It mainly depends on your own feelings. I think that a debian stable is a very good choice for a prod' server, but I really dislike the way Debian manages daemon and prefer the Gentoo approach. Updates are not painless...for sure, but you have to consider your needs first (what tools do you need ? typical web services ? extra lib from different languages ? any time reserved for maintenance or the server cannot be off ?). Then, updating is not a must. Believe me, an up-to-date machine is nice .... when you want brand new lib/features/softwares. Do your server need to be so.. up-to-date ?
Finally, if you take time to estimate what should be updated prior to emerge the whole world, you can plan your updates and organize the way to go back if required.... and updates are not nightmares. (But have a look at the handbook: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2). You also need tools like dispatch-conf to undo easily your conf files changes. Gal' On Nov 29, 2007 2:10 PM, Rafael Barrera Oro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First of all, thanks to everybody for sharing your experiences, very > helpful information indeed, specially now that i need some guidance. > For now, the conclusion i can reach is that Gentoo is perfectly adequate > to use on a server with the only downside of the need to have special care > with updates. > Ricardo, i find really encouraging the fact that your lab uses Gentoo for > their servers. Nevertheless it would be great if you could tell us a little > about your lab's experience with updates, which seems to be the only issue > when using Gentoo on a server. > Another thing i noticed is that some of you recommend to have a secondary > server to perform tests, i totally agree with this. Unfortunately i do not > think that having such thing will be possible since the server will be > charged to a client and i do not think they will agree to buy a second > server (even if its the right thing to do, which i believe so), in such > case, would you still recommend Gentoo?. > > Again, thanks to everybody for the information. > -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
