Reaction to Announcement Concerning CentOS

[soxfan]

I have to say I'm pretty disappointed to see this post. I've been a long time Zimbra FOSS user under CentOS, and have what I consider a pretty large installation (over 400 users, with around 130 GB of email total). I know that CentOS has never been officially supported, but it certainly seems to be widely used and often times even a suggested platform on these forums. Frankly the prospect of moving to Ubuntu, as suggested, does not excite me at all. I've been using RedHat and it's derivatives (Fedora, CentOS) since the RH 5.0 days. I know Ubuntu is widely used and gets great reviews, but whenever I've tried it there have been just enough differences to make me go back to using the RH line. I guess it goes along with the saying "you stick with what you know". Of course my other option it to buy a RedHat license, but even in this case there is going to be some type of operating system change, which I am not really prepared to get into.

As I said, I know CentOS has never been officially supported, but on the other hand I don't think I've ever seen any requests for help with it on these forums responded to with "use a supported OS" answer. I now fear with this announcement that we will start to see that happen.

I've been using CentOS for a while now, not just with Zimbra, and have never run into any incompatibility issues when trying to run stuff certified to RHEL. I'm sure someone will be quick to point out that I am wrong, but isn't the stated goal of CentOS to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL. Can anyone give me a good answer to why this issue with Scalar::Util has come about, and why CentOS differs from RHEL?

[rwc101010]

An enhancement request for Official CentOS Support has been filed in Bugzilla - Bug 23487.

Those interested in Official CentOS Support should go vote for it to show their interest.

[soxfan]

Thanks; I just voted for it. Although I'm using the FOSS version I'm assuming if it became supported for NE it would be supported for FOSS as well.

I saw the announcement and immediately posted my semi-rant. Didn't even realize that there was already another fairly long thread already started on the subject. That's what I get for not searching before posting.

[rwc101010]

We've all been there

Take care!

Robert

[KLGNT]

While I tend to agree about CentOS. I don't consider Ubuntu by any means an enterprise ready distro. Releasing a server version doesn't make it one. Until Ubuntu server is tried and tested, and until it has proper, decent admin tools and interface, I don't see supporting it over CentOS or others.

Meanwhile, I'd love to see 64bit OpenSUSE 10.2 supported. Though I do appreciate the 32bit support. Does anyone know if the 32bit version runs well on 64bit OpenSUSE? I have the 32bit compatibility packages installed.

[mmorse]

Please see: To our CentOS users

[KLGNT]

I appreciate your response, but, the main point of my post wasn't the issue with Perl, which I had read about. But rather the point that if CentOS isn't supported, then why on earth would Ubuntu be not only supported, but recommended? Especially given it's new and unproven status in a server role.

I know Ubuntu has generated a lot of zealous support in the desktop space, however that means nothing as for server use. Not only that but a lot of what makes Ubuntu desktop so appealing to desktop users, particularly it's simplicity and minimal configuration options, makes it less desirable as a server OS.

[hughesjr]

just to take this full circle, addressing the issue with Scalar::Util there is no difference in installing Zimbra on RHEL-4 and CentOS-4.

The issue that seems to have been encountered is one where the CentOSPlus version of perl (5.8.8) is installed and not the normal centos version (5.8.5) for CentOS-4.

This same issue also occurs if the Red Hat Web Application stack is installed on RHEL-4.

(This is certainly expected as the CentOSPlus CentOS-4 version is the same version as the RHWAS RHEL-4 version of perl, that is where CentOS got its source)

I do think it is wise for the CentOS users here to push for official CentOS support ... I am quite tired of people treating CentOS like a second class OS. I know that a significant portion of the install base for the FOSS version of Zimbra and probably a fairly large number of the paid versions are running on CentOS, so please let Zimbra know that you need support.

I am very happy with the Zimbra team's troubleshooting with this issue though, they did a good job and I appreciate the second announcement very much. This is not in any way to be negative to the zimbra developers, but CentOS needs to be legitimized as a supported OS.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes
CentOS Developer

[p24t]

Personally, I've been using Ubuntu for my Zimbra server for a little while now. I like Ubuntu, since it's essentially Debian. I've had fairly good luck with it so far, and there haven't been too many major 'wtf' issues that don't make sense. (I think the one thing I hate the most is the server install doesn't install ssh server by default.)

As for CentOS... How can Zimbra be blamed? CentOS is supposed to be '100% Binary Compatible' isn't it? So how can you expect that Zimbra should test against it, when, if it works with RedHat, it's supposed to work with CentOS?

Is Zimbra supposed to bring another distro into this? What does that mean? Well, since it's supposed to be 100% RH-like, they don't need to create a version for CentOS, instead they need to go through CentOS with a fine tooth comb, and find any differences between that and RedHat. I don't know how much of an issue the Scalar::Util is, nor the changes required to make things work properly. However, this is only one potential problem.

What happens when they have a working distribution of NE for Cent? They have to support it now. This means that any other issues between RH and Cent are now their problem. What do you do when a paying customer says "This isn't working," and the problem isn't reproducable on a RH system? Then they would have to dissect CentOS to find out potentially minute differences between it and the baseline RH.

Then, what about the next 'change' CentOS has? When will that next deviation be? What will it be? How pissed off are the customers going to be when it happens, and Zimbra has to race around to try to fix CentOS's problem?

I can see that people would want to use CentOS. However, don't blame Zimbra for something that CentOS has changed.

[fernandoflorez]

I'm not sure why zimbra doesn't support centos but could it be because of os support? If zimbra clients use centos who will give them os support? zimbra?

Could be but i doubt it is, that zimbra only supports red hat installations because of a *partnership* with red hat?

Just thinking out loud...