CentOS Linux 6.8 Released (softpedia.com) 91
An anonymous reader writes: CentOS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS Linux 6.8 and install media for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. Release Notes for 6.8 are available here. Softpedia writes: "CentOS Linux 6.8 arrives today with major changes, among which we can mention the latest Linux 2.6.32 kernel release from upstream with support for storing up to 300TB of data on XFS filesystems. The VPN endpoint solution implemented in the NetworkManager network connection manager utility is now provided on the libreswan library instead of the Openswan IPsec implementation used in previous release of the OS, and it looks like the SSLv2 protocol has been disabled by default for the SSSD (System Security Services Daemon), which also comes with support for smart cards now." In addition, the new release comes with updated applications, including the LibreOffice 4.3.7 office suite and Squid 3.4 caching and forwarding web proxy, many of which are supporting the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 protocol, including Git, YUM, Postfix, OpenLDAP, stunnel, and vsftpd. The dmidecode open-source tool now supports SMBIOS 3.0.0, you can now pull kickstart files from HTTPS (Secure HTTP) sources, the NTDp (Network Time Protocol daemon) package has an alternative solution as chrony, SSLv3 has been disabled by default, and there's improved support for Hyper-V.
Re:2.6 (Score:5, Informative)
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This isn't even extended support. CentOS 5 is in Extended support until March 31st 2017, 6 is mainstream until that date and extended until November 30th 2020, 7 is mainstream until that date in 2020 and extended support until 2024. See: https://wiki.centos.org/About/... [centos.org] for more info and the latest version of different software on the different releases.
Re:2.6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, at the risk of massive flamage - systemd.
Two very good reasons to keep on upgrading CentOS6.
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I strongly suspect RedHat has a shitload of paying customers who have told them in no uncertain terms that if RH drops RHEL6 and goes systemd-only, they'll be moving to a non-systemd distro.
You expect wrong then. A shrill and tiny minority of trolls and whiners do not represent their customer base. RedHat is perfectly fine about continuing with systemd as are their customers.
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I strongly suspect RedHat has a shitload of paying customers who have told them in no uncertain terms that if RH drops RHEL6 and goes systemd-only, they'll be moving to a non-systemd distro.
I can assure you, systemd would be far, FAR down the list of reasons for RHEL's paying customers to not switch from 6 to 7.
Here is why (Score:2)
Workstation software development, especially the commercial closed source kind, is very slow.
A major change in how things work such as systemd means that it will be several years before the devlopers of that sort of software even consider getting their software to work in the new environment instead of just telling users to use the old one. See also how many commercial packages still recommend turning S
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What I'm saying is that the workstation changes in RHEL 7 are so radical, such a departure from RHEL 6.. I'm not sure where even to begin.
systemd is easy.. EASY to manage and configure and deal with compared to some of the other changes that run through the operating system, especially in the interface. Hell, converting our old rc scripts into something a bit more systemd-friendly wasn't a problem. It's everything else.
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A very major geophysics package from a company starting
RHEL 6 was stable in 2010. See the revision number (Score:2)
The major.minor kernel number for Red Hat 6.0 was chosen based on what was stable when it was released in 2010. Kernel updates since then are reflected in the revision number. Updates after initial release don't change the API, the ABI, or the major.minor parts of the version number. They change the revision number.
Re:2.6.32 kernel? (Score:4, Interesting)
2.6.32 differs so much from modern kernels that trying to cherry-pick fixes leads to anything but stability. I wouldn't touch such a kernel with a 0.015 furlong pole.
ignorant idiots on slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
2.6.32 differs so much from modern kernels that trying to cherry-pick fixes leads to anything but stability. I wouldn't touch such a kernel with a 0.015 furlong pole.
rhel kernels are the most heavily tested kernels available, really you would trust a new kernel with your company's data?
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I guess you haven't seen the amount of patches atop RH's kernels. They backport loads of features which were never coded with ancient kernels in mind. These backports are not tested by anyone but RH's internal kernel guys -- as opposed to a large community testing mainstream kernels.
