Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Always Learning]

On Mon, 2015-12-07 at 14:27 -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:

> I've been pleased that the folks on this list have been solicited
> several times in the last six months for our opinions.

??? 


-- 
Regards,

Paul.
England, EU.  England's place is in the European Union.

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Lamar Owen]

On 12/11/2015 06:45 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
On the other hand, it would be relatively easy to determine the number 
of CentOS users, or CentOS machines, in various categories. For some 
reason both CentOS and Fedora seem to shy away from gathering this 
kind of information, or indeed any information from users. 


Users' privacy, perhaps?  Maybe some users don't want people to know 
that they use CentOS, for whatever reason.  Fedora/Red Hat tried doing 
this sort of gathering of data, years ago, and it didn't work out well 
(I'm trying to remember the name of the program that did the data 
collection, which was an opt-in thing, but I'm coming up blank).


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 11:45:05AM +, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On the other hand, it would be relatively easy to determine
> the number of CentOS users, or CentOS machines, in various categories.
> For some reason both CentOS and Fedora seem to shy away from gathering
> this kind of information, or indeed any information from users.

I'm interested in any suggestions for how to do this in a "relatively
easy" way. Traditionally, Fedora users have been very wary of any
opt-out metrics-gathering. So, that leaves either reach-out information
seeking (which is valuable but expensive, hard, and time-consuming) or
else self-selected feedback, which when not done carefully can be
_worse_ than nothing.


And when I say I'm interested in suggestions, that's not a rhetorical
flourish. I mean it. :)


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Timothy Murphy]

Gordon Messmer wrote:

> I think it's likely that, instead, you believe that you are
> representative of all of the people who do your job, and that features
> which you do not need are therefore not needed by others. That logic is
> quite normal, but completely wrong.

On the other hand, it would be relatively easy to determine
the number of CentOS users, or CentOS machines, in various categories.
For some reason both CentOS and Fedora seem to shy away from gathering
this kind of information, or indeed any information from users.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Steve Clark]

On 12/10/2015 05:33 PM, John R Pierce wrote:

On 12/10/2015 1:56 PM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:

As a lesser example, I just*adore*  the new ethernet names - NOT. Breaks
scripts, makes it all more difficult, not to mention*so*  much easier to
guess, when you've debugging a box and your organization has hardware from
many OEMs. What was wrong with eth0, or even em1?

when you have multiple adapters, perhaps different types (maybe 2 10gigE
and 2 1gigE?) which one is eth0 supposed to be?   BSD has always used
driver type in the network device names, and having dealt with device
confusions before, I understand why.




ethtool can easily tell you the capabilities of the device - you don't need 
magic names.

--
Stephen Clark
*NetWolves Managed Services, LLC.*
Director of Technology
Phone: 813-579-3200
Fax: 813-882-0209
Email: steve.cl...@netwolves.com
http://www.netwolves.com
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Warren Young]

On Dec 10, 2015, at 2:56 PM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> 
> Warren Young wrote:
>> So…you want veto power over Fedora?
> 
> Beg pardon? Why are you caricaturing what I said?

I didn’t think it was a caricature at all.  You clearly don’t want people to 
“listen” to you, you want veto power.

If all you wanted was to be heard, you’d have stopped banging on this drum long 
ago.  We got it.  We heard you.  You don’t like it.

How else would you characterize a desire for wishes to be changes, other than 
veto power?

> As a lesser example, I just *adore* the new ethernet names - NOT. Breaks
> scripts

Hard-coded values are never a good idea.  That’s been a principle of good 
software design and systems administration since the 1960s, at least.

The outputs of ip link and ifconfig -a are parseable for a reason.  Or, you can 
iterate over the contents of /sys/class/net.

Mind, I didn’t come away from that change unscathed.  I had to go back and make 
some changes to my code.  I think it amounted to about an hour of work, done 
years ago, and amortized to all-but-zero since then.

The bigger problem is the day-to-day mystery of it all.  “Gee, Brain, what 
interface shall we bounce tonight?”  “The same interface we bounce every night: 
enp3s0!”  “But Braaain, it’s been called enp4s0 ever since the mobo 
manufacturer switched to the rev 2 boards!  Narf!”  15 minutes of comic 
violence later, followed by utter failure; then, “So, Brain, what shall we do 
tomorrow night?”  “The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to bounce the 
first Ethernet NIC!”

>> What if the Fedora project gatewayed the low-traffic development mailing
>> list to this one, so that you don’t even have *that* barrier to
>> participation?  Now ask yourself: what user-visible changes do you expect
>> in the world afterward?
> 
> Why not what was suggested, a summary every month or three? How about
> sending announcements?

Fine, I repeat my question: what user-visible change do you expect to find in 
the world after they do that, given that those receiving only those 
announcements (i.e. those not also watching the Fedora dev lists) will 
contribute precisely *squat* other than complaints?

Once again, soapbox soliloquies don’t compile.

> 
>> People give Poettering a lot of static, but the fact is, he Gets. Stuff.
>> Done.  If you want different stuff done, you’re going to have to make that
>> happen somehow.
> 
> Which a vast number of us strongly opposed

Opposed what, exactly?  Everything Poettering has ever done, or did you have 
something specific in mind?

> but were not listened to.

I took a wild guess that your complaints are about systemd, rather than avahi, 
pulseaudio, or any of the other several dozen projects Lennart Poettering has 
worked on.

I got 210 results from Googling CentOS’s mailing list archive server for your 
email address and “systemd”.  The first one appeared in 2014, *four years* 
after systemd was created, and over three years after it was released as the 
default init system for Fedora.

And that was the *only* post from you on that topic in 2014.  The other 209 
posts were all in 2015, when it was way, way too late to change the decision.

So, in what world do your 2015 wishes for systemd to go away become a change in 
that world?

> who *cares* How Fast a *server* Shuts
> Down? And coming up - hell, damn HP server take for-bloody-*ever* with
> their firmware, init V is faster than their firmware.

We’ve covered this already: the cloud cares.

It’s right there on the front page of https://www.digitalocean.com/  They can 
bring a VM up for you in 55 seconds.  How do you suppose they achieved that?

It isn’t just one company’s marketing slogan.  Rackspace, Amazon, etc., all 
start from a few key premises, one of which is that you can spin a server up 
and down fast enough that you can rent dynamic instant-to-instant slices of the 
host hardware, as opposed to the old VPS or shared hosting models, where the 
finest rental time granularity was a month.

This is a multi-billion dollar business.[1]  You can’t handwave it away as 
unimportant.  Red Hat would have to be fools not to be running hard to grab a 
slice of that pie.


