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January 2016

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Subject:
Re: a year later - CERN move to Centos - what are we doing?
From:
Jim Campbell <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
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Date:
Wed, 13 Jan 2016 10:51:26 -0600
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On Tue, Jan 12, 2016, at 05:43 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 09:48:23AM +0000, lejeczek wrote:
> >
> > I personally am just about to trial a migration from SL7 to Centos.
> > I'm thinking it's inevitable, am I wrong?
> > 
> 
> I tried both SL7 and CentOS7 (and I have CC7 machines running at CERN).
> 
> The installer for both have the same idiotic "you *must* create a fake
> user or no login prompt for you!",
> and the same "you *must* use the disk partition tool designed by dummies
> for dummies".
> 
> So no practical difference at installation. Both installers boot from USB
> flash,
> no need to engrave the ISO images into stone tablets (an improvement over
> SL6).
> 
> After installation, I do not have to setup a local mirror for CentOS7
> repositories - CentOS7 automatically
> finds and downloads all packages from the very super fast mirror at
> SFU.ca. This is
> compared to SL7 which very-very-very-very-very-very slowly slowly slowly
> downloads all packages from Fermilab.
> 
> So one difference there.

Others have covered some of the points here. With regards to the mirrors
and download speed, it seems that CentOS installs the yum-fastestmirror
package by default, while perhaps Scientific Linux does not. I don't
really see this as a big issue for SL, though. If you install the
yum-fastestmirror package, you won't default to downloading from the
Fermilab repositories.

There are a good number of SL mirrors available, too, so I don't want
people to think of package download speed as some kind of disadvantage
for SL.

As I understand it, one of the key values of SL is that it allows you to
stay on a point release and obtain only security fixes for your packages
(someone else mentioned this, too). This is important when running
scientific experiments where you can't allow changes in software to
impact your research results. Unless something has changed, neither
CentOS nor the North American Upstream Vendor provide this service. This
feature from Scientific Linux is a valuable one if you need it.

Jim

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