Re: [gentoo-user] SLES or gentoo ... ?

[Alan McKinnon]

On 05/08/2013 23:20, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
>
> ! Pls don't flame me :-) !
>
> Don't misunderstand ... I happily trust gentoo on most of my customers
> servers.
>
> A customer of mine chose SLES 10 back then to run a VMware-Server
> installation (1.0.x back then) because they had some big
> company-license-pool available.
>
> That server is to be replaced and I asked them if they still want to use
> SLES because of that. Answer: no ... no more licenses available/paid.
>
> So they asked me for alternatives and I told them about gentoo.
>
> My question:
>
> how would you guys compare the 2 choices to report it back to them?
>
> People buy stuff like SLES to get/feel the feeling that all the choice
> and review of changes is done for them .... we didn't need one
> support-call in the last few years. And the gentoo-community is a
> helpful and competent one (yes, thank you!).
>
> So I tend to do the job with gentoo ... better they pay my work than
> some never-used support-contract ;-)
>
> I just plan to use stable gentoo there, be conservative with changes and
> keep the system up-to-date regularly ... as I use ~amd64 on my main
> machines I think I am rather informed about any *bigger* or problematic
> upgrades.
>
> It's gonna be a QEMU/KVM-host .. this and some rather powerful server
> should speed up those smallish and dusty VMs.
>
> Any thoughts? How to professionally deploy gentoo linux as a one-man-show?
>
> ;-)
>
> Best regards, Stefan
>


I despise SLES intensely[1]. Even more than Windows. So this may be biased.

The primary question as I see it is

Who will maintain this installation?

If the answer is you and 1|2 guys you train yourself, by all means go
right ahead and use gentoo. You already know it well so the quality of
service you offer a customer is likely to be better than if you went say
Centos.

If the answer is you plus other guys but you don't know who they are or
how good they are or if you get to train them, then gentoo starts
getting risky. You don't want a gentoo box where the admin is the
"emerge world && reboot" and walk away kind of guy.

I think you fall in the first class. And our Infrastructure team has
also never had to log a VMware service call. Our managed service team
that faces clients - very different story and not applicable here.

I find that gentoo does not scale well in corporates where machines are
a mix of everything. It takes too much brain power to update them. It
also doesn't work well if you have to give admin rights to people of
little skill.

Where gentoo shines is

- small installs that need something none standard
- large pools of identical hosts that are somehow non-standard so you
get to build what you want once and deploy it many times
- embedded. Your tools let you automate the build end-to-end



[1] A predecessor used SLES 9 & 10 for everything coz he thought it was
awesome. Nothing could ever get updated as it was always manual,
SuSEconfig kept biting us in the teeth hard and it was just awful for
anyone used to working on *nix at any leveol. Fine for Windows admins
moving over though...

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com