Kudos to the Fedora Folks

A few months ago we got a new Dell 1U server in house specifially for use as a monitoring machine. Our existing methods of monitoring, particularly for looking at bandwidth utilization, were not scaling well.

The box is now running several applications:

• Cacti: PHP/MySql-based network graphing


• Nagios: Server monitoring


• Smokeping: Excellent network latency monitor


• Netflow: Cisco monitoring tools based on this setup

In the process of getting all these tools set up and configured, I had first attempted to use Fedora Core 3, which at the time was the current release. I ran into quite a few problems particularly with MySQL for Cacti, and some other missing things.

If you've spent any time around Linux on a server, you know the drill: You need package X. You attempt to install package X using apt-get or yum or whatever package mangler your distribution has, only to see something like

This package needs Package Z, Package ZZ-dev, Packages foo through bar

or

You can't upgrade Package Z because Packages A-Y depend on it

Which is exactly the problem I ran into with Fedora Core 3 at the time. My solution was to install Fedora Core Test 1 and see if it worked, which it did. I'm not thrilled about using a test release for a production server, but the box is not hosting critical services, so I went ahead.

This week with the release of Fedora Core 4, all I had to do was downlaod the ISOs, boot from the CDs I made, upgrade the OS, reboot, and everything just works.

Normally I don't upgrade operating systems. I've had too many bad experiences. But this one just worked, it was clean, it was fast and I really have to give the people who make Fedora a big hand for making what would be very painful an easy and quick install.