Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on the server side

[Rafael Barrera Oro]

First of all, thanks to everybody for sharing your experiences, very
helpful information indeed, specially now that i need some guidance.
   For now, the conclusion i can reach is that Gentoo is perfectly adequate
to use on a server with the only downside of the need to have special care
with updates.
   Ricardo, i find really encouraging the fact that your lab uses Gentoo for
their servers. Nevertheless it would be great if you could tell us a little
about your lab's experience with updates, which seems to be the only issue
when using Gentoo on a server.
   Another thing i noticed is that some of you recommend to have a secondary
server to perform tests, i totally agree with this. Unfortunately i do not
think that having such thing will be possible since the server will be
charged to a client and i do not think they will agree to buy a second
server (even if its the right thing to do, which i believe so), in such
case, would you still recommend Gentoo?.

Again, thanks to everybody for the information.

2007/11/29, Billy Holmes <billy@××××××.net>:
>
> Robert Spahr wrote:
> > I have been running these gentoo servers since 2003, with very few
> > problems. Although I am conservative in doing my updates.
> >
>
> I've run gentoo on several servers from dual intels running dns, squid,
> routing, to web servers, to quad opterons running as terminal servers.
>
> The secret to all of that is what Robert said.. update conservatively.
>
> The update from apache 1.x to 2.x broke some things (good idea to follow
> the update faqs, or as I did, rebuild the config files by hand), as did
> when the gentoo apache package managers decided to change the config
> file layout to better match other distros.
>
> Also, beware of some of the library updates. They can break other things
> that revdep-rebuild will have to fix.
>
> It's a good idea to look up via google or whatever to figure out what's
> being updated and why (read the changelog).
>
> It will take a bit to get used to, but after awhile you'll just eyeball
> it and know which packages are non-issues, and which should be looked
> closely.
>
> It's also a good idea to have a staging server where you can test the
> updates and trash it if you need to (virtualization will help with this
> a lot).
>
> Also, some updates don't fully manifest themselves till you restart all
> the processes or restart the machine. Processes that were running before
> a library update still have an internal image of the previous version's
> library.
> --
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>
>