We have been using Redhat 8.0 on 4 of our internal servers for a while now.
With the recent move by Redhat to stop support for 9.0 after spring seems to
be a little troublesome. Fedora might be an option but since we have only
production servers, we are not inclined to experiment. I have heard a lot
about Gentoo. Does any body recommend it for servers? If not Gentoo what
other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in mind that a service like
up2date would be a life saver. Any suggestions are welcome.

--Turi
http://aijalon.net

Aditya Ivaturi <aivaturi@aijalon.net> wrote:
> We have been using Redhat 8.0 on 4 of our internal servers for a while now.
> With the recent move by Redhat to stop support for 9.0 after spring seems to
> be a little troublesome. Fedora might be an option but since we have only
> production servers, we are not inclined to experiment. I have heard a lot
> about Gentoo. Does any body recommend it for servers? If not Gentoo what
> other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in mind that a service like
> up2date would be a life saver. Any suggestions are welcome.

What about RH ES 3.0, not really cheap, but you can use up2date and
get 5 years patches.

Another option should be debian, updates are fairly easy with
apt.

--
Michael Heiming

Remove +SIGNS and www. if you expect an answer, sorry for
inconvenience, but I get tons of SPAM

Aditya Ivaturi wrote:
> We have been using Redhat 8.0 on 4 of our internal servers for a while now.
> With the recent move by Redhat to stop support for 9.0 after spring seems to
> be a little troublesome. Fedora might be an option but since we have only
> production servers, we are not inclined to experiment. I have heard a lot
> about Gentoo. Does any body recommend it for servers? If not Gentoo what
> other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in mind that a service like
> up2date would be a life saver. Any suggestions are welcome.

Gentoo is an awesome distribution. The portage system allows you to
update packages very quickly with package dependencies taken care of,
while still allowing you to choose your own compile flags. Installation
is not as easy as others, or really you just need to pay attention to
the instructions more because it really isn't hard, just specific. You
can set up a cron script to update your portage tree (the part that
tells where packages are and versions) and can update individual
packages or the whole "world". For the x86 architecture there are
several options including a base system and a "hardened" setup.

I recently had to switch from Slackware because I got an amd64 and am
very happy with my selection of Gentoo. I believe it would be a
wonderful server system requiring very little in the way of maintenence.
What is really impressive is the way it allows a completely customized
system while still preserving a relatively easy to use interface.

My recent experience with RedHat Enterprize and past experiences with
RedHat would make it a cold day in hell before I voluntarily use the
sysem and even then I would never, ever, ever, pay them the enormous
price they are asking. As far as I can tell it is not a good system, I
have had several problems with it just in the few hours I have spent at
work simply trying to test a procedure - which I haven't even gotten to
the testing part yet because I can't get the damn system to work right
in the first place!

So, my opinion is thus: Fuck RedHat! Gentoo is probably a very good
choice for your needs but there are of course others. Debian has a good
package system, but its install leaves much to be desired. I have had
nice experiences with SuSE, and I have seen Mandrake installed and used
by someone relatively illiterate; Gentoo does require some amount of
familiarity with low level commands.

BTW, did I mention that support in Gentoo is quite good? I am on the
Gentoo-amd64 mailing list and most questions are answered directly by
the man in charge within minutes or at most hours. This is of course an
experimental copy I have, so support may be a little better, but I am
still very impressed by that alone.

YMMV and all that...
NR

Thanks for your input Noah! There is one more thing I need to consider
before moving over to other flavors. And of course I have investigated quite
a bit Gentoo and so far the reviews have been only wonderful. But personally
I never had the time to actually install it and try it out thus I don't know
if Gentoo treats its package configuration different from others (and I'd
expect it to be different).

We have a lot of cron jobs set up that automate ton of stuff - backups,
syncronizing data etc. And we also automate creation of virtual hosts in
apache etc. Now does Gentoo store configs, by default, in /etc like redhat
does? What package manager does Gentoo use? How about support for rpms?
Would you suggest any website or reference apart from the gentoo website
where probably, Gentoo is compared with other distros at varying level?

