So, in previous posts, I've talked about the fact that SoylentNews currently is powered on Ubuntu 14.04 + a single CentOS 6 box. Right now, the sysops have been somewhat deadlocked on what we should do going forward for our underlying operating system, and I am hoping to get community advice. Right now, the "obvious" choice of what to do is simply do-release-upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04. We've done in-place upgrades before without major issue, and I'm relatively certain we could upgrade without breaking the world. However, from my personal experience, 16.04 introduces systemd support into the stack and is not easily removable. Furthermore, at least in my personal experience, working with journalctl and such has caused me considerable headaches which I detailed in a comment awhile ago.
Discounting systemd itself, I've also found that Ubuntu 16.04 seems less "polished", for want of a better word. I've found I've had to do considerably more fiddling and tweaking to get it to work as a server distro than I had to do with previous releases, as well as had weird issues with LDAP. The same was also true when I worked with recent versions with Debian. As such, there's been a general feeling with the sysops that it's time to go somewhere else.
Below the fold are basically the options as we see them, and I hope if the community can provide some interesting insight or guidance.
Right now, we have about three years before security updates for 14.04 stop, and we are absolutely forced to migrate or upgrade. However, we're already hitting pain due to outdated software; I managed to briefly hose the DNS setup over the weekend trying to deploy CAA records for SN due to our version of BIND being outdated. When TLS 1.3 gets standardized, we're going to have a similar problem with our frontend load balancers. As such, I want to get a plan in place for migration so we can start upgrading over the next year instead of panicking and having to do something at the last moment
As with any discussion for server operating system, knowing what our workloads and such is an important consideration. In short, this is what we use for SN, and the software we have to support
In addition, we use mandatory application controls (AppArmor) to limit the amount of stuff a given process can access for critical services to try and help harden security. We'd like to maintain support for this feature to whatever we migrate, either continuing with AppArmor, switching to SELinux, or using jails/zones if we switch operating systems entirely.
Right now, we've floated a few options, but we're willing to hear more.
The first choice is simply migrate over to a distribution where systemd is not present or completely optional. As of writing, Arch Linux, Gentoo, and Slackware are three such options. Our requirements for a Linux distribution is a good record of updates and security support as I don't wish to be upgrading the system once a week to a new release.
I'm aware of the Devuan project, and at first glance, it would seem like an obvious choice; Debian without systemd is the de-facto tagline. However, I've got concerns about the long-term suitability of the distribution, as well as an intentional choice to replace much of the time-tested Debian infrastructure such as the testing archive with a git-powered Jenkins instance in it's place. Another option would be slackware, but Slackware has made no indication that they won't adapt systemd, and is historically very weak with in-place upgrading and package management in general. Most of the other distributions on without-systemd.org are either LiveCDs, or are very small minority distros that I would be hesitant to bet the farm on with.
On the other side of the coin, and an option favored by at least some of the staff is to migrate to Gentoo or Arch, which are rolling-release. For those unaware, a rolling release distribution basically always has the latest version of everything. Security updates are handled simply by updating to the latest upstream package for the most part. I'm not a huge fan of this option, as we're dependent on self-built software, and it's not unheard of for "emerge world" to break things during upgrades due to feature changes and such. It would essentially require us to manually be checking release notes, and crossing our fingers every time we did a major upgrade. We could reduce some of this pain by simply migrating all our infrastructure to the form of ebuilds so that at least they would get rebuild as part of upgrading, but I'm very very hesitant about this option as a whole, especially for multiple machines.
Another way we could handle the problem is simply jump off the Linux ship entirely. From a personal perspective, I'm not exactly thrilled on the way Linux as a collective whole has gone for several years, and I see the situation only getting worse with time. As an additional benefit, switching off Linux gives us the possiblity of using real containers and ZFS, which would allow us to further isolate components of the stack, and give us the option to do rollbacks if ever necessary on a blocked upgrade; something that is difficult to impossible with most Linux distributions. As such, I've been favoring this option personally, though I'm not sold enough to make the jump. Two major options attract me of these two:
FreeBSD has been around a long time, and has both considerable developer support, and support for a lot of features we'd like such as ZFS, jails, and a sane upstream. FreeBSD is split into two components, the core stack which is what constitutes a release, and the ports collection which is add-on software. Both can be upgraded (somewhat) independently of each other, so we won't have as much pain with outdated server components. We'd also have the ability to easy create jails for things like rehash, MySQL, and such and easily isolate these components from each other in a way that's more iron-clad than AppArmor or SELinux.
illumos is descended from OpenSolaris, and forked after Oracle closed up the source code for Solaris 11. Development has continued on it (at a, granted, slower place). Being the originator of ZFS, it has class A support for it, as well as zones which are functionally equivalent to FreeBSD jails. illumos also has support for SMF, which is essentially advanced service management and tracking without all the baggage systemd creates and tendrils throughout the stack. Zones can also be branded to run Linux binaries to some extent so we can handle migrating the core system over by simply installing illumos, restoring a backup into a branded zone, and then piecemeal decommissioning of said zone. As such, as an upgrade choice, this is fairly attractive. If we migrate to illumos, we'll either use the SmartOS distribution, or OpenIndiana.
Right now, we're basically on the fence with all options, so hopefully the community can provide their own input, or suggest other options we're not aware of. I look forward to your comments below!
~ NCommander
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday February 07 2017, @03:05PM
CentOS 6 is EOL in 2020. You have another year before you really need to start testing and that year gives you some more time to allow a non-systemD distribution to emerge as the defacto keeper of the flame.
The other option is you can get a paid distribution. EL6 will have extended support past 2020.
The cost is not too much versus the amount of effort you will spend to move to a new platform. I do not see the physical hardware listed but you can get RH subs for 4 sockets for ~$1600 / year which includes support as well. That's pretty much peanuts when you are sitting there at 2AM trying to figure out why your scripts are vomiting errors. Suse's offering are similarly priced.
I personally have used production support from both Suse and RH and been pretty happy with both. It just depends on what you are comfortable with. For what it's worth, none of my production workloads have been moved to a SystemD-based system. Pretty much everything is RHEL 5/6 or SLES 11. I am taking wait and see approach. Maybe by 2020, they will have SystemD straightened out but it has not been worth my time to deal with it yet.
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 07 2017, @10:19PM
We only have 1 box running Centos/Rhel 6. It's basically the "other" box, which runs mail services, IRC, some ancillary web tools, etc. The problem is that the versions of everything are becoming quite long in the tooth, which is fine if your software is static or you only ever use system supplied packages. Once you need to upgrade your webmail software, and you need to upgrade PHP inorder to accomplish that, you just start down a horrid maintenance rabbit hole. We're already on the cusp of breaking everything on this box every time we touch it due to this.
While we have a while on our Ubuntu boxes which run the core site, this one is in really bad shape and honestly will probably make a decent testing ground for some of us admins working in a new environment.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Tuesday February 07 2017, @10:26PM
The bigger issue with the paid option is the budget for this site. It is... rather thin. We are currently covering our operating costs, and not much else.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday February 07 2017, @11:03PM
That makes sense. When it's all a labor of love, every dollar counts.