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

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

Am 05.08.2013 23:55, schrieb 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...


Thanks. That's what I wanted to read and fished for ;-)

Stefan