No one says you should run 4.6 in production yet, let's have it season for a bit. But running kernels without mainstream maintenance is not wise. I'd understand them if they cherry-picked just security and bug fixes -- but t
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They backport loads of features which were never coded with ancient kernels in mind. These backports are not tested by anyone but RH's internal kernel guys -
What a load of crap, these kernels are thoroughly tested by every vendor with a RHEL port of their product. Database vendors etc run these kernels through the ringer on production loads long before you ever see them.
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Hmm, the dunno about the Kernel in 6.8, but one of the kernel updates in the 6.7 kernel caused our CPU load to go up, we downgraded back.
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Sure that wasn't the kernel that fixed a miscalculated load average? There were some niggles around that for sure, but there's hardly a consistent pattern of Redhat introducing bad kernel updates.
* Due to prematurely decremented calc_load_task, the calculated load
average was off by up to the number of CPUs in the machine. As a
consequence, job scheduling worked improperly causing a drop in the system
performance. This update keeps the delta of the CPU going into NO_HZ idle
separately, and folds the pending idle delta into the global active count
while correctly aging the averages for the idle-duration when leaving NO_HZ
mode. Now, job scheduling works correctly, ensuring balanced CPU load.
(BZ#1300349)
Re: ignorant idiots on slashdot (Score:2)
And yet my exoerience with RHEL3,4,5 in production in a relatively large and varied environment was that they were all rock solid. We still have 5.x in production, we are currently rolling 7.2 out to replace most of those (though some VMs will need intermediate upgrades to 6.x due to multi-server customer-facing application upgrades also required to get to 7)
If you want more recent, run RHEL7.2. If you want bleeding edge run Fedora. If you want something between stable and bleeding edge, choose a more deskt
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We all hate SAP and Oracle, but RHEL is a preferred platform for them to run their enterprisey stuff on. If it was as bad as you say, I think somebody would have sort of noticed.
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Red Hat guarantees the API and ABI compatibility of their kernels for years
why:
https://access.redhat.com/articles/rhel-abi-compatibility
They've been doing it for a decade - and are more trusted than any other Linux OS
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/trusted
I think they've got this covered
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Modernism and Stability (Score:3)
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Re:Modernism and Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
CentOS/RedHat major releases have a 10-year life span. Debian is 5 years for LTS and Ubuntu is 4 years. For my uses that is a significant difference.
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Oops. Ubuntu LTS is also 5 years.
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You contradict yourself (Score:3)
"CentOS 6 is really behind" means that it does not have a bunch of significant recent changes. Which is the definition of stable.
Has CentOS 6 kept up with recent changes? If so, it's not "really behind". If not, it's stable. Pick one.
I would say they've done as advertised, they kept it pretty stable. That happens to be what I want right now. If I wanted cutting-edge, I might use Fedora.
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Again, hasn't been changed == remained stable (Score:4, Insightful)
> there is a huge difference between modern Ubuntu like releases and CentOS. Even Ubuntu 14.04 (2 years old) is way ahead
I don't necesarily disagree. Let's assume that's right, that Ubuntu has had a lot of updates (changes) and CentOS hasn't. That's what you said, right?
Of course all that new stuff has new APIs and especially new ABIs. The APIs and ABIs of RHEL 6 haven't changed for six years, so it doesn't have all the new shinies. What do you call it when something doesn't change a lot over time, when it pretty much remains the same? For APIs and ABIs, we call that "stable".
Notice the word is neither "good" nor "bad", it's "stable", aka unchanging, remaining the same, reliable.
> but at least show a bit of fairness.
I can't think of anything more fair than stating a plain, objective fact. RHEL doesn't change the interfaces. They are stable. Love it or hate it, it's a fact. What would be UNFAIR would be to lie and say RHEL doesn't provide a stable environment. That's simply untrue as a factual matter, for the sense of the word "stable" that matters for software maintainence.
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> Has CentOS 6 kept up with recent changes?
CentOS doesn't generally "keep up with changes". They follow changes from RHEL, with a few exceptions like their Xen virtualization project.
