Gentoo for servers ?

[ats2]

Thanks for these answers.

[Root Moose]

I work at a government agency as a sysadmin.

I have convinced my fellow admins to switch to Gentoo. We probably have about 30 servers running Gentoo currently, more to come as old RedHat, Fedora and Solaris (SPARC) machines are decommisioned and replaced. We've been doing this for more than a year now (about 2 years for me).

We run pretty much all of our infrastructure on Linux with the only exceptions being a few application servers where the binaries are only available on Windows or Solaris. The servers that run Linux run the gamut from file and print services for Windows, OS X and Linux desktops to email handling, etc., etc. Pretty much everything an enterprise typically has in the back end, including the entire web infrastructure. There's probably about a two dozen terabytes of data on Linux servers. We handle about six hundred users worth of email. There's about three hundred desktops that use our file and print services.

I/we are not terribly worried about the direction of Gentoo. As long as Gentoo exists, Portage is kept current and everything is OSS we will keep running it. If something truly odd does happen and Gentoo turns into a dead end it is no worse than going to another distro on a "fresh/upgrade" install path like we used to do in the old days before switching to Gentoo.

Too be honest, we don't have the money to run commercial solutions. We barely have enough money to buy parts to build our servers. No pre-built servers here. Adding licensing fees to anything is a non-starter; we just don't have the money.

If we were to switch at this point it would probably be to FreeBSD given that "Ports" is similar to Portage. In fact, FreeBSD was a very strong competitor before we settled on Gentoo. Gentoo appeared to have a "richer" support environment (i.e. forums.gentoo.org) and appeared to have better Intel SMP support at the time.

Some of the things we appreciate about Gentoo is that we never have to wipe/upgrade a server again. As long as it is kept current (glsa-check -t new cron jobs) with selected upgrades there is no need to "upgrade".

Also, Portage is very rich with software. When a new need arises it is pretty much just a matter of searching with the emerge command and we have something working quickly. The automation of the compile process really helps in this respect. We keep stable with the packages of course, with some exceptions when they arise and have been audited/vetted.

A really surprising outcome of our switch to Gentoo is that Gentoo has made us more competent Linux admins. We got complacent. We were running RH-like distros before and it made us "lazy" with respect to getting under the covers of how Linux works. Almost to the point of being "Captain OKs". Now we are able to do pretty much anything that can be done without scratching our heads too much. In fact, Gentoo has rekindled the "excitement" of working with Linux, kinda like back in the early `90s when we jumped from other operating systems to Linux as home hobbyists. Most of us have been playing/working with Linux for ten years of more. To say we are excited again says a lot.

[Mitusin]

I've been running 3 Servers for more than 2 years with no problems.
SAMBA, Apache, PostgreSQL, Bind, Courier, MySQL and my last baby Open-Xchange.

But off course, if it runs, don't touch it!!

[dashnu]

Five servers for a year now. No issues. I also ran Open-Xchange on Gentoo but switched to SUSE so I could get support for the app. Upgrades around 7.5 were way to much work when trying to save the data. To tell you the truth the _only_ machine I have issues with is my SUSE box. The nic just decided it would stop working only to find out it was a bug in their kernel. Never has anything like this happened to me in gentoo. Stable gentoo has been just that for me 'stable'
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