--Turi
http://aijalon.net

"Noah Roberts" <nroberts@dontemailme.com> wrote in message
news:bthq2c$9j8$1@quark.scn.rain.com...
> Aditya Ivaturi wrote:
> > We have been using Redhat 8.0 on 4 of our internal servers for a while
now.
> > With the recent move by Redhat to stop support for 9.0 after spring
seems to
> > be a little troublesome. Fedora might be an option but since we have
only
> > production servers, we are not inclined to experiment. I have heard a
lot
> > about Gentoo. Does any body recommend it for servers? If not Gentoo what
> > other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in mind that a service
like
> > up2date would be a life saver. Any suggestions are welcome.
>
> Gentoo is an awesome distribution. The portage system allows you to
> update packages very quickly with package dependencies taken care of,
> while still allowing you to choose your own compile flags. Installation
> is not as easy as others, or really you just need to pay attention to
> the instructions more because it really isn't hard, just specific. You
> can set up a cron script to update your portage tree (the part that
> tells where packages are and versions) and can update individual
> packages or the whole "world". For the x86 architecture there are
> several options including a base system and a "hardened" setup.
>
> I recently had to switch from Slackware because I got an amd64 and am
> very happy with my selection of Gentoo. I believe it would be a
> wonderful server system requiring very little in the way of maintenence.
> What is really impressive is the way it allows a completely customized
> system while still preserving a relatively easy to use interface.
>
> My recent experience with RedHat Enterprize and past experiences with
> RedHat would make it a cold day in hell before I voluntarily use the
> sysem and even then I would never, ever, ever, pay them the enormous
> price they are asking. As far as I can tell it is not a good system, I
> have had several problems with it just in the few hours I have spent at
> work simply trying to test a procedure - which I haven't even gotten to
> the testing part yet because I can't get the damn system to work right
> in the first place!
>
> So, my opinion is thus: Fuck RedHat! Gentoo is probably a very good
> choice for your needs but there are of course others. Debian has a good
> package system, but its install leaves much to be desired. I have had
> nice experiences with SuSE, and I have seen Mandrake installed and used
> by someone relatively illiterate; Gentoo does require some amount of
> familiarity with low level commands.
>
> BTW, did I mention that support in Gentoo is quite good? I am on the
> Gentoo-amd64 mailing list and most questions are answered directly by
> the man in charge within minutes or at most hours. This is of course an
> experimental copy I have, so support may be a little better, but I am
> still very impressed by that alone.
>
> YMMV and all that...
> NR
>

Turi writes:
> If not Gentoo what other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in
> mind that a service like up2date would be a life saver.

Debian. You won't like the installer, but you'll love apt.
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org (John Hasler)
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI

Aditya Ivaturi wrote:
> Thanks for your input Noah! There is one more thing I need to consider
> before moving over to other flavors. And of course I have investigated quite
> a bit Gentoo and so far the reviews have been only wonderful. But personally
> I never had the time to actually install it and try it out thus I don't know
> if Gentoo treats its package configuration different from others (and I'd
> expect it to be different).
>
> We have a lot of cron jobs set up that automate ton of stuff - backups,
> syncronizing data etc. And we also automate creation of virtual hosts in
> apache etc. Now does Gentoo store configs, by default, in /etc like redhat
> does? What package manager does Gentoo use? How about support for rpms?
> Would you suggest any website or reference apart from the gentoo website
> where probably, Gentoo is compared with other distros at varying level?

Gentoo does store configs in /etc, like any Unix system, but the init
structure is a little different. Your files in /etc/init.d/ do not take
arguments but appear to be called directly by a special program or
script which runs start() or stop() functions. It should be relatively
easy to convert from RedHat startup scripts to Gentoo.

I don't know where httpd.conf is exactly since I didn't install apache
yet and may not...this is a desktop system.

The Gentoo package system takes a little getting used to as it is
different than anything else. They use a system called "portage", which
I guess is similar to FreeBSD ports. I believe this is much better than
RPM's however:

root@bart nroberts # emerge search rpm
Searching...
[ Results for search key : rpm ]
[ Applications found : 4 ]

* app-arch/gnorpm [ Masked ]
Latest version available: 0.96
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 635 kB
Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/
Description: A Gnome RPM Frontend

* app-arch/rpm
Latest version available: 4.0.4-r5
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 5,728 kB
Homepage: http://www.rpm.org/
Description: Red Hat Package Management Utils

* app-arch/rpm2targz
Latest version available: 9.0-r2
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 2 kB
Homepage: http://www.slackware.com/config/packages.php
Description: Convert a .rpm file to a .tar.gz archive

* dev-perl/RPM
Latest version available: 0.40-r1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 53 kB
Homepage: http://search.cpan.org/author/RJRAY/Perl-RPM-0.40/
Description: RPM:: module for perl

The above means I can install RPM and use it, but I probably won't.