[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32442268

>> And don’t play the “underfunded government agency” card.  LANL, LLBL,
>> ORNL, NASA, USGS…all have given back lots of code to the open source
>> world.  As well they should, because they derive an awful lot of benefit
>> from that world.
> 
> May be, but my federal agency is at *least* 5% under what we were getting
> in 2003

Sigh…so you go and play the card anyway.

What, you think NASA’s doing great?  Their operating budget was about 1/20 that 
spent on troops’ air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011.[2]

Maybe you think the national labs are flush with cash, here in the post cold 
war era?

Open source works on the stone soup principle: everyone goes hungry when they 
hang onto their gnarled carrots and wrinkled potatoes, but everyo

Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Gordon Messmer]

On 12/10/2015 07:21 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

If the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
distribution and RHEL will follow.


Surely you're not suggesting that the code a developer writes is 
dependent on the form factor of the computer on which they write it?  
I'm sure that idea would shock nearly all of the developers of software 
for both rack mounted servers and embedded devices.


I think it's likely that, instead, you believe that you are 
representative of all of the people who do your job, and that features 
which you do not need are therefore not needed by others. That logic is 
quite normal, but completely wrong.


Take for instance your opinion of power management for NICs.  While 
power management is important to mobile, battery-operated devices, it is 
also desirable in large data centers.  Cooling and power use are big 
issues for data centers, and that feature was intended for that 
environment.  You dismiss it as laptop-oriented technology, but not all 
system administrators do.



A handful of voices representing server installations, who by
definition are not development types


"By definition?"  Have you heard of DevOps?  Whatever your opinion of 
that idea, there are definitely server admins who take part in 
development at all levels of the stack.



A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are
orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in
months if not years.  I have given up counting how many times I have
to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of
updates.


I share that frustration, but it has nothing to do with whether or not 
Fedora developers use laptops.  The truth is simply that software 
becomes more complex over time, that there is a growing value in 
attacking computer systems, and that the world is increasingly 
connected.  These things act together to create a situation where bugs 
are more likely in the core components, where it's harder to update a 
system without fully rebooting it.


But there's hope. There are a number of efforts to produce a system to 
update the kernel without reboots (ksplice, kgraft, kpatch, and 
KernelCare).  More developers are writing unit tests.  Code analysis 
tools are improving.  Both the number of bugs produced and the cost of 
fixing them are getting better over time, too.



We do not need plug-and-play; or usb hot-swapping; or hibernation; or
screen savers; or audio-video players; or power optimisation.


That's great for you, but some of those things are really valuable for 
system admins, especially those who run *really large* numbers of 
systems.  Power and cooling cost money, so optimization has a lot of 
value.  A lot of those plug-and-play and hot-swapping technologies that 
you deride are essential for high availability systems (such as SAS/SATA 
hot swapping).


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[James Hogarth]

On 10 Dec 2015 23:25, "Leroy Tennison"  wrote:
>
> The device I encountered it on had 10 NICS, at installation 6 of them got
the new naming convention and four of them got the eth convention.  I guess
my question is "what's wrong with using the MAC address?"  Yes, I know some
things don't have MAC addresses, let the exceptional situation be the
exception.
>

Because when that PCI express card with the 4-8 ports on it fails and it's
replaced under warranty having the server come back up right away with the
correct configuration since the logical port names haven't changed despite
the change of MAC is useful...
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Leroy Tennison]

The device I encountered it on had 10 NICS, at installation 6 of them got the 
new naming convention and four of them got the eth convention.  I guess my 
question is "what's wrong with using the MAC address?"  Yes, I know some things 
don't have MAC addresses, let the exceptional situation be the exception. 

- Original Message -
From: "Jonathan Billings" 
To: "CentOS mailing list" 
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 5:15:09 PM
Subject: Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic  
on boot]

On Dec 10, 2015, at 6:05 PM, Leroy Tennison  wrote:
> There is a freedesktop.org web page about why they did this - it has to do 
> with mobile devices and plug-and-play networking.  Take that page's statement 
> about setting net.ifnames=0 cautiously, I found it was the exact opposite. 

To be honest, I found that this change better suited servers, which often have 
multiple interfaces on multiple vendor’s cards, rather than mobile devices, 
which tend to only have one ethernet device, if any.  Being able to predictably 
define which interface would be named is much more important when you’ve got 4 
network interfaces, rather than hoping that eth0 is the one you booted from.



--
Jonathan Billings 


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Leroy Tennison]

Unfortunately, hardware isn't always purchased at the same time and, even if it 
is, how do you know that the vendor didn't make some "transparent" change in 
production that isn't noticeable until you get into the details.  Vendors 
***shouldn't*** do that but then there's reality.

- Original Message -
From: "John R Pierce" 
To: centos@centos.org
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 5:10:23 PM
Subject: Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on 
boot]

On 12/10/2015 3:05 PM, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> You think this is irritating, what about when you're trying to replicate the 
> network configuration to failover hardware...

IMHO, active/standby failover hardware should have exact identical 
configurations down to firmware revisions, so I'm not sure what the 
issue is.


-- 
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Jonathan Billings]

On Dec 10, 2015, at 6:05 PM, Leroy Tennison  wrote:
> There is a freedesktop.org web page about why they did this - it has to do 
> with mobile devices and plug-and-play networking.  Take that page's statement 
> about setting net.ifnames=0 cautiously, I found it was the exact opposite. 

To be honest, I found that this change better suited servers, which often have 
multiple interfaces on multiple vendor’s cards, rather than mobile devices, 
which tend to only have one ethernet device, if any.  Being able to predictably 
define which interface would be named is much more important when you’ve got 4 
network interfaces, rather than hoping that eth0 is the one you booted from.



--
Jonathan Billings 


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[John R Pierce]

On 12/10/2015 3:05 PM, Leroy Tennison wrote:

You think this is irritating, what about when you're trying to replicate the 
network configuration to failover hardware...


IMHO, active/standby failover hardware should have exact identical 
configurations down to firmware revisions, so I'm not sure what the 
issue is.



--
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Leroy Tennison]

You think this is irritating, what about when you're trying to replicate the 
network configuration to failover hardware...  There is a way around this, I 
haven't tried it on CentOS but on Ubuntu there are kernel command line 
parameters:

net.ifnames=1
biosdevname=0

which will override this behavior. Again, on Ubuntu these are added in 
/etc/default/grub as parameters to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.  Finally, 
there's /udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which allows you to associate a 
MAC address with an eth? label.  However, without the command line parameters 
it is ignored (contrary to other statements on the web ).  Given this is CentOS 
you mileage will almost certainly vary but hopefully this gives you enough to 
go on to get to the final solution.  There is a freedesktop.org web page about 
why they did this - it has to do with mobile devices and plug-and-play 
networking.  Take that page's statement about setting net.ifnames=0 cautiously, 
I found it was the exact opposite.  biosdevname is a program written by someone 
at Dell which is supposed to report on hardware configurations and make some 
sense out of the cesspool.  It appears the source of the whole thing is 
hardware vendors doing whatever they want and in some cases not playing b
 y the rules.

