My Boss Wants to Standardize...

nadir-san · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 9:29 am Post subject:

mmm, I think your best argument is that openbsd is run by paranoid freaks and they should either run freebsd or linux, and if they run linux they should run gentoo.
They run Solaris here at work (for oracle), but if I move up the chain of command ill push gentoo for the web servers.
Not sure how Gentoo would handle Oracle.

Also I dont see the problem with GNU/Linux running too many processes, it hardly affects performance in any noticble way.
There are also licence issues. It could be argued that the GNU licence is more stable

although Im sure BSD heads would have a thing or too to say about that.

Personally I dont have anything against bsd, I think its great, I just prefer Gentoo.

R.D.Olivaw · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:32 am Post subject:

Cossins · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:00 pm Post subject:

emil · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 44 Location: Ireland

amiatrome · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 5:35 pm Post subject:

Cossins · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 9:09 pm Post subject:

ColeSlaw · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 9:30 pm Post subject:

kashani · Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 5:56 am Post subject:

I've been unimpressed with this thread so far

1. number of processes
Why this even got mentioned is beyond me. Your base OS can be 7 processes or 14 processes and you're not going to see any difference. They are both doing the same thing. This isn't windows where your default OS install is starting up all sorts of nonsense that needs to be killed off.

2. in house talent
You have one Gentoo guy, one BSD guy, and one openBSD guy. You can push Gentoo, but BSD is a much easier sell unless there is some hardware or software you have that BSD can't support. Also if Gentoo breaks you're going to have to fix it until the other guys get up to speed. Whereas you've got atleast two guys who can fix BSD off the bat.

3. openbsd doesn't scale
They just got smp this year, IIRC. Fine for an office firewall not worth my time for production.

4. stupid netscraft statistics
Go to netcraft and look at their method. Then notice how it mentions that Linux has a 32bit TCP counter. Realize that most Linux boxes will not show an uptime of greater than 497 days becuase of this.

5. compile times
Production networks do upgrades in off peak hours. nice and distcc are your friends. Without doing anything special Postgres takes exactly 10 minutes to install on a dual PIII 1.4 w/ 4GB of RAM. I can live with degraded services for 10 minutes at 3am.

I run Gentoo on 10 servers now. It's not everything I want it to be, but for the most part it's better than the alternatives. I'm okay with BSD, but I've never cared for it as an OS, we run a few things that BSD won't support, and have more Linux talent as a team.

You can get screwed on any OS with any upgrade, but doing frequent updates, like emege -u world, ever week is going to increase the likelihood of problems. Don't do that. Portage still has issues with reverse dependencies, so as admin you'll have to watch your own back. BSD does a better job with that though portage tends to be more flexible.

kashani
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Will personally fix your server in exchange for motorcycle related shop tools in good shape.

amiatrome · Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 7:40 am Post subject:

I am detecting hints of unwarranted contempt from Cossins towards me and Kashani towards well, everyone else. Better watch it guys. You just needlessly made the thread sour. Maybe it's just me. But I won't waste any more time here.

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Cossins · Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 4:59 pm Post subject:

Carlo · Developer Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 3356

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kashani · Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 9:24 pm Post subject:

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fdamstra · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 3:14 pm Post subject:

popcan · n00b Joined: 27 Nov 2004 Posts: 33 Location: bath, ny

i'm not a master server admin, i'm just a college kid who's decent with *nix, so take that into account with this

this past semester, i was in charge of setting up a non-windows based multicasting imaging system for a forty workstation lab. and the choice came down to whether we would use freebsd or gentoo. so i took a week and read up on optimizing both for server environments, and installed and configured freebsd 4.10 stable and gentoo, on identical pentium 3 machines (nothing really robust i'm afraid). i used the tuning manual for freebsd (man tuning) and used no optimizations in the make.conf, gentoo was a 2.6.7 hardened grsec system with nptl compiled -O2 with the infrastructure team's use flag recommendations.

