CentOS

This week I stumbled across something called CentOS while checking into White Box Enterprise Linux next version. I had seen (and actually downloaded) v3 of WBEL, but was wondering if something had happened with the recent RHEL4 beta... Unfortunately nothing had been done with it, and while browsing for other alternatives for RHEL, I came across CentOS.

Using BitTorrent I was able to download the DVD images for 3.4 as well as 4beta. On my office workstation I installed a clean (and full) install of 4beta inside a virtual machine using VMWare (love that program!). Everything worked flawlessly, except for some startup trouble with the wrong SCSI emulation; this had more to do with me not paying attention, than with CentOS not dealing well with this issue.

I am checking out CentOS, because at the office we have several production level boxes running a version of Fedora, and others that run RHEL3. The latter are mainly servers used for external access, where the former are mainly used for corporate duties like branch HTTP proxy or development box. Recently though, we have started to pilot our Skool concept (http://www.skool.nl - in Dutch). Because of cost effectiveness it was decided to use Fedora Core 2 for the servers in the schools, although they could actually be considered to be production boxes. While going through the initial pilot/test/development phase we noticed that Fedora moves forward way too fast for the purpose we were planning to use it for. That's why we are now considering other options. Because most of engineer are already familiar with RedHat type distributions, and because we're already running RHEL3 on our most important servers, I consider it to be a logical step to look into something like CentOS.

Besides having the opportunity to run a free (as in beer) RHEL equivalent OS, we are able to make our server platforms more homogenic and more straightforward to maintain: Updates roll out to all Linux servers; new software can be packaged for just one platform and not two or three; we benefit from the stability of an enterprise level OS and the assurance that we will be able to update the boxes the next five years! Awesome dude!