- Original Message -
From: "John R Pierce" 
To: centos@centos.org
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 4:33:24 PM
Subject: Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on 
boot]

On 12/10/2015 1:56 PM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> As a lesser example, I just*adore*  the new ethernet names - NOT. Breaks
> scripts, makes it all more difficult, not to mention*so*  much easier to
> guess, when you've debugging a box and your organization has hardware from
> many OEMs. What was wrong with eth0, or even em1?

when you have multiple adapters, perhaps different types (maybe 2 10gigE 
and 2 1gigE?) which one is eth0 supposed to be?   BSD has always used 
driver type in the network device names, and having dealt with device 
confusions before, I understand why.



-- 
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[John R Pierce]

On 12/10/2015 1:56 PM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:

As a lesser example, I just*adore*  the new ethernet names - NOT. Breaks
scripts, makes it all more difficult, not to mention*so*  much easier to
guess, when you've debugging a box and your organization has hardware from
many OEMs. What was wrong with eth0, or even em1?


when you have multiple adapters, perhaps different types (maybe 2 10gigE 
and 2 1gigE?) which one is eth0 supposed to be?   BSD has always used 
driver type in the network device names, and having dealt with device 
confusions before, I understand why.




--
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Warren Young wrote:
> On Dec 9, 2015, at 11:55 AM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>> Matthew Miller wrote:
>>> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 01:05:15PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>>
 So, you're saying that end users need to go poke their noses into the
 development process
>>>
>>> If you want to go out of your way to read it that way, it's hard to
>>> stop you. However, it's not what I'm saying. The development process is
>>> conducted in the open for a reason.
>>
>> I don't see that as going "out of my way". Let's put it this way: how
>> many times have folks on the development side poked their nose in here
>> - the general redhat list is pretty dead - and asked anything?
>
> So…you want veto power over Fedora?  You want every proposed change to
> cross your desk for a yea/nay?

Beg pardon? Why are you caricaturing what I said? I don't believe any of
us who are complaining are talking about every small change; rather, the
major ones.

As a lesser example, I just *adore* the new ethernet names - NOT. Breaks
scripts, makes it all more difficult, not to mention *so* much easier to
guess, when you've debugging a box and your organization has hardware from
many OEMs. What was wrong with eth0, or even em1? Why go to Sun naming
conventions? Maybe it helps EEs, but not sysadmins.

Please, though, that naming is *not* the point of the thread.
>
> What if the Fedora project gatewayed the low-traffic development mailing
> list to this one, so that you don’t even have *that* barrier to
> participation?  Now ask yourself: what user-visible changes do you expect
> in the world afterward?

Why not what was suggested, a summary every month or three? How about
sending announcements?

> People give Poettering a lot of static, but the fact is, he Gets. Stuff.
> Done.  If you want different stuff done, you’re going to have to make that
> happen somehow.  Shouted complaints from a soapbox don’t compile.

Which a vast number of us strongly opposed, but were not listened to. That
stuff is fine for a desktop, but who *cares* How Fast a *server* Shuts
Down? And coming up - hell, damn HP server take for-bloody-*ever* with
their firmware, init V is faster than their firmware.
>
> And don’t play the “underfunded government agency” card.  LANL, LLBL,
> ORNL, NASA, USGS…all have given back lots of code to the open source
> world.  As well they should, because they derive an awful lot of benefit
> from that world.

May be, but my federal agency is at *least* 5% under what we were getting
in 2003, and my manager, who's working with another Institute about 2/3rds
of his time, and I, and another admin have to manage over 170 servers,
workstations, and clusters, some with special software, and ranging in age
from just bought to 2007 (I think there may be a workstation or 3 older),
and some of which we haven't managed to get the owners to allow us to get
off CentOS 5
>
> I’m not against your basic position, Mark.  I, too, have shaken my head in
> dismay at several of the desktop-focused behaviors in recent versions of
> CentOS.[*]  I think where we actually differ is that I realize that I have
> no right to complain all that loudly about them, because I have the means
> to change them, but do not.

And I ask permission from my fed manager to put in a ticket with upstream
(which reminds me, I need to ask about putting one in for those docs with
links to google ads).
>
> Partly that’s because of differing priorities, partly it’s out of rational
> self-interest (i.e. I know how many OS forks fizzle) and yes, it’s partly
> just laziness.  But there’s that difference: I know why I’m not out there
> trying to change it.
>
> What are your reasons?
>
Lack of time, as I've indicated.
>
> [*] My favorite fumble is the one where a 2-NIC box with one DHCP
> interface and one static will swap the configurations silently when you
> boot with only the DHCP cable plugged in.  Because *obviously* you want
> the static IP to be available all the time, right?  This is great for wifi
> + Ethernet laptops, where you want the static IP to move when you plug the
> wired LAN cable in, but it doesn’t work out so great for servers where the
> DHCP NIC is normally disconnected, and exists only so the boots on the
> ground can move the cable in an emergency to reestablish the Internet link
> after they roached the LAN config somehow.  This behavior means the broken
> static IP moves to the secondary NIC, where it remains broken.  Solution:
> Plug both network cables in so NetworkManager doesn’t get Clever.™

Oh, I remember when you couldn't be sure, pre-NM, what would be eth0,
until you put the MAC address in

   mark

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Warren Young]

On Dec 9, 2015, at 11:55 AM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> 
> Matthew Miller wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 01:05:15PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> 
>>> So, you're saying that end users need to go poke their noses into the
>>> development process
>> 
>> If you want to go out of your way to read it that way, it's hard to
>> stop you. However, it's not what I'm saying. The development process is
>> conducted in the open for a reason.
> 
> I don't see that as going "out of my way". Let's put it this way: how many
> times have folks on the development side poked their nose in here - the
> general redhat list is pretty dead - and asked anything?

So…you want veto power over Fedora?  You want every proposed change to cross 
your desk for a yea/nay?

What if the Fedora project gatewayed the low-traffic development mailing list 
to this one, so that you don’t even have *that* barrier to participation?  Now 
ask yourself: what user-visible changes do you expect in the world afterward?

