[Beowulf] [External] RIP CentOS 8 [EXT]

Prentice Bisbal pbisbal at pppl.gov
Thu Dec 10 17:47:15 UTC 2020


I have had the same experience as you, but we represent only 2 data 
points in a large market. I think many decision-makers like to pay for 
support as a form of "insurance" for when the s**t hits the fan and 
system goes terribly wrong. I have worked at a couple of different 
places that paid for RHEL, the whole time thinking that "open-source 
support", like this mailing list and others is usually more effective 
than RHEL support. In fact from my limited support with RHEL, their 
answer is usually "won't fix".

Prentice

On 12/8/20 8:08 PM, Tim Cutts wrote:
> I don’t know how often we ever actually used Red Hat support for RHEL 
> itself.  Very rarely, I suspect.  Even before they hiked the price on 
> us, I expect we effectively paid them several thousand dollars per 
> support call.
>
> Some of the other products, like RH OpenStack Platform, yes, but not 
> for the OS itself.
>
> Tim
>
>> On 8 Dec 2020, at 22:25, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf 
>> <beowulf at beowulf.org <mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>> wrote:
>>
>> I think it has mostly to do with user support. The biggest innovation 
>> on moving from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux was the 
>> addition of user support. Corporations like having someone to call 
>> when something goes wrong. No one wants to hear "read the source" 
>> when the corporate mailserver is down and 5,000 employees are no 
>> longer productive.
>>
>> Red Hat providing user support was actually a big deal for the Linux 
>> community. In the early days of Linux, many 3rd parties tried to make 
>> Linux acceptable to corporate users by providing Linux support 
>> services, but they never really caught. Probably because they weren't 
>> tied to a particular distro, so they weren't perceived as as "expert" 
>> as when the vendor itself is providing support.
>>
>> On top of that, Red Hat worked with hardware and software vendors to 
>> get them to support their products on Red Hat. It wasn't long after 
>> RHEL was introduced that you started seeing hardware and software 
>> advertising that it was supported on RHEL.
>>
>> Combine these two, and you have a recipe for success: People are more 
>> likely to use a version of Linux that comes with user support and 
>> that they know is supported by the hardware/software they use.
>>
>> To this day, I rarely see hardware/software advertised/documented as 
>> supporting anything other than RHEL. Fortunately, many of those 
>> vendors would treat CentOS and Scientific Linux the same as RHEL for 
>> support reasons. At least that has been my experience.
>>
>> Prentice
>>
>> On 12/8/20 4:50 PM, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote:
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> what I never understood is: why are people not using Debian?
>>>
>>> I done some cluster installation (up to 100 or so nodes) with 
>>> Debian, more or
>>> less out of the box, and I did not have any issue with it. I admit, 
>>> I might
>>> have missed out something I don't know about, the famous 
>>> unkown-unkowns, but
>>> by enlarge the clusters were running rock solid with no unusual problem.
>>> I did not use Lustre or GPFS etc. on it, I only played around a bit 
>>> with BeeFS
>>> and some GlusterFS in a small scale.
>>>
>>> Just wondering, as people mentioned Ubuntu.
>>>
>>> All the best from a dark London
>>>
>>> Jörg
>>>
>>> Am Dienstag, 8. Dezember 2020, 21:12:02 GMT schrieb Christopher Samuel:
>>>> On 12/8/20 1:06 pm, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
>>>>> I wouldn't be surprised if this causes Scientific Linux to come back
>>>>> into existence.
>>>> It sounds like Greg K is already talking about CentOS-NG (via the ACM
>>>> SIGHPC syspro Slack):
>>>>
>>>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.linkedin.com_posts_gmkurtzer-5Fcentos-2Dproject-2Dshifts-2Dfocus-2Dto-2Dcent&d=DwIGaQ&c=D7ByGjS34AllFgecYw0iC6Zq7qlm8uclZFI0SqQnqBo&r=gSesY1AbeTURZwExR_OGFZlp9YUzrLWyYpGmwAw4Q50&m=1zMuvRcDfPSs1bANcWt31ZL0d4u1U_-l2LyThS2cBqA&s=dlpDfQGFW4_JAdHq9LqE8XQAhSP4ETJdIFc5Dh25uzg&e= 
>>>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.linkedin.com_posts_gmkurtzer-5Fcentos-2Dproject-2Dshifts-2Dfocus-2Dto-2Dcent&d=DwIGaQ&c=D7ByGjS34AllFgecYw0iC6Zq7qlm8uclZFI0SqQnqBo&r=gSesY1AbeTURZwExR_OGFZlp9YUzrLWyYpGmwAw4Q50&m=1zMuvRcDfPSs1bANcWt31ZL0d4u1U_-l2LyThS2cBqA&s=dlpDfQGFW4_JAdHq9LqE8XQAhSP4ETJdIFc5Dh25uzg&e=>os-stream-activity-6742165208107761664-Ng4C
>>>>
>>>> All the best,
>>>> Chris
>>>
>>>
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>>
>> --
>> Prentice Bisbal
>> Lead Software Engineer
>> Research Computing
>> Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.pppl.gov&d=DwIGaQ&c=D7ByGjS34AllFgecYw0iC6Zq7qlm8uclZFI0SqQnqBo&r=gSesY1AbeTURZwExR_OGFZlp9YUzrLWyYpGmwAw4Q50&m=1zMuvRcDfPSs1bANcWt31ZL0d4u1U_-l2LyThS2cBqA&s=OLkw1toryrQl2g94ZNH2thHpCsYM1rlF30AXaiqMpCM&e= 
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>
> -- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research 
> Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a 
> company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered 
> office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. 

-- 
Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov

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