First impression on CentOS 7

by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Jul 13, 2014 | Linux

After testing the new CentOS 7.0 here are my first impressions:

1. systemctl took some time to get into (learning done on my SuSE laptop distro)
2. I  don’t really like the new FW config although I see some advantage there, if you already know iptables good enough not much to gain.
3. The default CentOS 7 installer is very good, kickstart also works as a charm.
4. I would love to see a kernel 3.13.xxx instead of the 3.10.xxx though (need to read what has been back-ported).
5. The new default XFS file-system on CentOS 7 surprised me, and for the standard VMs install I’ve come back to ext4 with some custom options, you need to take attention to this specially if you are deploying small VMs. Big filesystems with more than 2 cores will benefit of using it.
6. The network CentOS 7 configuration manager also changed and it’s better, nice to be able to fully use network-manager (nm), also the command line interface is really nice (nmtui).
7. The boot loader is now grub2 instead of grub
8. Also great the EPEL repo for CentOS 7 with all the goodies we are used to, you may install it just by running:

 

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm

 

I still think Redhat and it’s army of clones is ahead of all the major distribution to carry mission critical and deliver the best performance out of your boxes.

Great work CentOS team, and thank you Redhat!

PS – I’m also proud of Redhat 6, a few years ago I’ve installed an email cluster consisting of 2 servers and SAN storage this email cluster served 3000+ IMAP accounts(10GB quota, maildir format), the nice thing is since it was installed with Redhat 6.0 (one month after release aprox.) and it’s still running without reboots (4 years). This is impressive but now I hope my ex-work make update it to Redhat 7, although Redhat 6 support will still be available for until 2020.