Hint to the correct answer: F/OSS is a do-ocracy: those who do the work, rule.

People give Poettering a lot of static, but the fact is, he Gets. Stuff. Done.  
If you want different stuff done, you’re going to have to make that happen 
somehow.  Shouted complaints from a soapbox don’t compile.

And don’t play the “underfunded government agency” card.  LANL, LLBL, ORNL, 
NASA, USGS…all have given back lots of code to the open source world.  As well 
they should, because they derive an awful lot of benefit from that world.

I’m not against your basic position, Mark.  I, too, have shaken my head in 
dismay at several of the desktop-focused behaviors in recent versions of 
CentOS.[*]  I think where we actually differ is that I realize that I have no 
right to complain all that loudly about them, because I have the means to 
change them, but do not.

Partly that’s because of differing priorities, partly it’s out of rational 
self-interest (i.e. I know how many OS forks fizzle) and yes, it’s partly just 
laziness.  But there’s that difference: I know why I’m not out there trying to 
change it.

What are your reasons?



[*] My favorite fumble is the one where a 2-NIC box with one DHCP interface and 
one static will swap the configurations silently when you boot with only the 
DHCP cable plugged in.  Because *obviously* you want the static IP to be 
available all the time, right?  This is great for wifi + Ethernet laptops, 
where you want the static IP to move when you plug the wired LAN cable in, but 
it doesn’t work out so great for servers where the DHCP NIC is normally 
disconnected, and exists only so the boots on the ground can move the cable in 
an emergency to reestablish the Internet link after they roached the LAN config 
somehow.  This behavior means the broken static IP moves to the secondary NIC, 
where it remains broken.  Solution: Plug both network cables in so 
NetworkManager doesn’t get Clever.™
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Lamar Owen]

On 12/10/2015 10:21 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

Since the import of what I was trying to convey has been lost,  no
doubt due to my poor choice of words, I will restate the obvious: If
the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
distribution and RHEL will follow.  Talking about the server community
monitoring the Fedora development channel once every six months, or
every day for that matter, is simply not going to change this.


As Matthew said, there is a Fedora _server_ community already.  Not all 
Fedora devs are running laptops; but a laptop is one target, just as a 
server is another.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: 
Enterprise != Server.  I need an Enterprise distribution for my 
workstation needs, on a laptop.  Dell has been supporting RHEL on their 
Precision Mobile Workstations (aka 'high end laptops') for years; and 
there is a definite market segment for that use.



A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are
orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in
months if not years.  I have given up counting how many times I have
to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of
updates.


There is no single 'server-oriented' way of doing things; different 
servers have different requirements, and CentOS already gets poked on by 
those who think version number is a good indicator of how up to date a 
piece of software is for security and/or bugfix purposes. Owncloud, for 
instance, is server software, but it needs a far more up-to-date PHP 
than the default in CentOS 6 (Software Collections to the rescue).



On the other hand I have this task running on a different server with
a different OS:

Priority = DS; Inpri = 8; Time = UNLIMITED seconds.
Job number = #j3719.
TUE, NOV  4, 2014,  2:04 PM.


And I have a Cisco 7401 running a different OS (IOS, of course) with the 
following uptime (and other details.):

..
colo-7400-2 uptime is 6 years, 43 weeks, 3 days, 14 hours, 13 minutes
System returned to ROM by reload at 00:40:17 UTC Tue Feb 10 2009
System restarted at 00:43:11 UTC Tue Feb 10 2009
...
Cisco 7401ASR (NSE) processor (revision A) with 491520K/32768K bytes of 
memory.

Processor board ID 74993065
R7000 CPU at 375MHz, Implementation 39, Rev 3.3, 256KB L2 Cache
1 slot ASR midplane, Version 2.0

Last reset from power-on
PXF processor tmc 'system:pxf/ucode0' is running ( v1.1 ).
2 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
509K bytes of NVRAM.
..

But uptime isn't everything.  That router would not have been up that 
long if there was a more updated IOS available for it (I am running the 
last security update available from Cisco's TAC for that box, and it is 
way out of support, but it's in a 'sheltered' position and works fine 
for what it is doing).


Certain updates require a reboot; without ksplice or similar technology 
it will always be that way for the kernel.  Certain glibc updates are 
similar.



What we need is simplicity, stability, reliability, and consistency.
What seems to be happening instead is feature-creep, software-bloat
and increased coupling.
Many share your needs; at this point in time, CentOS 6 is in that form 
of maintenance mode.  CentOS 7 is still in a 'can get new features' mode 
(this due entirely to upstream's model).  If you need something in a 
stable mode today, use C6.  C7 will get there in a few releases.


The footprint of the needs met by a general-purpose Enterprise Linux 
distribution is getting larger, not smaller, and the software needed to 
meet all of these needs is necessarily not as simple as it once was.  
Now, niche distributions can be a bit more simple, but they will not 
have as broad of a footprint as the general-purpose ones. CentOS, and 
its upstream, is a general-purpose Enterprise (and Enterprise != Server) 
OS where one of the many use cases is as a traditional server.


Other use cases exist, and are targeted by upstream as being valuable 
market segments.  That includes the Dell Precision Mobile Workstation 
line of high-end laptops (like my 2010-vintage M6500), as well as the 
Precision Workstation desktops and the PowerEdge servers, all of which 
can be ordered from Dell with a fully-supported RHEL factory-installed.  
But there is also the virtualization market and the lightweight 
containers ('cloud') market.  And now there is the IoT market, and those 
are almost entirely ARM-based systems.  Perhaps a 'tablet' market for 
Enterprise Linux will come into play; at the moment the Linux 
penetration here is mostly Android, with some niche traditional Linux 
distributions filling certain needs (like Kali Linux for things like the 
Pwnie Express Pwn Pad).


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 10:21:56AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
> Since the import of what I was trying to convey has been lost,  no
> doubt due to my poor choice of words, I will restate the obvious: If
> the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
> platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
> distribution and RHEL will follow.  Talking about the server community
> monitoring the Fedora development channel once every six months, or
> every day for that matter, is simply not going to change this.

But this isn't the case, so it's not really a very productive line of
speculation. We _have_ a server community around Fedora, both
developers and users.

> source.  The choice to go to Fedora for RHEL development was a
> commitment to the laptop environment, whether consciously made or not.

This does not match history nor the current situation.

