Finally have some time to write at the end of the day, or rather, the beginning of a new day. Today was one of my most horrible days since the beginning of the year. I’ve had very painful experience with yum, CentOS, and its GUI, not to mention the goddamn RSI! Let me quickly sum up how CentOS became one of my hatred operating systems in a couple of hours.
My goals
I need to setup a high-availability system in active/active model using CentOS 5 (latest) for a web server (Apache2), a VoIP server (Asterisk), a database server, and a distributed storage system (DRBD) with 2 nodes. And oh, the company which I’m supporting has a horrible Internet connection.
What happened?
I’ll explain in details what had happened in the next post. Here are the summarizations:
- yum download package database every time I want to do something with it. What the heck? When I tell you to install, just download the necessary package file and install; when I tell you to reinstall, just remove the package(s), take the RPM(s) and install them again. I don’t need you to do something I don’t tell you to do. The hell with you, don’t assume I’m stupid! You folks’ll know what I felt when you come back to the old time of Linux and Internet, when we were trying to download hundreds of tarballs with a 56kbit modem.
- Besides, I ran a x86_64 system and when I installed a package, it automatically installed both x86 and x86_64 packages! Try it yourself with pacemaker, corosync, and drbd.
- CentOS GUI tools break the configuration files. Personally I hardly ever used any GUI tool to config something. Raw config files are sometimes tiring but really honest. Tools (especially GUI things) are just a bunch of liars. I took me 3 hours to figure out CentOS GUI tools used by my partner broke the Apache configuration and network settings at one node, making Corosync and Pacemaker failed to manage the services.
- Booting lasted forever when sendmail is supposed to be started at boot, and there is no network connection. Perhaps my partner has changed some sendmail settings but I’m pretty sure it’s not related to the timeout.
And…?
Farewell CentOS! As an IT consultant, I’m sure you have lost a lot of potentially good users and supporters.