Here is another interesting command output:

root@bart nroberts # etcat uses gimp
[ Colour Code : set unset ]
[ Legend : (U) Col 1 - Current USE flags ]
[ : (I) Col 2 - Installed With USE flags ]
[ * No USE flags found for : app-doc/gimp-user-manual ]

U I [ Found these USE variables in : media-gfx/gimp-1.2.4 ]
+ - python : Adds support/bindings for the Python language
+ - nls : unknown
+ - gnome : Adds GNOME support
- - aalib : Adds support for media-libs/aalib (ASCII-Graphics Library)
+ - perl : Adds support/bindings for the Perl language.
- - doc : Adds extra documentation (API, Javadoc, etc)
+ - jpeg : Adds JPEG image support
+ - png : Adds support for libpng (PNG images)
- - tiff : Adds support for the tiff image format

U I [ Found these USE variables in : media-gfx/gimp-print-4.2.5-r2 ]
+ - nls : unknown
+ - gtk : Adds support for x11-libs/gtk+ (The GIMP Toolkit)
+ - readline : enables support for libreadline, a GNU line-editing
library that most everyone wants.
- - cups : Add support for CUPS (Common Unix Printing System)
+ - foomaticdb : Adds support for the foomatic printing driver database
- - ppds : Adds support for automatically generated ppd
(printing driver) files
[ * No USE flags found for : media-gfx/babygimp ]
[ * No USE flags found for : media-gfx/gimp-freetype ]

USE flags are install options much like configure options; in fact that
is what they usually translate into.

If I want to know what will be installed I do this:

root@bart qdbm-1.7.27 # emerge -pv apache

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] dev-util/yacc-1.9.1-r1
[ebuild N ] net-www/apache-2.0.47 +berkdb +gdbm -ldap

Sometimes an emerge will fail, then you untar the source from
/usr/portage/distfiles and try by hand, possibly patching. Then you
"inject" the ebuild into the system so that dependencies work. I have
had to do this a few times as I am using a less than fully supported
architecture and often must unmask ebuilds and a few of those then don't
work as expected and must be injected by hand. Guile for instance
required a patch and gnucash needed some masagging to get it in. I
would expect that you would run into much less failures on the x86.

I can't say I have fully learned this new system, but I can say I like
it better than anything so far, maybe even my old favorite Slackware.

I can't say I know any sites that compare it to others, it would be
silly anyway as Gentoo is in a league all of its own wether you like its
system or not. No distribution compares to Gentoo as it is a very
different creature. Personally I like these differences and think it
would make a very good server distribution where you are constantly
updating and such.

It does take a little longer to install though, and you need to know
exactly what you need. For instance, apache is not installed by
default. I don't know what is in the GRP's as my architecture hasn't
got one yet; you may want to look those over to see if one supplies
enough of what you need to install quickly.

I would recommend trying it out to see if you can live with it in a
production environment. Take it home and play with it for a couple of
weeks.

NR

Wed, 7 Jan 2004 21:41:03 UTC, John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> Noted:

> > If not Gentoo what other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in
> > mind that a service like up2date would be a life saver.

> Debian. You won't like the installer, but you'll love apt.

Interesting. I've used Slackware for 10 years and never liked RH. I
liked them even less when I saw they were gonna try and charge $$$ for
something that is free (my take on things).

I don't lurk in these NG's much anymore but figured there would be a lot
of unhappy people. I see that looks to be the case.

"Aditya Ivaturi" <aivaturi@aijalon.net> wrote in message
news:4nZKb.224439$Eq1.136421@twister.rdc-kc.rr.com...
> We have been using Redhat 8.0 on 4 of our internal servers for a while
now.
> With the recent move by Redhat to stop support for 9.0 after spring seems
to
> be a little troublesome. Fedora might be an option but since we have only
> production servers, we are not inclined to experiment. I have heard a lot
> about Gentoo. Does any body recommend it for servers? If not Gentoo what
> other flavor of Linux should we consider keeping in mind that a service
like
> up2date would be a life saver. Any suggestions are welcome.

Gentoo is cool, but inherently risky since so many of its components are
built up on the fly. If you have any software drift, such as a bug in the
compiler that pops up for a single release then gets fixed, this can really
screw up your other components.

If you need production grade server, pay for it with a commercial distro. If
you need freeware cutting edge software and fun to play with and reasonably
stable, Fedora actually looks pretty good.