Hi, Sorry for this somewhat OT post (though it may be of general interest).
I am currently maintaining a WAN (4 continents) consisting of FreeBSD machines. While I am quite happy with FreeBSD, lack of driver support for some boards I need to use forces me to switch to Linux. And while the Pros often seem to favor Debian, the drivers I need (binary only) seem to be best tested with/easiest available for Redhat and SuSe, which is why I am looking especially at those two. This is strictly for server use, so problems with X, compatibility with new-fangled video boards and other Desktop-OS related problems are not the issue here. Besides general observations I am specifically interested in answers to these questions: Apache/modperl installation and updates: I assume installation is straight forward, how about keeping current? As those are remotely administered platforms, chances are the OS may not be kept current. So is it still easy to deal with security updates (Apache, sshd, bind etc) when the platform is a couple of years old? With FreeBSD this has become somewhat harder lately (still running 3.x, but the ports system doesn't support 3.x any longer). Remote maintability: Is it possible to remotely upgrade between OS versions for either of those platforms (not a must, but would be a plus)? Sendmail: Does the system make it easy to replace sendmail with another mailer of choice (qmail in my case)? Footprint: Is it easy to weed out unused system components to have a smaller footprint of the OS? Or does that mean fighting the installer left and right? perl: Any iussues with perl/modperl? Besides modperl I will be running a perl application with a few hundred thousend lines of code... Security: Is it easy to 'tie down' the system? Software-based RAID 1: Is it usable (only for a data partition, not required for the root partition)? Is it easy to recover from a broken disk? Robustness: While almost all systems I have are/will be on UPSs, they still tend to occasionally be 'unplugged' (not shut down cleanly), be it due to an empty or dead UPS battery, someone tripping over or accidentaly unplugging the power cable etc. etc. Does the system tend to survive the then due fsck without manual intervention? Better yet, would it be possible to mount / and /usr read-only, and have a /var partition that (if the worst should happen) can be recreated on the fly? Any other oddities one should be aware of? Thanks much for any input Gerd
