[RndTbl] Opinions on Fedora Server

[Alberto Abrao]

Thanks for your input Trevor.

A little of background:

I am a big Fedora fan for my desktop machines.

My use case is a server for my things+wife's and family's small business 
back home. It's Nextcloud and, after the latest redeployment, e-mail. It 
runs right here at my house, and is nothing more than consumer hardware 
on a regular case.

It started with CentOS 7 from May/2018 up to Jan/2020, and, along with 
Nextcloud and sans e-mail, it had extra duties such as being an router 
and Samba server for my internal network. Other than a few updates 
coughing up a hairball because of the extra repos I added for Nextcloud, 
it didn't give me a lot of trouble. For the few times it did, a few 
minutes of searching and/or raw bravery were enough to get it back up. I 
even switched it from one machine to another out of boredom... a few 
times. In retrospect, I was kind of trying to break it, but never 
managed to. It was never down for more than a few minutes other than 
regular hardware upkeep and, of course, moving it to different hardware. 
Manitoba Hydro, however, did fry its PSU at one point, and that was its 
longest downtime because I was 300kms away, so kudos to them! =D

At that point, I was playing - and learning - a lot on it, the whole 
thing was rough around the edges. Not to mention that I was finally able 
to have my local network duties on another piece of equipment. It was 
time for a refresh.

Moved to Debian on Jan/2020 soon after I moved to Winnipeg, and it's 
running great. That's when I decided to try Debian on everything - 
including workstations. But something about Debian irks me. Maybe the 
package management system? I don't know for sure.

So today I was moving my laptop back to Fedora and I realized... why not 
run that on a server just for fun? Going by what you are telling me, 
well, I have no issues with troubleshooting the odd thing at random 
times, I find it fun to be honest. So I might as well run it. Keeps me 
sharp.

Once again, thanks for your input!

Alberto Abrao
204-202-1778
204-558-6886

On 2020-03-24 11:25 p.m., Trevor Cordes wrote:
> On 2020-03-24 Alberto Abrao wrote:
>> Does anyone have experience with Fedora Server on a (semi) production
>> setting? If yes, care to share your opinions? Thank you!
> I've used Fedora in a server setting on dozens of computers since
> Fedora 1.  I still use it exclusively (well, except 1 box I'm forced to
> use RHEL on).  All production settings!
>
> Pros:
> - Always near the latest kernel for all the latest h/w support and bug
>    fixes and new features; Linus uses it for this reason
> - Bleeding edge of nearly everything, never sitting there wishing for
>    the newest features in this or that or compiling things yourself or
>    having to fudge new-on-old with containers, etc
> - Very professional distro: Fedora today is RHEL in 2-4 years
> - Upgrading to next Fedora version is easy and very reliable, many of
>    my boxes are upgrades from 1 to 2 to 3 to ... 30.  Yes, really: Same
>    installs going for 16+ years.
>
> Cons:
> - Must upgrade every 12ish months (if you skip a release) to keep
>    getting updates
> - You'll see the bugs first before the other distros do; mitigate
>    slightly by staying on the next-to-latest Fedora
>
>
> There will be a lot of Sayers of Nay, but don't listen to them if you
> have the smarts and fortitude to live a bit more on the edge.  You also
> get to be a bigger part of the development, guidance and bug-fixing
> process by using Fedora.  Also, there's always CentOS if you want the
> RHEL world without the for-pay aspect, or if one box needs to be a
> little less edgy.  And RHEL if your box is being used for a
> money-no-object purpose.  And if you know one of those 3 distros, you
> know them all.