Technomancer wrote:
I'm building 2 Gentoo servers at work. One of them will run a
Postfix+Mysql+Courier Imap system and the other will be a LAMP
machine. They both will run on a mid-end corporate environment.
I'm using the hardened profile and kernel.
I choosed Gentoo because using other distros I could not build the
system the way I wanted without headache.
On most cases there was the necessity of package compilation, ignoring
the package management systems of most distros. This sounds like chaos
to me.
Agreed.
Using Portage I coul add and remove features of programs like Postfix
without making some ugly workaround.
Some people keep telling me that I'm mad and Gentoo is a poor choice
for servers. I don't agree with that.
I wish to hear sugestions and advices about Gentoo Servers, how could
I maintain the system up to date without breaking etc etc.
First: Gentoo is not a poor choice for servers. It does well what you
need in a server: control. In my company we have deployed something like
20 servers with Gentoo: web servers, mail servers, database servers,
file servers, backup servers, you name it. We have used RedHat and
Debian in the past, and the Gentoo servers seems to be less trouble.
They are much more "just works".
Upgrading:
Make binary packages of the stuff you've merged. In make.conf add
"buildpkg" to FEATURES. That way you can alway roll-back quickly, if an
upgrade breaks something.
You need to watch out for major changes. For example:
- The changes around xpdf and poppler.
- The shift from dev-php/php,mod_php and cgi_php to dev-lang/php.
- The new apache-config layout.
- The new ftp-base dependencie to proftpd.
Read up on the changes BEFORE upgrading anything untrivial. For example
the changed php-build required some new USE-flags in order not to break
our servers.
This is accually the biggest headache with Gentoo. The portage tree is
just not stable.
Using binary packages:
Compiling on a production box is not cool, so we have tried using binary
packages build on a central server, but portage just doesnt do it well.
The PHP-builds have often had missing dependencies when merged from a
"remote binary".
There is a couple of alternatives that will allow custom packages the
same way Gentoo does, while not forcing you to compile everything.
- The FreeBSD system is not as flexible as Gentoo, as it operates with a
"base-system", but it does have a build system similar to portage, while
still having binaries of the most common packages. But it is not Linux,
and it has a very different init-system (BSD-init).
- Another alternative is Arch Linux, which also has binary packages, but
also a portage-like build system. This IS linux, but uses BSD-init, and
does not seem as mature as Gentoo or FreeBSD.
/Daniel
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