, etc.
-- 
deatrich @ triumf.ca, Science/Atlas         PH: +1 604-222-7665
<*> This moment's fortune cookie:
A little inaccuracy saves a world of explanation.
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