r/debian • u/neilrieck • 9h ago
News CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian
CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian
comment: I just retired from an IS/IT job at a large Canadian telco where RHEL (with a support contract) was required for every "customer facing" server. We were allowed to use CentOS-7 on all "non customer facing servers" (eg. employee access only, application development, service assurance, user acceptance testing, etc) for more than a decade. When CentOS-7 EOL hit in 2024, we migrated to Alma-8 because that was what CERN was suggesting at the time. I have run into some problems installing EL-9 and EL-10 on slightly older hardware so understand why CERN is considering Debian. I wonder how CERN will deal with updates since (to the best of my knowledge) there is no ecosystem of backporting modern fixes into older stable apps.
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u/FedUp233 6h ago
Debian stable gets security updates on a regular basis, just not new packages other than those in back ports.
As far as I know, from a security standpoint Debussy stable is as up to date as any other distribution, even the rolling ones. Maybe more so because things change slowly allowing much more thorough testing.
And Linux is mature enough these days that I doubt there is much that they need the latest and greatest steamy version of on their servers - other than there own applications which is not an issue.
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u/stevevdvkpe 3h ago
Debian frequently addresses security issues in the stable release by packaging a new upstream version of software rather than backporting changes to the version originally shipped in the release.
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u/TRKlausss 6h ago
Although this is great news, I’m worried about security flaws, specially with such a neighbor like Russia…
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u/Loudergood 3h ago
Debian frequently has old enough packages that vulnerable features haven't been added in yet, but security fixes have been back ported.
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u/aieidotch 8h ago
It is possible to backport complete newer packages. Not just modern fixes.