[ale] Distro question...

[Brian MacLeod]

Jay,

Since you are familiar with RH, and of course, do not want to spend $$
on an EL license, perhaps you should check out one of the EL clones:
White Box, Tao, CentOS.

I've enjoyed working with my WBEL boxes, almost as much as the RHEL ones
(sorry, but the RHN edges it out, but isn't worth the price of of a
license from RH, either).  I've used a WBEL box to compile .src.rpms for
my RHEL boxes, and I can honestly say I've had no problems with
compatibility at all.  

The one caveat to this suggestion is that it does seem to take a while
for a RHEL update to propagate down to the WBEL servers.  Of course,
since you indicated that you are familiar with rpm, you could always
speed that process up yourself by pulling the .src.rpms from RHEL (which
are distributed freely) and building them on your system.

Just a thought...

bnm

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On 
> Behalf Of Jay Finch
> Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 3:43 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] Distro question...
> 
> Hey everyone,
> 
> Let me just say up front that I don't want to start a "Distro 
> War" - but I would like some feedback before I make a lasting 
> decision.
> 
> -------
> 
> A little Background:
> I have a server that's hosting about 60-80 domains, and 
> handling all of their E-mail, Web and Database access.  About 
> 6 months ago, my machine began to exhibit signs of slowness & 
> lag.  Based upon the increasing amount of Spam and such, I've 
> finally nailed down the slow reaction times to the E-mail 
> pre-processing I'm doing, and have decided to split the 
> Mailserver from the main Web/DB server.  (This is to improve 
> the average Web Users experience when accessing any of the 
> sites I'm hosting.)
> 
> That said, I'm currently running RedHat 9 on the main box 
> (with yum getting patches from http://www.fedoralegacy.org), 
> and am wondering:
> Should I stick with Redhat or go with another Distro?  (And 
> if Redhat, should I go with FC3, or go with an EL version?)
> 
> I'm running Qmail, with Vpopmail & Qmailadmin on the box, and 
> want to keep those tools.  I'm also running Qmailscanner & 
> ClamAV installed as per http://www.qmailrocks.org
> 
> I'm pretty familiar with RPM, but not so much with any of the 
> other package managers.  I'd like to keep things installed 
> using Packages as to keep my upgrade/update path fairly easy.
> 
> This new machine will be exclusively a Mailserver - No web, 
> limited DB (as required by Vpopmail), but no other extraneous 
> processes.  I will have OpenSSH installed on it so I can 
> remote admin into the box and maintain it.  There will be no 
> user accounts on the machine other than the personal account 
> I will create for administration using sudo.
> 
> -----
> 
> Based upon these specifications & needs, is there another 
> distro which would work better?  I'd prefer to stick with 
> Linux, as it's the *nix I'm most familiar with.  (I'm not 
> adverse to learning a *BSD, but don't want to do it as an 
> exercise in configuring & setting up my new Mailserver.) The 
> Distro's I'm familiar with are Redhat (pre-Fedora/EL), 
> Slackware & SuSE.
> 
> Any feedback is appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Jay
> 
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