Will 11.4 install on Fedora Core 8?

[jnavas]

At this point, since Fedora Core 9 is already out, I was expecting that 11.4 would be based on Fedora 8. Are there any plans for Scalix to also install on Fedora 8?

Julio

[kanderson]

It doesn't matter. Install on CentOS 5.1

Installing on Fedora is a mistake. It's ONLY supported for testing, not production.

Literally, the post before this is a reply to someone who asked for assistance upgrading on an unsupported platform. And their easiest solution will be to migrate.

Learn from their mistake, and install on CentOS, RHEL or SLES. Nothing else.

Kev.

[Valerion]

Agreed. Doing FC (and OSS to a lesser extent) is playing the forced-upgrade game. There's a reason Scalix only recommends FC on evaluation platforms, not production ones.

I have had to have this fight with far too many CE/SBE customers. Upgrading takes hours or days instead of minutes (doing a full machine backup, then uninstall Scalix, then upgrade the platform, then install Scalix, then find out what ELSE broke due to the upgrade). Ends up costing them an enormous amount of money for my time to do it. And I would rather spend that time on something else. So these days I am tempted tell OSS and FC customers that they are on their own WRT upgrades. Install CentOS and I will help to the best of my abilities.

[les]

and heres strike 3 for fedora......and its out!

Move to CentOS, save yourself a world of pain.

Since Fedora 9 has been released, in the space of 10 days i have seen 337 update notifications!!!!!

Thats just way, way, way too many for a production mail server. I also heard that a lot of the packages released in FC9 were considered "alpha", hence the large number of updates.

In the same period FC8 had 153 updates.

On the other hand, one of my servers....CentOS in the same period - 4 updates (and 5 additional updates from a 3rd party repo).

CentOS is much more stable.

[florian]

yup, we usually opt for stability over currency - good for servers.

I would also recommend using CentOS. For Fedora support, we remained at F7 for 11.4, will probably flip to F9 for the next one and skip F8 completely. (Note that since 7 it's actually no longer Fedora Core, just Fedora)

Cheers,
Florian.

[kanderson]

***Warning in advance. This is a personal pet peeve, and this is a rant about it. ***

Just drop support for Fedora and OpenSuse.

PLEASE.

I bet 1/4 of the questions on these forums are related to this exact issue. And it'll never end. We all know it, but by providing users with the ability to install onto it, they don't see the extent of the problem until it's too late. Just stop supporting it. Period.

At MINIMUM, Face the installer with a popup at install time that says, bluntly...

"I realize that installing on this OS is for testing only and there is NO, as in zero, supported upgrade path for it. Scalix does not support it, and I accept that experienced users on the forums will tell me to migrate when I require assistance with this."

Make them agree, by typing the full paragraph in rather than just y/n or even Yes/No. Make it case sensitive. Hide a few leading and trailing spaces. Basically design it to COMPLETELY tick off the user before they ever get the software installed, so they are used to it when they see that it will be their future on these platforms.

But a better option is to just drop support completely.

You're better off ticking off a user before they get into production with it, than having them find out they're screwed after they're tied to it. Yes, I'm comfortable, as are you with upgrading them. But users who choose Fedora are typically users who don't understand why one distro matters over the other. That means they are frustrated with Scalix for letting them come down a path that has effectively screwed them. *I* understand that it's their fault. But they don't. And no amount of Les, Kanderson, Florian, Valerion, etc telling them that it's not a Scalix problem will covince them otherwise. ESPECIALLY after they tell their boss that they're looking at a weekend of downtime after promising that upgrades are a 10 minute process. The tech looks stupid. The company is frustrated. Forums support is useless because we'll effectively tell the people they're stupid (though in better wording) and they'll have no good solution, especially if they're small, because this really should be done with 2 servers, and most small businesses (which is who dfoes this) don't have a server laying around that they can use for this migration. Then, if they try it with a single server, and something is wrong with the backup (which is REALLY possible with small businesses and users that don't understand Linux well, which is (again) the people who are doing this) they lose all data on their server because their backup sucks. Which again, will be perceived (fairly or not) as a Scalix problem. And the result is that Scalix is too hard to use and maintain. So Linux is smeared and so is Scalix. The real problem is that the user is inexperienced, but we're enabling them to do something stupid, and frankly, I think we're encouraging it by allowing them to install on a platform that we clearly say we won't support.

Clearly, this is a pet peeve of mine. I apologize for the rant. But with 11.4 now offering full, official support for a community OS, I can't think of a single reason to support OpenSuse or Fedora. And in the last 24 hours, I've watched person after person make the stupid mistake of putting their job and their company email at risk by installing to a platform that we don't support and have no intention of supporting.

This is about as sensible as spending time making Scalix run in Cygwin, so people could test it on their desktops.

We "enforce" ram limits, Disk limits, DNS checks, all this other stuff, so that the user has a correctly working server. Why on earth do we provide a path that breaks all of this? Fixing a problem where a user installs on a server with 512M of RAM on CentOS is FAR easier to fix than a situation where a user installs onto 16G of RAM, but only has Fedora running underneath, and needs to upgrade.

Florian, you can put me in my place here, I KNOW it's a personal pet peeve, and I'm overly sensitive here. But every one of the "Scalix Stars" has told people DO NOT RUN Fedora/OpenSuSE. Scalix employees have said it too. Scalix should not waste the time offering it. It only -- ONLY -- Brings grief. Period. Nothing good comes of it, ever, and that will never change.

***Rant Ended***

Kev.

[les]

I agree with Kev.

The frustrating thing about this is that 9 times out of 10 when a new post hits the forums, that user has not searched the forums to look for "Fedora related" posts, and they are looking at a specific problem (a lot of upgrade issues). They're not searching for whether or not Fedora is a good choice, they've already made that decision long ago when they first downloaded and installed Scalix. And a lot of them don't want to be bombarded with "dont use Fedora..." responses, they just want a problem resolved.
So they end up stuck. If they had realized it wasn't a good option for a production server beforehand then maybe they would have went with RHEL or Suse or CentOS originally.

The people who use Fedora/OpenSuse have always used those distros and because its listed on the download page as a supported platform, (most people wont see, or ignore the small print where its not recommended for production) they'll continue to do so.

Even those who use Debian still will put Scalix on Debian using the manual install instructions, but at least its a bit more clear that Debian is an unsupported platform. Nonetheless people still use it, ignoring the warnings. They still post to the forums about issues, however not as often as Fedora/ Opensuse users.

Fedora, Opensuse, Ubuntu might be great as workstations, but as production servers no way! Stick to supported RedHat, CentOS or Suse Enterprise.

Fedora/ OpenSuse should come under the same guise as Debian - an unsupported platform. the download page should not list Fedora or OpenSuse at all in the "Supported Operating Systems" section.