I recently deployed a Fedora 11 server and found that Red Hat keeps on doing themselves up upon each release. I love the new EXT4 support and and planning on benchmarking some speed tests in the future. Stay tuned.... oooohhh ahhh

The installer (Anaconda) continues on with its simple GUI interface and they have added options for downloading updates from the installer. I tried it the first time around but found that is was so slow to download updates and I couldn't continue on with the installation until they finished. So since I was in a crunch for time I decided to stop the installation and start over and skip the download updates.

Once the server was up I found it had every utility I needed to get the system configured and locked down enough to put on the network securely. I was able to download samba, proftp, and other servers simply through yum.

After that came the mounting of our large storage array. I was hoping to go larger but I ran into a limitation on EXT4 that limits the partition to 16 TB. So oh well I have to live with 16 TB instead of 18. I can use that extra space for virtual drives. The formatting with EXT4 was the same process as EXT3. Very straight forward.

So now came the time to get everything up 2 date. Ahh but we don't use up2date any longer. Now we us yum. Yum is Linux's anal retentive twin to Microsoft's Windows Update so it took a looong time to get all the updates downloaded and installed. I've got to find a fast repository for Fedora 11 because it took 8 hours for all the updates up get installed.

But I rebooted in the end and all was well.

Much more fun to come out of this server. I feel Red Hat has done an excellent job.

That's my personal experience.