in benchmark testing, the freebsd box outperformed gentoo by at least fifty percent in all situations i can recall (i have no numbers right now, i'm on vacation), and is really easy to lock down in basic matters (the security levels options, automatically setting the kernel immutable, randomized counters in the tcp stack, firewall, strong service control through rc.conf). it also can run linux binaries via the compatbility layer (i only tested it with a statically-linked udpcast binary which is what i ended up using to distribute the images, and it seemed to work nicely, not that udpcast is an in depth program). however, it was relatively easy to set up a similar configuration in linux, just by hand instead of a sysctl.

as no one else in the department knows freebsd, the end choice was to use gentoo (the lab and classes teach linux, not bsd), but i would happily deploy freebsd if they had given me the chance. the OS you should use is the one you think is the most capable for the environment. gentoo is extremely adaptable, and IMO scalable and standardized if you nfs mount the portage tree, build packages and do network-wide updates with cfengine or any of the dozens of alternatives that linux is great at providing. freebsd has the ports system, the idea on which portage is based, from source compilation of the system for the environment, strong out of the box security, but has a smaller user base than linux, and the core os is written by a team, instead of pulling independent projectst together as gentoo does. freebsd is also an port of unix for the x86, instead of a clone, and there are statistics showing it's stability.

basically, i like freebsd. i like gentoo. but you know your specific needs more than i ever will, so you have to weigh the fact that linux isn't quite as fast or stable for some things, and *bsd just can't be used in every environment, and push for the one that's ideal.

kashani · Posted: Sat Dec 25, 2004 6:26 pm Post subject:

weezl · Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2004 10:04 pm Post subject: glsa-check

As far as security goes, I think GLSA-check is one of the big selling points for Gentoo on production servers.

I generally take the "don't touch it if it's working" approach to production machines, since I don't want to bring things crashing down because I thought of a new CFLAG to add. The only time I want to emerge a new package is if there's a good reason. 'glsa-check --test all' will list all the good reasons. :wink:

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

hununu · n00b Joined: 24 Dec 2003 Posts: 6

This topic in this forum is bound to have bias in it, and the initial question was ill-formed to start with. That said, I really can't recommend gentoo for production servers and I'll try to explain why:

1) In any serious production server, you don't care about 0-5% optimization, you care about stability. This means that --USE flags holy grail idea that gentoo provides is irrelevant and counterproductive.

2) Gentoo requires much more time and care to upgrade, mantain, etc. This is because Linux is a kernel and gentoo is really just a bunch of many many many ebuilds and this means that potentially many many more things can go wrong. This is not my opinion, this is mathematics talking.

I have been using FreeBSD for years for servers and using gentoo for desktop for a couple years. My fellows sysadmins all agree that gentoo is nice for desktop, but it's not on their list to move servers to linux/gentoo unless it's needed for some particular reason, which is ok. One should use the best OS for every task.

You really need to decide whether you want to mantain 10 machines on a kind of bleeding edge or you want to maintain 10 machines on a release tag of FreeBSD that has been tested by thousands/millions(?) of users. This means that these users have tested EXACTLY the same code, not some particular combination of ebuilds... this make a great difference.

FreeBSD is an OS and it's really easy to upgrade/mantain. I've seen comments about down-time, etc, etc. This clearly shows ignorance regarding FreeBSD administration, which is ok in a gentoo forum I guess. If you know what you are doing (which I hope for every FreeBSD sysadmin), the only downtime you will have in 99% of the upgrades/updates will be the reboot time for the new kernel/world. I upgraded 4.x machines to 5.x with *minimal* downtime.

By the way, if you are really concerned about security, you should really play with FreeBSD and explore the jail concept. It's unique and widely used. It works.

Do not take any of my comments with offense as I didn't mean to. I apologize if I have offended anyone.

ps: I'd also recommend OpenBSD for PF/CARP situations, but I'd take FreeBSD for every other server task.

BA

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

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beandog · Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2004 6:35 pm Post subject:

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK