Re: [gentoo-server] Gentoo for server

[Andrew Cowie]

Gentoo is excellent from a security standpoint; either a version bump or
a backported patch tends to be made available very quickly, especially
on the various things that tend to be in production use.

But.

On Tue, 2004-07-12 at 00:20 +0100, Simon Striker wrote:
> Now I am thinking of reinstalling my servers and
> installing the Gentoo Linux on them, but I am a bit worried
> because all packages in Portage tree are NOT up-to-date.

As compared to what?

You said you are running Slackware. That's fine, it's a nice enough
distro, though a bit hide bound perhaps. I certainly wouldn't rate it as
more "up to date" than Gentoo, but that's not actually what matters.

Practice in most major shops is NOT to use stuff from the bleeding edge,
on the grounds that a piece of software has not yet had sufficient
stress testing to get the bugs and glitches out.

And further,

> I would like to know, how do you maintain your servers? Is it safe to
> have Gentoo as a server?

No matter what distribution you use, when you deploy systems, you take
on the responsibility of a being a distro vendor yourself. [See the
"Turing Equivalence" paper]

So the question really is: if you have good practices for the
administration and maintenance of your machines, if you have mechanisms
to stay up to date with the threats out in the wild and what corrective
actions need to be taken, then it is safe to run servers regardless of
what flavour of Unix they are.

AfC
Sydney


--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

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