[Asterisk-Users] Fedora Core 3 or Fedora Core 4? yum update ornot?

[Matt Roth]

Keep in mind that if you want to run Asterisk Business Edition, RedHat 
Enterprise 3 or Fedora Core 3 are currently required in order to receive 
full technical support.  My options were narrowed down further by the 
amount of RAM in our production server.  It has 20GBs, and all of the 
documentation for RHEL3 mentioned limits below that.  I don't know if 
those are hard limits or tech support limits, but either way it made the 
choice to use FC3 obvious.

There is a lot of talk about the instability of Fedora Core as a 
production server, but in my experience it's been very stable.  It's 
helpful that the Asterisk server doesn't need to be visible outside of 
our network, so I don't have to be as diligent about updates.  
Generally, it's best to have a dedicated machine for Asterisk and this 
adds another good reason why to the list.  If your Asterisk box is a 
database server, ftp server, and web server as well, you could probably 
save yourself a lot of headaches by offloading those tasks to another 
machine.

That said, I am concerned about ABE's reliance on FC3/RHEL3.  FC5 test 
releases are available and FC3 is being moved to Fedora Legacy, so it 
seems like a good time to look at supporting ABE on FC4 as well.  If you 
are interested, there is a lot of talk about the effects of FC3 moving 
on the Fedora users list <https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/> 
under the subject "Fedora Core 3 Transferred to Fedora Legacy".

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer

Ryan Amos wrote:

>This is turning into a sysadmin theory flamewar, but I think the main
>point is that Fedora probably isn't the best thing to run on production
>machines for QA reasons. This is because Fedora is more or less the QA
>testbed for RHEL. CentOS is, for all intents and purposes (except a
>little bug I discovered with large block devices >2 TB) the same as RHEL
>without the support contract, so it is probably a better choice for a
>server you want to keep working for a while.
>
>Debian stable would probably work just as well (though IMO debian tends
>to be a bit TOO old,) as would SUSE's stable release version. Just don't
>use a "testing" release on a production machine. "yum update" (or
>up2date, or apt) is pretty safe on "stable" release trees, but in the
>testing releases you can run into problems with package dependencies,
>versions, slowly updated mirrors... you get the point.
>
>-Ryan
>