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[James B. Byrne]

On Wed, December 9, 2015 16:50, James Hogarth wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2015 9:07 p.m., "Lamar Owen"  wrote:
>>
>
>> No, it seems to me that a suitably motivated CentOS user needs to
>> scratch this itch; and, no, I am not volunteering, as I've
>> followed Fedora before..and just simply cannot give the
>> time to it at this point in time in my life.
>>
>
> 
>
>>
>> So who wants to be the CentOS-Users to Fedora liaison, likely to be
>> one of the most thankless jobs on the planet?
>>
>>
>
> I'm an active Fedora packager and yet I dare say Mark would hate me as
> liaison for I find the changes in EL7 most refreshing and look forward
> to bring able to make better use of them in due course ;)
>
> But I really do question whether someone in this industry is really
> not able to spend 30 minutes or so every six months checking changes
> for anything interesting.
>
> And frankly if one isn't willing to get either get a subscription and
> feedback as a paying customer or to get involved with the upstream
> sources then no one does not have say in direction and one shouldn't
> be surprised by that.
>
> If it was a democracy with a vote on every possible choice then we'd
> never get anywhere given the time to carry out such a survey and the
> vast differences in opinions.
>
> No, as the Debian folks say it is a meritocracy instead and those
> who get stuck in and actively discuss at the right time provide
> the influence on what happens next.
>

Since the import of what I was trying to convey has been lost,  no
doubt due to my poor choice of words, I will restate the obvious: If
the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
distribution and RHEL will follow.  Talking about the server community
monitoring the Fedora development channel once every six months, or
every day for that matter, is simply not going to change this.

A handful of voices representing server installations, who by
definition are not development types, has no hope of dealing with the
incremental changes introduced every day by hundreds of people that
use laptops as their primary development platform and all of whom have
their own 'itch' to scratch.  That is just the way it is in open
source.  The choice to go to Fedora for RHEL development was a
commitment to the laptop environment, whether consciously made or not.
And it is not in the control of RH to dictate this.  If the Fedora
developers take up tablets en masse then guess what?: We will end up
with a tablet distribution.

The OS distro we get is the consequence of the culture and environment
predominant in the development community.  This is neither good nor
bad.  It just is.  Our firm has specific requirements which to date
have been more than adequately met by RHEL and CentOS.  But that seems
to us to be changing in ways that no longer meet our expectations from
a server based distro.

A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are
orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in
months if not years.  I have given up counting how many times I have
to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of
updates.

On the other hand I have this task running on a different server with
a different OS:

   Priority = DS; Inpri = 8; Time = UNLIMITED seconds.
   Job number = #j3719.
   TUE, NOV  4, 2014,  2:04 PM.

We do not need plug-and-play; or usb hot-swapping; or hibernation; or
screen savers; or audio-video players; or power optimisation.  All of
which are worthy things in their own right and certainly have their
place in computing.  While these occasionally have proved convenient
for me none are really necessary for a server host and their presence
undoubtedly significantly increases the complexity and maintenance
burden of the distribution.

What we need is simplicity, stability, reliability, and consistency. 
What seems to be happening instead is feature-creep, software-bloat
and increased coupling.

And lest I be accused of 'wingeing' from the sideline I have been
contributing to Open Source in a modest way since 1995, starting with
Sendmail-8.7 on HP-UX.  I just have limited time to give over to these
things. The selection of RHEL for our primary platform was, in large
part, to reduce the resources given over to managing the software.  It
would be ironic in the extreme were the reverse prove the case.

-- 
***  e-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel  ***
Do NOT transmit sensitive data via e-Mail
James B. Byrnemailto:byrn...@harte-lyne.ca
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[James Hogarth]

On 9 Dec 2015 9:07 p.m., "Lamar Owen"  wrote:
>

> No, it seems to me that a suitably motivated CentOS user needs to scratch
this itch; and, no, I am not volunteering, as I've followed Fedora
before..and just simply cannot give the time to it at this point in
time in my life.
>



>
> So who wants to be the CentOS-Users to Fedora liaison, likely to be one
of the most thankless jobs on the planet?
>
>

I'm an active Fedora packager and yet I dare say Mark would hate me as
liaison for I find the changes in EL7 most refreshing and look forward to
bring able to make better use of them in due course ;)

But I really do question whether someone in this industry is really not
able to spend 30 minutes or so every six months checking changes for
anything interesting.

And frankly if one isn't willing to get either get a subscription and
feedback as a paying customer or to get involved with the upstream sources
then no one does not have say in direction and one shouldn't be surprised
by that.

If it was a democracy with a vote on every possible choice then we'd never
get anywhere given the time to carry out such a survey and the vast
differences in opinions.

No, as the Debian folks say it is a meritocracy instead and those who get
stuck in and actively discuss at the right time provide the influence on
what happens next.
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Lamar Owen]

On 12/09/2015 11:45 AM, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:

I'm sure it's *far* too much work for, say, the fedora development team to
put out once a quarter a notice to upstream, and maybe CentOS, Scientific
Linux, and whatever other main user groups to inform them of major
changes, and see the feedback
Someone just needs to spend the time to do it.  So who is that someone?  
The Fedora team already has their hands full; or is the Fedora team 
supposed to allocate already scarce volunteer resources to handle the 
needs of CentOS users?  (Red Hat likely already has one or more liaisons 
of this sort with the needs of Red Hat's customers in mind).


No, it seems to me that a suitably motivated CentOS user needs to 
scratch this itch; and, no, I am not volunteering, as I've followed 
Fedora before..and just simply cannot give the time to it at this 
point in time in my life.


So I shouldn't really complain, either, when a feature I use was removed 
way back then or a feature I would never use was added way back then, 
when I am getting many thousands of man-hours worth of work for free.  
If I want the right to complain, I need to ante up, either with money 
(and I did purchase and do annually renew my RHEL subscription) or with 
time (and I have done that, too, both as a Red Hat beta tester (prior to 
the Enterprise Linux / Fedora Core 'split') and by maintaining the 
PostgreSQL RPMs as a volunteer for five years, which is a far costlier 
thing to do!).  IMHO, of course.


So who wants to be the CentOS-Users to Fedora liaison, likely to be one 
of the most thankless jobs on the planet?


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Gordon Messmer]

On 12/08/2015 07:46 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

I have been bitten by things done in Fedora that only have any use on
a laptop and that should never have been allowed into a server
distribution.  But I cannot see how I would have been aware of them
until they manifested themselves on equipment under my care.  By which
time it is rather too late to influence the decision to include them.
Automatically powering down NICs comes to my mind; due the rather
nasty consequences that resulted.


Without any references, it's hard to know what you're referring to 
specifically.  However, I *think* you're talking about the Intel e1000 
ASPM bugs.  Those bugs were in the Intel NICs, and had nothing to do 
with decision making in the Fedora project.  If you're convinced that 
those features have no business in server class products, then you 
should provide that feedback to the hardware vendor who enabled ASPM in 
their BIOS (had they not done so, you would not have been affected by 
the bug).  I think you're upset at the wrong people, though I understand 
your frustration.  I was affected by that bug, too.


