On May 10, 2014, Matthew Walker wrote:
> 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. I understand that one, having hit it myself a time or two. I worked once for a company that was designing a cross-platform authentication tool (i.e. use a window NT domain server to validate your linux login and if necessary create your home directory when logging in). It worked well, but when I mentioned to some of the people that I was surprised they didn't include Gentoo Linux as part of the supported distros the reactions ranged from "You're right. We don't. Period." to "Why on earth would we want to support that?" I've used Gentoo quite a bit. The biggest complaints I've heard from some people are the install time to get it setup. They don't seem to get the idea that you can just use the Live CD to install a fully functional Gentoo image then use emerge to change the packages to meet your needs. They keep clinging to the idea that you HAVE to use the minimal image (which I freely admit I usually do anyway) and then you have to compile each and every package you want installed, plus all it's dependencies (i.e. compiling PHP when you want Apache to support mod_php). I guess it's just a paradigm shift. I used Gentoo happily, even back when, in order to get the best performance, you had to download a stage ONE tarball (vs. the "stage 3" used today), and then compile gcc/g++ and glibc on your system. And that was back in the AMD K6-2 days when only one CPU meant only one thread (two if you had an Intel chip that could hyperthread) being executed at once. That literally took several hours on my K6-2 400 box. But it was very nice when I was finally done. :) Smooth as silk, and noticeably faster when the machine was under heavy load. Probably due to the lack of need to dynamically link in all these functions from shared libraries that I never used. Speaking of Gentoo, by the way, do you happen to know of a good wrapper (either a curses style console app or an X11 app) for gentoo's portage? Something that would let me search the various packages, see the versions available, and select which packages to install/remove? That would be really handy. :) --- Dan On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Matthew Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
