Gentoo on application server

[meyerm]

posting in "networking and security" because these are the main principles to consider in this case!

Hello,

(Attention: much bla-bla following... )

I'm using Gentoo on my workstation and am happy with it for now. But now I will have to make quite a big descission (big, because it will last for several years... ).

The computer science and the mathemathics departement of our university will move. I'm responsible for the network of the students representations. And since we have to move everything anyway, we wanted to rebuild our infrastructure. (bye, bye Sun Sparc Classic, hello Dual P-III )

We decided to use Linux (until now we had NetBSD, but the people who can/want to admin it are dying out...). But we have still no clue which distribution to choose. Redhat, SuSE and Co don't have any chance. But what about Debian and Gentoo?

For the first step we would need a few (~10) clients which will _perhaps_ just be X-Clients (depending on the machines we will get), some smaller servers (firewall, DHCP/DNS/foobar, mail, mp3 ) and one bigger application server. Of course, everthing should be the same distribution. We don't want to maintain another heterogenous network.

Now my question (finally ): which distribution to choose? Yes, I know. I'm asking in a gentoo forum for arguments for/against Debian and Gentoo, but I believe most of the people here can discuss quite reasonable. Especially I would need some real arguments ("portage is sooo much better than apt because...") to convince my co-admins of gentoo since nobody of them ever used it. And of course some (and perhaps even me?) are concerned about security and overall stability. They say, Debian/testing is wonderful...

It would be great, if some guys with experience in both (or pehaps even other distris?) could give some arguments for and against the one or other.

Thanks a lot (especially for reading until now )
Marcel

[delta407]

Hmm... not so much networking and security as general Linux (which distro is right). In this situation, I would caution you that strange things can and will happen when packages are updated on different intervals. Gentoo is current -- perhaps too current -- and things break often without warning.

It's still good, of course, but it will probably require more administrative attention than, say, Debian. Then again, machine-specific optimizations are rather tempting...
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[meyerm]

OK, thanks. I think, since we now got a test-phase, we could give it a try and play a little bit around before switching over to it.

The only updates which are needed are nonetheless security updates. And those are also needed in Debian.