If you're referring to something else, I'd be curious to know what it was.


forcing highly qualified people to expend time, a very
limited resource in my experience, to learn yet another way to start a
computer system, without providing any readily discernible benefit to
them, is not likely to engender much in the way of sympathy.


Well, considerable effort was made to provide discernible benefit. If 
you find time to look at it later:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html


We went to RedHat and ended up on CentOS because of its server
orientation.  Which to us implied something more than simple
compatibility of the software components.  If RedHats's intent is to
end up as a laptop distro then we will probably part ways at some
point.  We have a laptop distro that works well for us. It is called
OSX.  And the hardware is pretty good too.


I doubt you mean to imply that you'd use OS X as a server.  No one does 
that.  Even Apple uses Linux for its servers.

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Gordon Messmer]

On 12/09/2015 05:54 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
impact a server installation.


I would offer that you could visit the Fedora ChangeSet page once every 
six months and see what's coming.  For the release of 24 (changes not 
yet final):

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/24/ChangeSet

But generally, Free Software is a participation culture, where "Free" 
refers to liberty, not commerce.  You don't get to consume the goods for 
free, and also dictate your needs to the developers. If your employer 
needs features that the developers aren't currently working on, it needs 
to participate in development.  Maybe that means paying a developer.

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 01:05:15PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>> >> Why? Fedora is a development, rapid change distro. I just bugged one
>> of
>> > Because of the context of this conversation. We can't have user
>> > feedback and involvement without user feedback and involvement.
>> So, you're saying that end users need to go poke their noses into the
>> development process, but that developers don't need to poke their noses
>> out to the end users... or at least, that's how I read what you're
>> saying.
>
> If you want to go out of your way to read it that way, it's hard to
> stop you. However, it's not what I'm saying. The development process is
> conducted in the open for a reason.

I don't see that as going "out of my way". Let's put it this way: how many
times have folks on the development side poked their nose in here - the
general redhat list is pretty dead - and asked anything? I've been here
since '09, and I *think* that maybe once, *maybe* twice, someone asked
something here, who was on that side of the house.

Perhaps, if it's open, it should be a two way street, not one way, for us
to take time from what we're being paid for, to hit that side.

Oh, and btw, we *do* have a few RH licenses... and for those who have to
deal with smart card ID cards, you can thank my manager for pushing
through native support in RHEL 7. So I guess you could say we do,
sometimes, go to the development side.

   mark

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 01:15:56PM -0500, Steve Clark wrote:
> I think saying that you can have some say as to what goes into Fedora
> is being a little naive, look at systemd, many people complained
> about its inclusion but the powers to be heard none of it, and the

That's not a historically accurate picture of the process. And, I know,
because I was one of the people very skeptical of systemd's inclusion.
"Powers to be" didn't really come into it.

I'm not going to argue about systemd in specific, because that horse is
so dead that its zombie skeleton version is _also_ dead, but the
general point is important enough that I'll say it again: anyone who
puts in the effort to contribute can have a meaningful say in any and
every part of Fedora.


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 01:05:15PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> >> Why? Fedora is a development, rapid change distro. I just bugged one of
> > Because of the context of this conversation. We can't have user
> > feedback and involvement without user feedback and involvement.
> So, you're saying that end users need to go poke their noses into the
> development process, but that developers don't need to poke their noses
> out to the end users... or at least, that's how I read what you're saying.

If you want to go out of your way to read it that way, it's hard to
stop you. However, it's not what I'm saying. The development process is
conducted in the open for a reason.


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 11:54:57AM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>> Matthew Miller wrote:
>> > Working with your employer to fix the "will not allow Fedora into the
>> > premises" part seems like a good start.
>> 
>> Why? Fedora is a development, rapid change distro. I just bugged one of
>> my
>
> Because of the context of this conversation. We can't have user
> feedback and involvement without user feedback and involvement.

So, you're saying that end users need to go poke their noses into the
development process, but that developers don't need to poke their noses
out to the end users... or at least, that's how I read what you're saying.

mark

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Steve Clark]

On 12/09/2015 09:37 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:

On 12/09/2015 08:54 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
impact a server installation.  

Am I correct?

Yeah, pretty much.  At least you have the ability to have some input
upstream, unlike with Windows.

Once it is in RHEL, it is simply *going* to be in CentOS, full stop.  If
you don't want it in CentOS, then it needs to be yelled about when it
appears in Fedora.  Yes, this is work.  But many are already doing this
work; it is those people whose voices are being heard; it is also some
of those people that are making dynamic networking happen (which is
useful for more than just laptops).

Hi,

I think saying that you can have some say as to what goes into Fedora is being 
a little
naive, look at systemd, many people complained about its inclusion but the 
powers to be
heard none of it, and the refrain I saw was if you don't like systemd then run 
something else.

Regards,
Steve



If you want your voice to be heard, you have to use your voice in the
venue where changes can happen.  Once it is in a particular major
version of CentOS, it is simply not going away (unless RHEL removes it).


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Director of Technology
Phone: 813-579-3200
Fax: 813-882-0209
Email: steve.cl...@netwolves.com
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 11:54:57AM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > Working with your employer to fix the "will not allow Fedora into the
> > premises" part seems like a good start.
> 
> Why? Fedora is a development, rapid change distro. I just bugged one of my

Because of the context of this conversation. We can't have user
feedback and involvement without user feedback and involvement.




-- 
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Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 11:45:55AM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> I'm sure it's *far* too much work for, say, the fedora development team to
> put out once a quarter a notice to upstream, and maybe CentOS, Scientific
> Linux, and whatever other main user groups to inform them of major
> changes, and see the feedback

I'm not sure what you mean by "to upstream".

But overall, why do you think I'm here suggesting that CentOS users
follow Fedora development?

And, if following the actual development cycle is too hard, we actually
do produce something else that's designed for exactly what you're
asking: the actual Fedora OS releases.



-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 08:54:56AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:

> Working with your employer to fix the "will not allow Fedora into the
> premises" part seems like a good start.

Why? Fedora is a development, rapid change distro. I just bugged one of my
users yesterday that I'm *GOING* to update and reboot his system, since it
hasn't been rebooted in about a year and a third. And we've got cluster
members that they won't *let* us update, because it might break the
software that's running on them. Around 6.3, I think, one user found an
issue with the results from an updated system, and reran a completed job,
and the update did *not* give the correct results. We had to downgrade - I
forget what packages.

