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On Tuesday 27 January 2009 22:38:21 Tom Brown wrote: |
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> Hey guys, |
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> |
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> I've been using gentoo on my desktop for several months now. I works |
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> great. It cut five minutes off my build time when I build our product |
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> tree. It went from 20 to 15 minutes. |
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> |
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> I setup our email server using Debian. Its been solid as a rock and very |
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> low maintenance. However, it provides an antiquated environment. |
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> |
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> I'm looking at using gentoo for the email so I'll have an up-to-date |
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> system. Peformance is fine on the Debian system, but hey, faster is |
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> always better. |
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> |
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> I was hoping you guys could give me warm fuzzies about stability and |
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> maintenance with gentoo when it comes to a production server. |
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A well administered gentoo box is as stable as a well administered debian box. |
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Or a red hat one. Or a FreeBSD one. And maybe even a Solaris one. |
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By "well administered" I mean "decisions about it made by a sane admin", and |
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there are two roles to this: |
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- building the software. Sane decisions have to be made about what features to |
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include, what compiler settings, what patches etc. |
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- the on-site admin who decides what to deploy and how to run it. |
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The difference between gentoo (and FreeBSD to a lesser extent) on the one hand |
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and binary distros on the other is that with gentoo YOU fill the first role. |
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In binary distros it is someone else. |
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So, if you are confident with this role, go for it and gentoo is for you. |
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If you are not confident with this role, do not use gentoo. Use debian or red |
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hat or centos and you get the warm fuzzy feeling of believing you have |
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someone else to blame for problems :-) |
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There is middle ground of course, but by and large people either can and do |
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take this role fully, or can't and don't. |
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With that out of the way, debian and gentoo mostly use the same upstream |
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sources anyway, so there's no reason to assume things will be majorly |
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different in the stability department. You can prove me wrong any time by |
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installing the latest cvs versions of everything you can get your hands on, |
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but that is crazy for a production machine. |
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> What about major upgrades? If I keep the system updated regularly, is a |
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> major upgrade necessary? |
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mu |
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google it :-) |
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"upgrade" does not make sense in a gentoo context - it's like asking if whales |
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are troubled by pimples on their nose. Gentoo is not versioned and does not |
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have releases. What it has is a vast collection of stuff you can build. Most |
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of it is recent but you get to pick the versions of packages you want, and |
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you do it incrementally. Most folks do an update something between weekly and |
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monthly. |
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A sure recipe for disaster is to let updates slide and try do a whole whack of |
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them in on go. Again, it's not the same thing as updating a binary distro |
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with a release. It's more like trying to change large amounts of the OS on |
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the fly - it tends to be problematic. |
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Rule of thumb: update often, know what you are doing, keep an eye on the |
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machines, and forget you ever heard of a thing called an "update" when |
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working on a gentoo box |
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hth |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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