My Boss Wants to Standardize...

fdamstra · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 2:01 pm Post subject: My Boss Wants to Standardize...

My boss would like to get standardized on nix-like OS. Seeing as I'm the local Linux guy, and responsible for maintenance, new projects, and most anything that happens on our *nix servers, I'm strongly pushing for Gentoo.

My boss, however, knows FreeBSD. And the other person who has good 'nix skills is an OpenBSD fan.

So, since clearly this is a biased forums, I'm looking for help in the impending argument: Why should we choose Gentoo over the BSD's?

The servers are production quality, and uptime is very important. They run things like DNS, web hosting, and network monitoring. And there are many more projects coming down the pipeline that will have high availability concerns.

Further, we deal with financial data, so security is important. Obviously, this is one of the selling points of the BSD's, but I also think it's one of the selling points of Gentoo.

Can anybody with experience on both give me some good reasons why we should standardize on Gentoo? His concerns include the length of time and difficulty with installing Gentoo (important in a DR situation), and ... well, I'm not sure what else. Help me win this decision.

neilhwatson · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 719 Location: Canada

As much as I like Gentoo I don't think it is for a production environment. Updates and installs from source take too long. Unless you are prepared to create your own Gentoo mirror, with binaries, I would try something else. Personally, I still like Debian for production. Debian, is easy and fast to update, has good security updates and still allows you to build from source, if you choose.
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malloc · l33t Joined: 19 Sep 2003 Posts: 762

Trevoke · Advocate Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 4099 Location: NY, NY

Gentoo is great for servers, because you can hold it all just as you want.
However, Gentoo is a GNU/Linux, and GNU/Linux has one major problem : too many processes running.

We have here a NetBSD machine that runs with seven processes. Yes - SEVEN.
BSD is just.. better for servers

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codergeek42 · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 3:55 pm Post subject:

fdamstra · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 5:42 pm Post subject:

Clearly, not the responses I was hoping for. :(

I like Gentoo as a server OS. Rationale:
- It's easy to keep up to date. With Gentoo, I am always running an up to date release. Even using CVSup on FreeBSD, I still have to deal with upgrading to new releases every so often, which requires a longer period of downtime. I have moved servers from 1.4->2004.1->2004.3 without any hardship whatsoever. I inherited a mission-critical FreeBSD box running 4.9 that I've now got to come up with a plan to update to 4.10 or above.
- Great support from the community. The helpfulness of these forums is incredible. I've found the FreeBSD mailing lists to be only slightly more helpful than the Redhat ones, and much more difficult to use.
- Software support. I'm more likely to find that that the obscure open source app or library works on Gentoo. Seeing as I'm often asked to solve problems that our Windows and (ack) iSeries programmers can't handle, I like having the vast open source support that Linux has to offer, and I just don't see that the BSD's have the breadth that Linux does.

I don't find that updating my servers takes that long in Gentoo. I can 'emerge sync', generate the list of packages I want to update, and --fetchonly those packages in advance, so that patch day morning comes I just run a simple command and get everything up to date in our 2-hour monthly maintenance window with near-zero downtime.

Trevoke · Advocate Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 4099 Location: NY, NY

up to date in a server means what?
The important processes will need to be restarted to be updated. Lose, lose.
If you want Gentoo, go right ahead. It's customizable as all hell, but what are you gonna end up? A glorified BSD! :lol:

No X, probably no regular user, maybe even no monitor, only ssh login, cron, whatever needs to be run (iptables, sendmail, spamassassin, MySQL, ... )
OpenBSD is paranoid about security, so it's good for that.
Now, if you need easy multi-user.. Well... Linux is there for you.
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neilhwatson · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 719 Location: Canada

Your favouratism of BSD over Gentoo seems to lack quantitative observations. Less retoric and more substance please.
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Cossins · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 7:55 pm Post subject:

I would choose neither Gentoo nor BSD, but rather Debian. Debian is good for servers because it's paranoid regarding security and stability. Maintenance is easy with apt-get as well.

Reasons for not choosing
1) Gentoo: Too much compiling. Plus, having a development environment installed is considered a security vulnerability by some people (hackers could compile a C program, or assembly, that would compromise security).
2) *BSD: *BSD would be a better choice than Gentoo, but still, more people use the Linux kernel, and as such there is better support and applications have been tested more thoroughly on the Linux platform. Also, Linux is more POSIX-compliant (at least with NPTL). And Linux is more scalable, or rather, tested more on both very small and very large systems.

- Simon
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amiatrome · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 8:23 pm Post subject:

Perhaps you would like to base your decision on statistics? Do read the FAQ regarding OS detection limitations.
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Archangel1 · Veteran Joined: 21 Apr 2004 Posts: 1212 Location: Work

seppe · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 9:05 pm Post subject:

I'm absolutely no expert in licenses, but I heard that GNU/GPL has much more potential than a BSD license.

I would choose Debian as a server instead of Gentoo. Gentoo is too much bleeding edge to run in a production environment and compiling stuff increases your load, while Debian Stable is rock-solid for servers.
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truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

amiatrome · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 4:10 am Post subject:

zeek

lightvhawk0 · Guru Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 388

the only time gentoo is ever too bleeding edge is when you add ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to your make.conf file
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jmz2 · Guru Joined: 13 Jan 2004 Posts: 421 Location: Finland

The question on why you should choose Gentoo over BSD really bores down to how much risk you're willing to take. There's really no advantage of using source-based distribution on production servers, especially if downtime or security problems of the servers can make your company lose money.

If BSD is better known among your peers, you'll make them feel safer with the systems if they're familiar with it. Choosing Gentoo will alienate them from the system and faults in it will look much worse than they are, because they may not trust the system.

So my advice is: Choose BSD. If you can't choose Solaris 10, that is

Trevoke · Advocate Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Posts: 4099 Location: NY, NY

shash · Apprentice Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 220 Location: India

If you want a very watered down install on some, at least, of the systems, I say go in for Gentoo. If you set USE flags properly (-kde, -gnome and so on) you can make a very small system, which might be good for a fileserver or something where you don't want to waste space on what amounts to a framework. Like a house with walls 2 metres thick, though metaphors go only so far.

What's the configuration of your servers? Do you have a machine that can be modified to serve as a binary packages repository? Are you willing to take the time to get the entire thing running with gentoo? If you can answer those, you'll see the best of it.

I've got no experience of *BSD and therefore no opinion. But over just about all other distros of Linux, Gentoo wins out in size, speed and configurability.

Of course, it goes without saying, stable only, and be very safe with CFLAGS.

Taladar · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 4:23 pm Post subject:

Gentoo without ACCEPT_KEYWORDS is okay for Server use if you are willing to compile and test on another machine. Compile load is too much for a serious production environment and you will find the few problems left before you put the binaries on the production system if you keep your compile-system an exact copy of the server. This has the added advantage that you can use your test-server as drop-in should anything ever happen to your server (hardware).

Cossins · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:33 pm Post subject:

asimon

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

I use Gentoo on my server and it runs very smoothly. There is no problem with Gentoo on a server IMO, and you have to remember that just because there are more processes does not mean that they all hog a bunch of RAM or CPU cycles.

Cossins · Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 12:54 am Post subject:

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500