And some of these users have jobs that on bare metal (forget VMs, we can't
spare the cycles) run one to two *weeks*... and that's on clusters with
512 or over 1100 cores, or the boxes with *two* Tesla cards. Yes, we are
talking very serious scientific computing.

Absolute stability is what matters. For production machines, I worked out
a once a month maintenance window, to update and reboot.

In an environment like this, why would we want to do fedora, with its
how-many-updates in the last two days? This is why we're on CentOS, which
is *stable*.

 mark


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Lamar Owen wrote:
> On 12/09/2015 08:54 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
>> that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
>> developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
>> hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
>> impact a server installation.  
>>
>> Am I correct?
> Yeah, pretty much.  At least you have the ability to have some input
> upstream, unlike with Windows.

Can't remember if I posted this here - I've posted this comment in a one
or two other places - but one thing that's always aggravated me is when
the development or architecture side simply DOES NOT TALK to end users,
but Knows How It Needs To Be.

I'm sure it's *far* too much work for, say, the fedora development team to
put out once a quarter a notice to upstream, and maybe CentOS, Scientific
Linux, and whatever other main user groups to inform them of major
changes, and see the feedback

Nahhh, who cares whether end users are happy, they'll just do what is
K3wl, never mind if it's appropriate, or overly complicated

  mark

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 08:54:56AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
> So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
> that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
> developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
> hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
> impact a server installation.  To do this I am required to obtain such
> intimate personal knowledge of the internal workings of the
> distribution as to be able to identify these items as soon as they are
> introduced.  naturally, I am also supposed to be able to immediately
> identify the negative impact of these things and prepare and present a
> cogent argument against their adoption or propose patches to correct
> the deficiencies that I believe that I have detected.

Yes, that's basically how it works — but you don't actually have to go
to that elaborate scale to make a difference. That's why I suggested
getting involved with Fedora Server, not "auditing all of the
communication forums". We (Fedora) also work hard on making sure that
proposed and planned changes are communicated. Following the Devel
Announce list
 
   https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/

is a relatively low-traffic, low-effort way to stay informed of major
things.

Focus on something you're interested in. When enough people do that, it
adds up.

> I am to do this whilst running a CentOS installation that will not
> allow Fedora onto the premises.  SO, no doubt, the intent is that I
> should run Fedora on my home systems and work diligently in my off
> hours to protect any future version of CentOS from that vantage.  

Working with your employer to fix the "will not allow Fedora into the
premises" part seems like a good start.

Of course, if you don't like all of this — and from your tone, it
sounds very much like you don't — there's another obvious path where
you can have an impact. That's to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and
to submit feedback and problems through the official channels that
provides.


>And
> of course, if I miss something then it is my fault for not having paid
> enough attention to that item.

I don't think _fault_ comes into it. It's not about blame; it's just
that when no one does something, that something doesn't happen.

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Scott Robbins]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 09:37:33AM -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On 12/09/2015 08:54 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
> >So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
> >that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
> >developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
> >hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
> >impact a server installation.  
> 
> If you want your voice to be heard, you have to use your voice in
> the venue where changes can happen.  Once it is in a particular
> major version of CentOS, it is simply not going away (unless RHEL
> removes it).
> 

The best place to keep track is probably the Fedora testing list.  Adam
Williamson, among others, does listen to reasonable disagreements and some
decisions that would be bad for a server O/S do get turned down.

-- 
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Lamar Owen]

On 12/09/2015 08:54 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:

So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
impact a server installation.  

Am I correct?
Yeah, pretty much.  At least you have the ability to have some input 
upstream, unlike with Windows.


Once it is in RHEL, it is simply *going* to be in CentOS, full stop.  If 
you don't want it in CentOS, then it needs to be yelled about when it 
appears in Fedora.  Yes, this is work.  But many are already doing this 
work; it is those people whose voices are being heard; it is also some 
of those people that are making dynamic networking happen (which is 
useful for more than just laptops).


If you want your voice to be heard, you have to use your voice in the 
venue where changes can happen.  Once it is in a particular major 
version of CentOS, it is simply not going away (unless RHEL removes it).



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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[James B. Byrne]

On Tue, December 8, 2015 11:05, Matthew Miller wrote:

>
>> I have been bitten by things done in Fedora that only have any use
>> on
>> a laptop and that should never have been allowed into a server
>> distribution.  But I cannot see how I would have been aware of them
>> until they manifested themselves on equipment under my care.  By
>> which
>
> ^ right, this.
>
>> time it is rather too late to influence the decision to include
>> them.
>
> Well, not if you get involved early. That's the point.
>
> If you don't *want* to, that's fine, but there's only so much
> complainy cake that you can have and eat at the same time.
>

So, the implication of your suggestion, if I understand it aright, is
that I should audit all of the communication forums in use by Fedora
developers and then point out whenever any of the many dozens or
hundreds of contributors introduces something that in my opinion may
impact a server installation.  To do this I am required to obtain such
intimate personal knowledge of the internal workings of the
distribution as to be able to identify these items as soon as they are
introduced.  naturally, I am also supposed to be able to immediately
identify the negative impact of these things and prepare and present a
cogent argument against their adoption or propose patches to correct
the deficiencies that I believe that I have detected.

I am to do this whilst running a CentOS installation that will not
allow Fedora onto the premises.  SO, no doubt, the intent is that I
should run Fedora on my home systems and work diligently in my off
hours to protect any future version of CentOS from that vantage.  And
of course, if I miss something then it is my fault for not having paid
enough attention to that item.

Am I correct?

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 10:46:58AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
> > This is roughly true, although "downstream" RHEL makes its own
> > decisions about many things. If you (Mark, or anyone else) would like
> > to make this different in the future, getting involved with Fedora
> > Server is a good way to do so.
> However, to describe the Server List as an active forum for discussion
> would be somewhat overstating things.  I have not received anything

I didn't describe in that way. In fact, it *isn't* that. It's a mailing
list for working on the Fedora Server edition.

> from it as yet in December and the total volume of traffic on that
> list in November was very light.

I'm sure it will pick up as we get further into the Fedora 24 cycle.

> I am not sure in what way you envisage additional involvement is to
> take place.

It's an open source project. There are a lot of ways to be involved.
From your concerns, doing early testing and providing feedback on
system-wide features from a server perspective is one way. Or simply
doing QA in general. You could also help develop server roles matching
needs in your environment — that's a particular feature I'm hoping will
come from Fedora through RHEL to CentOS.


