On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 13:08, Hamish McBrearty wrote: > Hi all > > Currently I seem to be expanding my client base a little, and have been > rolling out some Linux servers to them. But seeing as I don't have a great > deal of experience with all things Linux I'd like some frank pros and cons > about certain things. > > Firstly distro. My personal preference is Gentoo, I know where it puts the > config files, I understand the packaging system, patching is dead simple, > and overall I'm comfortable. It's my preference too. Installing it using the binary packages is really no slower than any other distribution.
> But what are the pros and cons of Gentoo vs say Debian? The primary advantages of Gentoo over all the binary package dists. is that you escape the hell of dependencies and have a o/s which is precisely tuned to your cpu. Gentoo goes noticeably faster than Mandrake or RedHat. The major disadvantage is that it is virtually impossible to keep the machine up to date without some sort of Internet connection. You do not need broadband, the bandwidth of a box of CDs via courier post exceeds Jetstream, but you do need to be able to log into the machine to initiate the work. > Secondly kernels. At home I use 2.6.2-mm, or in Gentoo speak mm-sources, > which performs fantastically. It's notably faster than 2.4.22-gentoo-r5 on > my laptop, and performed great under heavy load, ie compiling KDE3.2. So > stick with the tried and true but slightly slower kernel? Or the newer, > untested but faster kernel? Depends on the situation. I too have been running 2.6.1, but for only a fortnight or so on a desktop machine. I'd wait until the 2.7 branch is made before I put 2.6.x on a critical server. However for anything which does not absolutely have to be 99.999% 24/7 I'd be pretty happy with 2.6.x > And finally filesystem. I really have no preference here as I don't fully > understand the differences between them. On my most recent server I used > Reiserfs and it goes great, but there's only 5 workstations on the > network. The next one is likely to have 20-30 clients accessing the > server, all via Samba. Again, pros and cons of using Reiserfs vs Ext3 vs > XFS. I have been using xfs at home for well over a year now. I had a minor hiccup with it about a year ago. The xfs_repair utility fixed the problem and it goes very well now. Currently here is a problem with JFS on Gentoo. There is a package which uses the extended UTF-8 character set in a file name. JFS baulks at this because the char-set is iso-8859-1 and the install crashes. I have no direct experience of either ext3 of Reiserfs so cannot comment. The Gentoo docs suggest ext2 for the /boot partition so I go along with it. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell NB. This PC runs Linux. If you find a virus apparently from me, it has forged the e-mail headers on someone else's machine. Please do not notify me when this occurs. Thanks.
