[ale] Web server OS

[Pat Regan]

David Hamm wrote:
> My experience with Gentoo has been really good. I have about 60 web 
> servers running gentoo and the only thing I don't like about it is 
> the lack of an auto installer and the size of portage.  That being 
> said the web servers are all power pc based and a couple ARM9 boxes.

I've had minor very minor hiccups over the years when a distro updated a
package that broke something I had running on a box.  It has happened,
but not often.

I can potentially run into bigger problems when upgrading from one
stable release to the next.  Maybe my distro's Perl goes from 5.8 to
5.10, or Apache goes from 1.3 to 2.0.  These kind of changes can
potentially break something.

I generally only have to worry about this once every few years.  With a
living distro like Gentoo, I could conceivably have to worry about this
every time I do an update.  What I really want from my server distro is
security updates and major bugfixes.  Anything more is potentially going
to cause me to work harder.

I don't want to work harder :)

> Emerge is very nice but compiling PHP or Samba because the default 
> make flags aren't what you need can be time consuming.  No I'm back 
> on Fedora and its ok.

I try to stick to my guns an build packages out of any custom compiled
software.  That way I can build it once, test it, and copy it to a
repository.  Then all my servers that need it can update themselves.

> I could live without NetworkManager but Fedora doesn't seem to like 
> to.

Since it started working well (which was a LONG time ago),
NetworkManager has been so much more convenient for roaming than
manually editing wpa_supplicant's config file.

Pat

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