So management at my previous company decided that we should go enterprise, thus replacing our unix boxes which run on freebsd or debian with redhat enterprise linux. It's enterprise right, so it should be good? Anyway, redhat is not necessarily that bad, al though a lot less well thought out compared to debian or ubuntu for example. Anyway, the mail server was migrated to redhat, but then we discovered that redhat is extremely conservative with filesystems and only provides ext3 and gfs. Our mailserver still had a mailspool on xfs. This was a bit annoying. So.. centos to the rescue! Centos is the GPL version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So it is mostly identical to redhat, minus some tools. It also uses yum and rpm packages of centos and redhat are interchangeable. Centos is identical to Red Hat, but centos has centos plus, which is a repository with additional goodies. So this solved our problem: we installed a centos plus kernel + headers and xfs tools, and now the server is happily running kerio mail server on redhat EL 5, with xfs. How ever, you do need to realize that your server is no longer a real Red Hat EL server, which affects you getting support. But for now it runs, but don't tell your PHB!

Tags: sysadmin,linux,redhat,centos,xfs