RHEL is kept very standard, with consistent major libraries, kernels, and software versions. They do occasionally publish add-on toolkits, such as additional and upgraded versions of python or gcc in parallel with the main default version. And they are doing some interesting things with the "software collecion" libraries, to
Just in time for PayPal. (Score:1)
Hosts have 3 weeks to roll it out:
(Yes, that's right, NSS, not OpenSSL.)
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.8_Release_Notes/new_features_security.html [redhat.com]
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If we are fortunate, you will die before then. Unreasonable hatred is not something we wish to encourage or foster.
Another POSIX hater (Score:2)
> Unreasonable hatred is not something we wish to encourage or foster.
So why do you Red Hat shills so unreasonably hate POSIX, and the UNIX philosophy?
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I was like you. Then I tried it out. It's actually quite good.
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(Yes, that's right, NSS, not OpenSSL.)
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.8_Release_Notes/new_features_security.html [redhat.com]
I don't understand your emphasis on NSS.
FWIW, the version of openssl that shipped with CentOS 6.7 fully supported TLSv1.2. Their announcement that, "NSS now enables the TLS version 1.2 protocol by default", does not in any way imply that OpenSSL had not or did not do so. They happen to be building some items against NSS, thus that change affects things like pyCurl and phpCurl for them, though those could be rebuilt against OpenSSL (I rebuild php to get a more recent version, and link it to openssl instead o
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PayPal didn't back off, the PCI Council did. The PCI DSS standard previously offered an exemption for existing sites that could not easily deprecate TLS 1.0 that was to expire June 2016. Now that has been extended 12 months, and PayPal is following suit.
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CentOS 6.8 is NOT the latest CentOS version, with CentOS 7.0 taking that honor.
Actually 7.2 is the latest!
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RHEL 7.2 is the latest long-term supported production platform from Red Hat. Fedora is the bleeding edge work, and a sign of what will be in future RHEL releases. The bleeding edge versions of perl, python, and of virtualization toolkits and security toolkits can be very destabilizing to production systems, which is why RHEL and CentOS have been so popular for production work.
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Or Gnome3. What a load of old rubbish, I must be an idiot to have almost 3 machines running it.
Systemd shills rated this "troll" what a surprise (Score:1)
Red Hat is shameless.
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Where is the auto install pop up ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had to install it this morning by typing ''yum update'', it told me that it was going to install 855 MB and prompted me ''Is this ok [y/N]'' -- notice a default answer of no.
This is yet more evidence that RedHat/CentOS is behind the time and not following recent industry practice of bamboozling their users [slashdot.org] into installing the latest version of the OS whether they want to or not. Should I downgrade to Microsoft Windows so that I can become as exasperated as some of my friends ?
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Should I downgrade to Microsoft Windows so that I can become as exasperated as some of my friends ?
Do you hate yourself? If so, then yes, join your friends.
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They don't change major version numbers, ever. New features may be patched in as long as the risk is minimal. That's what they call "major". Maybe they should have worded it "noteworthy changes" instead.
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Unless you're running a desktop, who cares? My CentOS servers don't run Wayland, X, or any kind of graphical desktop.
FreeBSD, Slackware, Gentoo, or Calculate Linux? (Score:1)
Just no reason for CentOS anymore. The kernel on the 6.x distros is old. The 7.x use that horrid systemd crap. It really sucks. CentOS 6.5 was a great distro.
Calculate Linux is based on Gentoo, but Calculate installs easily. I use the MATE based distro, everything works, and is easy.
I think Slackware 14.3 is out. That might be worth a look.
I used FreeBSD for a while, but FreeBSD has no Dropbox client, and I could not install my VPN on FreeBSD. Sad, because FreeBSD is very solid UNIX implementation.
Watch out for fatal regression (Score:2)
Well, my big file server just paniced after a 6.7->6.8 upgrade. The ONLY reason to stick with CentOS6 was stability and long lifetime. Since that is now out the window, switching to Ubuntu 16.04 (with the huge advantage of having ZFS precompiled) is back on my burner.
The good news is it doesn't look like I lost any of my 24 TB of ZFS data, despite panics, reset switches, and power buttons.