Re: Goodbye Fedora!

Mladen Gogala wrote:
> I wrote more then one post on this group about installing Oracle on
> Fedora, for various versions of Fedora. Fedora has always been a bleeding
> edge endeavour, which helped finding tools and products to use with the
> future versions of Red Hat Linux and Oracle.
>
> At the moment, I am running Oracle11 on Fedora8 and investigating things
> like "Systemtap" (Linux version of Solaris dtrace), iotop (an excellent
> monitor showing the most I/O intensive processes) or a bit more
> sophisticated version called "atop", all of which are available for Linux
> kernel versions 2.6.20+, not yet available in any of the "enterprise"
> distributions.
>
> All was well, Fedora was providing the bleeding edge environment for those
> of us who didn't mind living dangerously and toiling to find workarounds
> for numerous problems. All was well, that is, until Fedora 9. Fedora 9
> decided to break with sysvinit standard and decided to go with a poorly
> documented thing called "upstart". Upstart is used by Ubuntu, as a matter
> of fact, it is a part of the Ubuntu project and can be looked at here:
> http://upstart.ubuntu.com
>
> One tab on the web page that is absent is called "Documentation". This
> thing that is supposed to replace sysvinit, no less, is not even
> documented! Nothing, nada, zilch, no documentation whatsoever!
> No "enterprise" distributions have announced an intent to adopt the
> "upstart" software, which means that Fedora will no longer resemble the
> venerable Red Hat's "Enterprise Level" Linux. As an Oracle DBA, I was
> using Fedora to train myself and adopt new technologies when they find
> the way into "RHEL" version. This is, obviously, not a good platform any
> more. Oracle doesn't show any signs of supporting Ubuntu, either. My
> next chosen distribution is OpenSuSE. Does anybody have any experience
> or recommendations? Fedora is, simply put, no longer an option.
> It was nice while it lasted.

I'm not entirely sure what your issue is. Whilst upstart might be all new, all-singing and all-dancing, boring old init scripts will still get your Oracle instances started automatically in Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9. It's not like Oracle doesn't work on those distros, in short, in exactly the same way they did in Fed8 and U710.

In any case, it's been apparent since about Fedora Core 4 that Fedora was a seriously wacky distro to use for Oracle purposes. The only surprise in this quarter is that you are surprised to discover the fact.

The only sensible recommendation as far as Oracle-on-Linux-on-the- cheap is concerned, I think, has been the same for the past four years or so: stick with Centos. And dabble with OpenSolaris whilst you're at it to keep up to date with the sort of tools (like dtrace) that are slowly filtering down to the masses.

Meanwhile, it's evident that no matter what has been announced, if upstart and its ilk are any good, they will eventually make it into Enterprise distros, even if it won't be until RHES7 or so. By which time, Fedora users will presumably be old hands at it and you'll have yourself a competitive advantage.

I don't, in short, see what the problem is. Fedora has always been iffy. It's no more iffy now than it was back when. There are perfectly good and very much non-iffy distros at your disposal (and I'd suggest OpenSuse wasn't one of them). And even the iffy ones teach you things which will, one day, be of use in an Enterprise setting. And I'd still be working hard with openSolaris if I were you! Received on Sun Jun 08 2008 - 02:41:18 CDT