[Cialug] CentOS upgrades

Fri Jan 28 02:55:57 UTC 2022

Hi all,

We're going to see how I do cc:ing to this from the digest. Apologies if I
stink it up.

I worked as a field systems engineer for Oracle here in Iowa from 2010 when
they bought Sun until 2018. My experiences with Oracle Linux during that
time were pretty positive, but I second what Dan wrote below in terms of
the repositories having problems at times. I saw that at multiple customer
sites over the years, but the OS itself seemed to track RHEL pretty closely
and I never saw a compatibility problem.

In fact reading this thread I think there's plenty of great advice here,
but a cautionary tale:

We abused our customers badly at times due to the fact that Oracle was very
good at making money and controlling costs. If you want to know what being
a stormtrooper feels like I can highly recommend going to work for Oracle.
I miss Sun greatly, but I don't miss Oracle at all.

Mike C

Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:18:35 +0000
From: "Hasler, Chris" <ChrisHasler at alliantenergy.com>
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
Subject: Re: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
Message-ID:
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DM6PR19MB4311D72EF47C984332A625CBA6229 at DM6PR19MB4311.namprd19.prod.outlook.com
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I can confirm that Oracle is cheaper.  Employer has had a support contact
for years, not my choice but in business, options which save money are
usually preferred.

We use Oracle's version of the Red Hat kernel and not Oracle UEK.  It does
feel wrong that Oracle takes Red Hat's source code and compiles it into
their own branded distribution and offers it at a cheaper support cost.  We
only purchase support for a handful or servers, one of which is the server
used to run the nightly repo download script.  Even though we only purchase
support for a few systems, we have 900+ Oracle Linux servers which we patch
from our internal repo.  This is all legal via Oracles own Open Source
documentation.   We have not seen major delay in security updates.

When we talk with software vendors and ask if they will support running on
Oracle Linux rather than Red Hat, the standard answer we receive is: "If
there is a problem that they determine is OS related, we would have to
re-create the issue on a Red Hat server before they would offer application
support", but in 10 years we have not come across any application issue
caused because the OS was Oracle Linux.  I also don’t know of any instance
where an application vendor has refused any support.

Oracle does use their UEK distribution on their Exadata products (which we
also have) and claims they have optimized it for better performance and
have contributed back to the open source community what they have
developed.
Chris H.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cialug <cialug-bounces at cialug.org> On Behalf Of Dan Ramaley
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2022 5:41 PM
To: cialug at cialug.org
Subject: Re: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
Seconded.

Oracle is cheaper. (It just feels so wrong to type that sentence
though.) But their updates always have a lag of a few weeks to a month or
so behind RHEL. For most updates, no big deal, but for security updates
that *is* kind of a big deal. And also, Oracle doesn't seem to know how to
keep a repository online reliably. Back when i supported Oracle Linux i
ended up standing up my own mirror of their repo (and scheduled it to sync
nightly) so that i had something i could rely on during maintenance windows.

On 2022-01-27 16:53, Matt Millard wrote:
> If I’m going to not someone for support of Linux it’s going to be Red Hat
over Oracle any day. I’ve used both Oracle Linux and RHEL in production and
used both support systems.
> ________________________________
> From: Cialug <cialug-bounces at cialug.org> on behalf of Mike Hughes
> <mike at visionary.com>
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2022 4:25:09 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
> Subject: Re: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
>
> I converted a couple CentOS boxes to RHEL and it went very smoothly:
> https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linu
> x/migration-process/convert2rhel-how-to-convert-from-centos-linux-to-r
> ed-hat-enterprise-linux
>
> ________________________________
> From: Cialug <cialug-bounces at cialug.org> on behalf of L. V. Lammert
> <lvl at omnitec.net>
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2022 4:16 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
> Subject: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
>
> Watched a good presentation last week about Oracle Linux and how they
> track RH repos; the suggestion was that this makes it easier to switch
> from CentOS to a valid open source distro that has commercial support
> avaiable.
>
> Any validation or problems from folks that have done a migration?
>
>          Lee
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