Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

Fedora 19 released

Fedora 19 has been released a few hours ago.  This is one of the most interesting releases, feature-wise, for me personally.  Have a look at the announcement, and scroll through the full list of features that made it through.  Here is what I’m going to be looking at first thing tomorrow:

  • MATE Desktop 1.6.  After numerous switches from Gnome to KDE and back, MATE is now my desktop of choice, both at work and home.  Hopefully new version will fix a few minor glitches that I’ve noticed.
  • Developers Assistance.  Not that I need it for my own projects, but it might be useful for bringing more standardization to the office.
  • PHP 5.5.  The latest and the greatest version of the programming language I use on a daily basis.
  • Node.js and npm package manager.  It’s been long overdue.  Node.js is extremely popular these days and having it as part of the standard distribution is mighty useful.  Finally, Fedora users can take advantage of all those numerous projects on GitHub without any additional installation headache.
  • BIND10.  This has been a complete rewrite, and it now includes both DNS and DHCP. That’s interesting.  And probably not too backward compatible. We’ll see.

Yet again huge thanks to everyone who made this release possible.   You guys are awesome, no matter how much or how little ranting will come in the next few days.

Fedora for short-lifespan server instances

Fedora for short-lifespan server instances

Let’s come back to the odd fact that Fedora is both a precursor to RHEL, and yet almost never used in production as a server OS. I think this is going to change. In a world where instances are deployed constantly, instances are born and die but the herd lives on. Once everyone has their infrastructure encoded into a configuration management system, Fedora’s short release cycle becomes much less of a burden. If I have service foo deployed on a Fedora X instance, I willnever be upgrading that instance. Instead I’ll be provisioning a new Fedora X+1 instance to run the foo service, start it, and throw the old instance in the proverbial bitbucket once the new one works.

Via LWN.