CentOS 5.3

by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 4, 2009 | Front Page

CentOS 5.3 was released on the 1st of April, I’ve since updated a whole lot of my machines to this version and been very happy.

There are a few gotchas, mostly well covered in the release notes, the only other odd thing I found was that /etc/snmp/snmpd.options has now moved to /etc/sysconfig/snmpd.options ditto for snmptrapd.options.  It’s a bit of a weird change, while it makes the SNMPD config a bit more like the rest of the RedHat system, it still is different, you’d think based on all the other files in /etc/sysconfig that this one would have been called /etc/sysconfig/snmpd rather than have the .options bit tacked on.

Other changes that I noticed is that Xen is behaving a lot better now on suspends, if I reboot a dom0 and then bring it back up the domU’s resume where they were and unlike the past the clocks do not go all over the place, in fact I’ve even seen SSH sessions stay up between reboots.  Though SNMP still sometimes stop working after resume.

The general overall look of the distribution is much better, the artwork has been redone through out and now forms a nice cohesive look and feel through out.

While investigating the cause of the /etc/snmp/snmpd.options file mysteriously going missing I once again had the miss fortune of having to deal with #centos on freenode.  It really is one of the most hostile channels I’ve come across in the opensource world, people are just outright arseholes, every one including the project leaders. 

Immediately assuming you have no clue, don’t know what you’re talking about and generally just treating everyone like shit who dare suggest something is broken with the usual ‘works for me’ ‘read the docs’ or ‘its in the release notes’ or ‘looking at the source will not help’ style responses to every question.  When as it turns out every one of those remarks were just plain wrong. No it didn’t work for them, their files also got moved by the installer.  No it was not in the docs or release notes.  No looking at the source would have helped a lot more than they did because I would have then been able to see for myself that the post install of the RPM moves the files etc.  It took literally over a hour to get even one of them to actually make the effort to be helpful compared to about 2 minutes it would have taken if the SRPMs were available at release time.

I think they’re really doing the project a big disservice by not sorting out the irc channel in fact they actively defend and even promote the hostility shown there, in contrast to the puppet irc channel for instance it really is a barbaric bit of the 3rd world.