[SOLVED] Re: CentOS Official Support

[hughesjr]

dijichi2,

I suggest that you look at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ (while logged in) and do a search for CentOS.

The CentOS Project identifies (and SOLVES) many problems there. I will point you to two bugs on our bugzilla where we called out and worked in conjuection w/ Red Hat to solve problems ... there are dozens more:

0002189: CentOS is not getting optimal performance in a virtualized environment and on slow cpus - CentOS Bug Tracker

0001776: kernel panic because of a bug in the cifs module - CentOS Bug Tracker

Is Red Hat legally pirating pidgin or KDE or OpenOffice.org? Please.

[dijichi2]

Originally Posted by uxbod

"In essence, as a paying customer of Redhat, I am paying for all of you that run CentOS - it is a form of legal piracy."
No your paying for commercial support!

No, I'm paying to login to rhn and download prepared ISOs, register the server against rhn and automatic 'guaranteed' updates, and the 'right' to use the commercialised OS. I'm paying for the years of engineering and testing that redhat have done to improve the GNU/Linux OS. The Redhat business model says they make their money from support, but in reality you need to pay for the product to legitimately use it as well, supported or not. I pay the minimum for most of my servers, I don't even think I get any support with that, but it's extremely important that I can get it if I need it. Business critical servers I do pay for support contract, although I very rarely if ever use it.

Originally Posted by uxbod

So, what about all the people who are sat at home fixing bugs in RH and feeding them back in? Do you think RH are paying them?

I doubt anyone (or very few, anyway) sits at home fixing bugs in RHEL for the good of the community. Fedora perhaps, but then they're getting a free OS in return.

Originally Posted by uxbod

2) "what person with the ultimate responsibility for IT in these corporates would in their right mind would go for the unsupported software?"

But they still use M$ products aswell

Not sane people

[hughesjr]

For the record, I did the centos search on bugzilla.redhat.com ... the results are:

758 bugs found. (number of RHEL bugs centos and our users have mentioned centos in .. many more where it is not mentioned but centos is envolved).

CentOS Developers find and fix bugs (and report these fixes upstream) on a regular daily basis. CentOS has a higher volume General Discussion mailing list than all the ones for RHEL and Zimbra combined.

CentOS has an estimated 2-3 millions unique IPs download yum updates in any 6 month period and nearly 200 mirrors worldwide.

CentOS finished 6th in the Linux Foundation 2007 Desktop Survey ... we are not even a Desktop OS.

But I digress.

[uxbod]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

I doubt anyone (or very few, anyway) sits at home fixing bugs in RHEL for the good of the community. Fedora perhaps, but then they're getting a free OS in return.

You would be amazed how many do, and especially people from other large O/S providers. Just take a look on the HP website. And the support their staff provide in there own spare time.

Everybody has their own view on this matter, but IMHO CentOS fills a needed enterprise grade Linux void. I have been a long time Gentoo user, and only recently switched to CentOS as I do not have the time anymore to compile up all my code, and tune the hell out of it CentOS just works and I love it. Zimbra just works and I love it. To me it is a great combination, and *very*stable when teamed up.

[dijichi2]

Originally Posted by uxbod

You would be amazed how many do, and especially people from other large O/S providers. Just take a look on the HP website. And the support their staff provide in there own spare time.

HP make a lot of money from Redhat - company I work for has bought many thousands of HP servers specifically to run various flavours of linux on. The likes of HP, IBM, Dell, *should* be submitting fixes to the benefit of Linux as it drives their sales, and mostly the fixes make linux run better on their hardware.

The previous replies from hughesjr about upstream bugs in the redhat bugzilla is very interesting though, and certainly is a really very good thing for redhat and the community. I didn't know that, and certainly it paints CentOS in a good light, as does the point from rwc101010 that it possibly drives the sales of RHEL (which interestingly is a similar argument frequently made in favour of pirated commercial software) - CentOS certainly has a vibrant community and clearly a good number of customers here like it. What doesn't paint CentOS in a good light is posts from apparently associated people like z00dax who although provided me with a good laugh, sound like a rabid 12-yr old fanboy sitting in his mothers basement and as a company would make me run a mile.

I'll bow out of the discussion here, I've given my opinion and am neither qualified or placed to continue it.

[rwc101010]

You know, it just struck me while re-reading the thread . . .

Originally Posted by dijichi2

For the sake of a few hundred quid a year, what person with the ultimate responsibility for IT in these corporates would in their right mind would go for the unsupported software?

There's a BIG difference between Network Edition customers that are resale based service providers, and those that are Corporate IT shops maintaining Zimbra for their own employee use only.

The two models have vastly different support, operational and regulatory requirements - and have vastly different budgets for maintaining such infrastructures. I wonder how many Network Edition CentOS users are service providers vs the number of internal IT groups . . .

Something to ponder as we argue about the one 'true' source for all our bugs, and how sane our operating decisions are

Robert

[uxbod]

A lot does come down to who is running/maintaining the servers. If I were not Linux savy then I would look to commercial support for the O/S, but as such I can support most O/S and would prefer to spend my/companies money elsewhere.

This has been a very good open discussion and should provide some valuable information to both Zimbra and CentOS.

Certainly felt like the FOSS community coming together as one big happy family

[hughesjr]

A couple more little known facts:

CentOS powers one of the largest clusters in the world:

TACC > HPC Systems

Look at Ranger, a 3,936 node, 62,976 processor cluster that has 504 TFlop/s rating (based on CentOS). it should be #1 on the top 500 the list (current leader is only 478.2 TFlop/s) when it next comes out.

CentOS also powers one of the largest computer clusters in Australia::

Supercomputer overhaul is out of this world - Technology - smh.com.au

I think it will run Zimbra on a mail server OK too :-)

Also ... just a couple more stats to throw out there:

Google Trends: zimbra, centos

zimbra.com - Traffic Details from Alexa

(on the alexa site, do a compare of traffic for Zimbra.com and CentOS.org)

So, it seems Zimbra has been bought by Yahoo! ... has almost all the news articles. However, it appears that CentOS has more traffic (alexa) and searches (google trends).

On a side note, I would be glad to build CentOS Binaries for either the Open Source or the Network Edition if Zimbra is so inclined.

[Diluted]

I am running CentOS 5 and Zimbra 5.0GA NE,

so far have had no problem? IS this something I can expect to crop up and has anyone gotten a fix for it yet?

Thanks.

[hughesjr]

diluted,

Probably not. The main issue (as I understand it) that people have been talking about is one of a perl module (Scalar::Util).

If you can do this:

http://www.zimbra.com/forums/install...html#post72213

That is, run the /tmp/system.pl file that quanha has shown there, then you should be OK.