On Friday 07 May 2004 11:00, Jason Louie wrote:
> First I would like to say that this is not asking which is the best distro.
> I'm just asking for your opinion. Please do not *bash* other distros.
>
> Which distro do you use as a business webserver, (w/ Email) server? Why?
Gentoo.
Similar to Debian, it's painful to set up initially (compared to other
distros), but once up, it's rock solid, and MUCH easier to keep up to date.
Further, it's MUCH lighter than any other distro I've seen, meaning your
hardware will last you far longer, and you'll have far fewer security
problems by virtue of the fact that you'll have far less software available
to be exploited. Gentoo has a better than average support community, and I'd
be quite suprised if it wasn't the most popular community supported distro --
meaning it won't fade away any time soon, and finding support will be
relatively easy.
Another person touched on this a BIT, when they mentioned BSD. BSD is easy
to admin due to the ports system. Portage (emerge) works in a very similar
way, and again, similar to BSD, is also incredibly easy to administer.
RH and Suse are difficult to keep up to date after a distro version is end of
lifed. This doesn't happen with Gentoo, and is in fact a bit of a foreign
concept. "emerge --update world" will bring any version to current in a
single line command. The only exception is the move from 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.6
kernel (and eventually 3.0 and beyond) because you will need to configure
them manually. But aside from the kernel, the upgrade is REALLY easy, and
for this reason, the kernel will be ignored during these upgrades, it needs
to be done seperately and manually. Better yet, the server is still up and
live during the upgrade process. Ask someone running Red Hat 6.2 about their
process of upgrading to RH 7, then RH 7.1, RH 7.2, RH 7.3, RH 8, RH 8.1, RH
8.2, RH 9, FC1, FC2 either through each step, or jumping directly from 6.2
to FC2. This is a BIG difference, and it matters in the longer term. And
it's HUGELY easier with Gentoo.
> Which distro would be simple to keep up with updates and patches?
I have yet to see an easier one than Gentoo. And I do use it corporately,
ditto Red Hat and Suse. Gentoo is far easier to support. I will say, that
this may not be the case if I spent more time getting familiar with RPM. Not
RPM specifically, but RPM as a Package Manager, so that I'd be better able to
deal with YUM and YAST, etc. Emerge is far slower (because it compiles from
source), but it's been far easier to work with, in my experience.
> What method do you recommend with updating a server? (I ask this because
> some updates disable certain features, that might be a security hole,
> causing certain sites to fail.)
I've never seen this happen with Emerge. Moving from KDE 3.1 through to 3.2.2
has been a single command in all instances. No dependancies, no questions
only Aaron can answer, no strangeness. Ditto for kernel 2.4 to 2.6 moves.
> I definately want something that is stable, secure and easily maintainable.
And my esperience with Red Hat, Suse, and Gentoo is this. They're all rock
solid. Short of a hardware failure, they'll all work perfectly. Gentoo is
easier to update. Red Hat is the easiest to find closed source, or "unique"
binaries packages for. Suse is a close second to Red Hat in this regard, but
somehow, it feels nicer. I can't put my finger on it. In all likelyhood,
it's probably a personal preference issue more than anything else.
Kev.
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