> I have been bitten by things done in Fedora that only have any use on
> a laptop and that should never have been allowed into a server
> distribution.  But I cannot see how I would have been aware of them
> until they manifested themselves on equipment under my care.  By which

^ right, this.

> time it is rather too late to influence the decision to include them. 

Well, not if you get involved early. That's the point.

If you don't *want* to, that's fine, but there's only so much complainy
cake that you can have and eat at the same time.

-- 
Matthew Millermat...@mattdm.org 
Fedora Project Leader  mat...@fedoraproject.org   
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[James B. Byrne]

On Mon, December 7, 2015 13:41, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 09:03:50AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 02:50:38PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>> > For laptops, great. For anything else, not so much. For example,
>> > it's supposed to be an *ENTERPRISE* o/s... why does it
>> > automatically, without ever asking, install anything wifi? I'm
> [...]
>> The short answer:  Because RHEL is based on Fedora development.
>
>
> This is roughly true, although "downstream" RHEL makes its own
> decisions about many things. If you (Mark, or anyone else) would like
> to make this different in the future, getting involved with Fedora
> Server is a good way to do so.
>

I subscribe to the Fedora Server list digest. Which form also is how I
get this list's messages. Thus the delay in my responses.

However, to describe the Server List as an active forum for discussion
would be somewhat overstating things.  I have not received anything
from it as yet in December and the total volume of traffic on that
list in November was very light.  I am not sure in what way you
envisage additional involvement is to take place.

I have been bitten by things done in Fedora that only have any use on
a laptop and that should never have been allowed into a server
distribution.  But I cannot see how I would have been aware of them
until they manifested themselves on equipment under my care.  By which
time it is rather too late to influence the decision to include them. 
Automatically powering down NICs comes to my mind; due the rather
nasty consequences that resulted.

The difficulty is that with Free and Open Source Software you are only
going to see features that are of some immediate use to the writers;
or whose value has already been entrenched such that it is difficult
if not impossible to dispense with. Clearly, power saving features are
of some interest to people that run their systems on batteries.

However, there are batteries, and then there are batteries.  We
occasionally run run on batteries too. It is just that ours are
measured in kilovolt-amp hours.  Having a server distro configured by
default to turn off a NIC because it has not had traffic for fifteen
minutes is not going to save us enough power from now to the end of
eternity to warrant the disruption that little 'feature' cost us when
it was first encountered.

The move to Systemd, and all the controversy that decision has
generated, also provides 'features' whose benefits appear to me be be
aimed principally at users who shut their systems off every day. These
benefits are of far less value to people who measure uptime in months
or years, while the discomfort, and expense, of this change must be
borne regardless.

Systemd will eventually be accepted or rejected on its own merits.  I
am not interested in debating them here since I have nothing upon
which to base an opinion one way or the other.  But it can hardly be
denied that forcing highly qualified people to expend time, a very
limited resource in my experience, to learn yet another way to start a
computer system, without providing any readily discernible benefit to
them, is not likely to engender much in the way of sympathy.

We went to RedHat and ended up on CentOS because of its server
orientation.  Which to us implied something more than simple
compatibility of the software components.  If RedHats's intent is to
end up as a laptop distro then we will probably part ways at some
point.  We have a laptop distro that works well for us. It is called
OSX.  And the hardware is pretty good too.


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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 02:23:21PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> 1. Ignoring the several hundred log, etc, emails I deal with at work
>   every day, I'm currently on at least 5 mailing lists, including
>   this one, each ranging in business from 10-30 emails/day.

I didn't say you have to. I'm just offering a way for you to make a
difference.

> 2. I work full time as a sysadmin, dealing with over 178 workstations,
>   servers, and clusters.

Okay. 


> 3. I actually have a life outside of computers.

Yay!

> 4. I don't notice any response to the huge and vehement reaction to systemd.

Well, to be honest, probably because you weren't paying attention due
to 1, 2, and 3. :)



-- 
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Fedora Project Leader
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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 09:03:50AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 02:50:38PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>> > For laptops, great. For anything else, not so much. For example,
>> > it's supposed to be an *ENTERPRISE* o/s... why does it
>> > automatically, without ever asking, install anything wifi? I'm
> [...]
>> The short answer:  Because RHEL is based on Fedora development.
>
> This is roughly true, although "downstream" RHEL makes its own
> decisions about many things. If you (Mark, or anyone else) would like
> to make this different in the future, getting involved with Fedora
> Server is a good way to do so.

Oh, one more thing: as I posted (by request) on Bruce Schneir's blog last
week, one thing that has *always* really annoyed me is when architects or
developers DON'T TALK TO END USERS, but some manager who *knows* what
needs to happen designs the whole thing. Too many times I've seen the end
result: end users, the mass of folks who have to use it, range from
dislike to loathing, and avoid using something that *should* have made
their life easier at work, instead making it *much* harder, until they
have no choice.

I've been pleased that the folks on this list have been solicited several
times in the last six months for our opinions.

   mark

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Re: [CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[m . roth]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 09:03:50AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 02:50:38PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
>> > For laptops, great. For anything else, not so much. For example,
>> > it's supposed to be an *ENTERPRISE* o/s... why does it
>> > automatically, without ever asking, install anything wifi? I'm
> [...]
>> The short answer:  Because RHEL is based on Fedora development.
>
> This is roughly true, although "downstream" RHEL makes its own
> decisions about many things. If you (Mark, or anyone else) would like
> to make this different in the future, getting involved with Fedora
> Server is a good way to do so.

1. Ignoring the several hundred log, etc, emails I deal with at work
  every day, I'm currently on at least 5 mailing lists, including
  this one, each ranging in business from 10-30 emails/day.
2. I work full time as a sysadmin, dealing with over 178 workstations,
  servers, and clusters.
3. I actually have a life outside of computers.
4. I don't notice any response to the huge and vehement reaction to systemd.

Given all that, how much more of my life should I spend on yet *another*
busy list, esp. when I do *not* want to install fedora, and debug an o/s
at home?

   mark "had to come in an hour early to bring up servers
   in the datacenter due to power work over the weekend,
   so, yes, I *am* a bit testy"

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[CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 09:03:50AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 02:50:38PM -0500, m.r...@5-cent.us wrote:
> > For laptops, great. For anything else, not so much. For example,
> > it's supposed to be an *ENTERPRISE* o/s... why does it
> > automatically, without ever asking, install anything wifi? I'm
[...]
> The short answer:  Because RHEL is based on Fedora development.


This is roughly true, although "downstream" RHEL makes its own
decisions about many things. If you (Mark, or anyone else) would like
to make this different in the future, getting involved with Fedora
Server is a good way to do so.


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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