Re: [squid-users] CentOS 4.3 and Squid Version

        Hiyas,

Chris Robertson escreveu:
> Domingos Parra Novo wrote:
<snip>
>> For an stable and secure (enterprise) environment, I'd recomend
>> all users to stay with the vendor's packaging and updating, and let
>> the administrator deal with other tasks.
>
> I agree with all that you said up to this point. This line, I have to
> (partially) contest. If you are paying for RHEL (and therefore paying
> for the support it offers), then by all means, use the packages offered,
> and report bugs to RedHat. If, on the other hand, you are using a clone
> distribution (CentOS, WhiteBox, etc.) then your support is going to be
> supplied by the community. If you want the Squid community to support
> your Squid install, please, please, PLEASE don't use the stock distro
> packages. They are not current. There are too many non-standard,
> back-ported changes. If you want stability, hang back a release or two
> (pick one with few bug fixes, and apply the patches), and let others
> shake out the problems with the new releases. But don't ask the
> community to support the Frankenstein's Monster released by the vendor.

        I totally agree with you. Either you buy RHEL and use its support, or
you choose to use CentOS, and try to figure your issues by yourself.
Request support to the squid community (or any other software), when
using a vendor package is not a good thing (tm).

        By the way, we have hundreds of servers running CentOS 4 (and some
others running the original RHEL 4). We usually package our own squid,
apache and others (to a well know, secure and stable version of the
package). Almost 100% of the time it is newer then the vendor, but it
usually lags a bit from the stock one (eg, squid 2.5-stable14 and apache
2.0.58, instead of squid 2.6-stable1 and apache 2.2.2). Of course, we
have a few linux specialists doing this task. If you got no
"specialists" (and is not an *nix expert), vendor packages (with its
documentation) are easier to install/configure, compared with the
process of a stock tarball (download/compile/install/configure/run).

> Chris

Regards,

Domingos.

-- 
Domingos Parra Novo
Coordenador de Projetos
Terra Networks Brasil S/A
Tel: +55(51)3284-4275