[GTALUG] War Story: distro version upgrades can be dangerous

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

One of my gateway machines uses Fedora.
I used to use CentOS for that kind of purpose, but no longer.

When CentOS changed, I decided to try Fedora instead.

The first downside is the torrent of updates.  But that doesn't really 
seem to be a problem.

The second downside is that support for a release of Fedora is two and a 
bit 6-month release cycles.

An upside is that version upgrades are automated (unlike CentOS) and that 
automation generally works.  This upgrade takes the machine offline for 
perhaps an hour at a time of your choosing

(If one isn't diligent, one can fall way behind upgrading distro versions.  
This is particularly easy in systems like CentOS or debian where there is 
a combination of long support periods and no automated version update 
procedure.  Ubuntu LTS appears to get this right: long support and
update automation.)

Fedora has been working pretty well on my gateway for the last few
years.  I like it that the packages are up to date (CentOS packages
tend to be old).

I upgraded the gateway machine from Fedora 36 to 38 a couple of days ago.

It didn't go smoothly.  A couple of small-ish hangups caught me.  This
is not ideal in a gateway.  Luckily, I have more than one.

====

Problem 1: firewalld

firewalld had a new bug.  Or maybe it was iptables.  I don't need to
know which.

The firewalld settings could not be loaded.  So the firewall had default 
settings.  These were safe but not functional for a gateway machine.  I 
could manually install what I wanted in the running firewall but those 
settings would not persist.  I could not make persistent changes.

I reported the bug:  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2209199
Within a day or so, a work-around is suggested and a bug fix is initiated.

This shows outstanding support for which I pay nothing.  (Actually, I
have done free support for specifically for Red Hat as part of an
upstream project.  But there is no connection.)

====

Problem 2: GNOME now suspends the machine when it thinks nobody is using 
the console.  See
<https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/gnome-suspends-after-15-minutes-of-user-inactivity-even-on-ac-power/79801>

Guess how I found out?  No, not reading the Fedora 38 release notes.  I 
discovered it when my gateway suspended.  What the heck?!?

This is a disaster for any machine that has tasks that need to run all
the time.  Clearly this applies to a gateway machine, but even on my
desktop machine, this isn't correct:

- I want to be able to SSH into my desktop at any time

- I run Hexchat IRC client 24/7 on my desktop so that I can know of 
  activity while I'm not there.

- My desktop is an internal mail server and needs to handle mail at all times.

There is a "Fedora Server" version that gets this right.  I haven't 
figured out how to get Fedora Workstation to stop suspending generally.  
The work-around is that you can get each possible console user to turn 
this feature off.  And you have to do this for GDM (the login screen) too.