On 5/10/2014 1:10 AM, Dan Egli wrote:
On May 9, 2014, Matthew Walker wrote:
I'll be blasted for this, no doubt. But I run Gentoo on my servers. They
only get EXACTLY what I need them to have.
Exactly. That's one of the reasons I like Gentoo myself.
Admittedly, it's only 3-4 servers, and they're low maintenance. I would
never do Gentoo for a large server farm, much as I love it.
Why not? Especially since server farms frequently all use the same package
set (maybe one or two machines do different), you could just compile the
packages on one server, save them, and use that server as a binhost for the
other servers. Not too complicated. Now if you need a completely different
package set on each server, then maybe it's a bit of a pain. But even then,
you just get the packages you need, then add distcc and let each package
compile through distcc, leveraging the power of that server's cpu and
several of it's neighbors. Just offset the compile process so they don't
all try to compile at the same time.
To be fair, I feel the same way. But the reactions I usually get when I
mention running Gentoo on a server have me a bit defensive-minded on the
topic, so I usually throw out that anchor to defuse the outrage. :)
I've never had enough servers to feel like I needed to set up the
binhost solution, and they've usually been non-homogenous, so it
wouldn't have been ideal anyway. But I've slowly gotten to the point
where I'm kept notified of what software updates are pending, and
whether there's any GLSA announcements about my systems. My general
experience has been very positive, and with my recent move to using
Linode as my server host, it's become even better. They take the pain
out of the initial server setup since you can deploy a bootable image
that's ready to have a world file dropped onto it and installed.
So yes, Gentoo on servers is very workable in my opinion. But lots of
people have knee-jerk reactions to the distro that make it difficult to
convince them. :)
--
Matthew Walker HAM Call Sign: N7TOX
Kydance Hosting & Consulting, Inc. - http://www.kydance.net/
PHP, Perl, and Web Development - Linux Server Administration
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