Michael Pedersen wrote: > On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Ed Valentine > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: ... > Ubuntu is based on Debian, and therefore *should* be stable enough for > a production server. I have been taking care of a forum where they > have been running on Ubuntu for over a year now. Even with that, I > can't shake the feeling that something is not quite right, and would > prefer stock Debian as my first choice. Many people criticize Debian > for being too slow to update, but for production servers, it seems to > be the right speed. Ubuntu might well work for you. I just prefer Debian. That's our normal stance for client sites as well (i.e. Debian is the preferred production server platform), but for my *personal* servers I run Ubuntu's latest release. Mostly because I normally want bleeding-edge functionality for demo/testing stuff. With Debian, the sysadmins seem happy, and it's familiar for the developers who use Ubuntu desktops or VMs. > RHEL/CentOS are fine, but their Python is horribly older than it > should be. What amuses me the most is that Debian is actually ahead of > them (Python 2.5 comes with stock Debian, whereas RHEL/CentOS use > Python 2.4 still). Considering the speed benefits of upgrading to at > least Python 2.5, you will want to build your own Python, and make > sure to use it whenever working with it if you go with this platform. RHEL/CentOS is fine, and we had 1 customer who ran it. I personally find it somewhat alien-feeling, but then I'm accustomed to Ubuntu/Debian systems. With virtualenv isolation, we find it really doesn't matter which Linux you're running on most of the time, so if your admins are comfortable with RHEL, build a custom Python 2.5 or 2.6 and virtualenv and you're off to the races. Basically, what your admins can maintain safely, securely, etceteras is way more important than the packaging system that's being used. > Personally, you can't keep me far enough away from Gentoo. Managing to > have a repeatable installation of Gentoo is nothing short of a > nightmare. And if something goes wrong, or you do need to duplicate > your production environment in your QA or dev environments, well, good > luck to you. You're going to need it. I liked Gentoo as a learning OS (used it for a couple of years as my workstation), but no, I wouldn't go with it for a production shop unless you're looking at scaling out to hundreds or thousands of (identical) machines and want to set up a binary package server, do quality-control tests on each upgraded package, etceteras. Even on a non-mission-critical workstation the downtimes when something got borked in the emerge CVS tree were enough to eventually make me shift to Kubuntu. There are apparently shops that use it for production, but my recollection is that most of those used a deployment process which meant that no production server was ever building a package while being hammered by customers, or without having the target set of builds tested on a staging machine... which is to say, they were basically using emerge to build (heavily optimized) binary packages targeting their specific hardware and then installing them on the servers as binaries.
HTH, Mike -- ________________________________________________ Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears?hl=en.
