On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 03:56:59PM +0800, Cocoy wrote: > i ran a gentoo box in an old family business... which i have since > left... ;) it replaced a redhat box. it ran postfix for our company > email, as well as acted as a gateway for our small office and as a > nameserver.
Gentoo running a family business mail server does not qualify as mission critical in the enterprise sense of the word, despite the fact that it means your mom/dad will be breathing down your throat when they can't email. The problem with Gentoo or any build-it-yourself distribution is that you always have one-ofs. That's unacceptable in the enterprise, where you grow from one server to thousands. When you're not talking about maintaining just a handful of servers anymore, then standardization becomes important. When you use an enterprise distribution like Debian or CentOS/RHEL, you leverage the fact that many other enterprises build on the same setup, "lock, stock and barrel". The parts are known to work well individually, and all together as a cohesive system. These distributions also go through rigorous testing, and have acceptable turnaround times for security updates. That gives you a "known base" upon which to build your service, so you only need to focus on your core competency (ie: the application you've built on which your service relies). Cheers! --> Jijo -- Federico Vicente C. Sevilla III Information Technology Consultant Q Software Research Corporation Website: http://jijo.free.net.ph _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
