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After having used RHEL/CentOS and Debian in the past (for a binary system, I |
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really like Debian), I'm at the point where I get frustrated working on a |
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non-gentoo server. I had used Gentoo in the past, but in the last 6 months |
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my place of employment has been deploying more and more gentoo servers. |
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These started off as mainly development environments, but have since used |
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them as mailservers, postgres servers, dns servers, ldap servers, and a dhcp |
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server. After having used Gentoo at my employment, I converted all 3 of my |
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personal servers from CentOS to Gentoo. While I love the power of portage |
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on my desktop, it's become absolutely incredible from a server perspective. |
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It's the flexibility of compiling everything by hand, but far easier |
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maintenance and ease of use. |
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|
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As others have said, updates are the biggest drawback. For the most part, I |
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stay away from system wide updates. I update: |
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- When I need an update |
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- When there's a security vulnerability fixed in an update |
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|
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For the security vulnerabilities, setup a glsa-check weekly cron (run after |
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an emerge sync): |
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http://gentoo-wiki.com/SECURITY_Getting_GLSAs_by_Email |
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|
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Also, revdep-rebuild is your friend (in gentoolkit). |
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|
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When you emerge something, always use emerge -av to see what is goign to be |
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installed/re-installed. |
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|
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etc-update can cause you some problems if you're not paying attention. |
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There have been times where I've merged a change without looking at it, |
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because I thought I never hand-edited that config file, but in the end I did |
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and just forgot about it (it was an init script). It's generally a good |
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idea to review the changes for all files that it wants to merge. |
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|
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Some sysadmins worry about having a compiler installed on a production |
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system, and there are valid reasons to be concerned, but most of those can |
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be averted with a little extra care. In the end, I think the worry about a |
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compiler is sometimes overblown. |
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|
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Finally, if there isn't a time of day that will be a "down" time of day |
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traffic-wise, you may be worried about compiling apps will slow down |
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performance on the server. Setting up distcc and having portage use that |
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could be a huge help. |
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|
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Gentoo's a great potential system for a server. It's really flexible, and |
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really customizable. The power or portage is an absolutely incredible tool, |
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but it is slightly different than binary based GNU/Linux distros, and may |
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require a little bit of a learning curve. As others have said, installed it |
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in a virtualized environment so you can test things out could be of great |
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benefit. |
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|
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---- |
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Derek Bodner |
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subscribedlists@×××××××××××.com |
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|
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On 11/29/07, Billy Holmes <billy@××××××.net> wrote: |
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> |
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> Quoting Wayn0 <wayn0.ml@×××××.com>: |
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> |
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> > Mirror the setup in a virtual machine ;-) |
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> |
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> linux virtualization |
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> |
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> some links: |
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> |
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> http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/ |
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> http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/01/26/xen.html |
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> |
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> linux-vserver looks pretty neat, too |
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> |
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-VServer |
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> |
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> -- |
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> gentoo-user@g.o mailing list |
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> |
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> |