Fedora 9 virtually OK!?

In spite of lamenting the seeming likelihood that Fedora 9 would not handle simple routing well enough for production deployment in a VMware Server (1.0.5) environment, I now have Fedora 9 deployed in such a production environment, without major problems.

Update: June 14: The problem was not limited to Fedora. The problem also occurred with Windows Server 2003 in a virtual machine. The problem was the free version of ZoneAlarm. Uninstalling ZoneAlarm and using only Microsoft’s firewall, routing works OK in the previously problematic environment. ?? It is hard to identify a meaningful environmental difference between the unsuccessful test deployment vs. a separate successful test deployment vs. the production environment. All three physical machines have Broadcom 440x 10/100 Ethernet controller, so differences in the network driver paths, my first hypothesis, seems unfounded. The unsuccessful environment has XP Pro as the real OS, while the successful environments have XP Home. ?? 

Fedora 9 GUI stuff still seems less stable:

  1. Every time I’d start VNC, I’d get a kernel oops warning, but was unable to get the applet to report the oops, so I turned off the warnings.
  2. The updates pending alert has never yet allowed me to apply an update
  3. Many times when I try to start a GUI applet (application??) I get a big warning box “There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.” There’s no indication of any way to try to fix, just “GNOME will try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in.”
  4. System->Administration->Update System, like the automated alert, does not allow me to apply updates.
  5. System->Administration->Add/Remove Software never lets me add software. So I can’t say anything good about PackageKit in Fedora 9.

I routinely used pirut, pup (& puplet) in the past, but since those seem to have been removed, I use yum from the command line. I’ve grown to mostly like that better than the older GUI stuff, but still found those useful enough to wish they were still around.

Since I mostly use Fedora for name/mail/web serving and similar things, none of these problems are a big deal for me. But they are annoyances.

I’ll probably start putting Fedora 9 into production on my two main servers after a new disk arrives tomorrow.

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