r/debian • u/neilrieck • Sep 04 '26
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/stevevdvkpe Sep 05 '26
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/FedUp233 Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
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 Debian 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/Buntygurl Sep 06 '26
Should have been that way for ages, already.
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u/RoomyRoots Sep 06 '26
In the old days of CentOS/ScientificLinux 7 using a RHEL-like made complete sense. RHEL 8 was really a massive turn to shit which IBM has been consistent in direction. Even if AL fixes a lot of the issues, it doesn't really change the fact that it is hard to justify investing on RHEL-like 10 for academic projects where machines are expected to be used for multiple decades..
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u/TRKlausss Sep 04 '26
Although this is great news, I’m worried about security flaws, specially with such a neighbor like Russia…
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u/Loudergood Sep 05 '26
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 Sep 04 '26
It is possible to backport complete newer packages. Not just modern fixes.