Gentoo vs Fedora (benefits and drawbacks of both)

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Ravenium · Post by **Ravenium** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 4:29 am

I hate to start a thread of this type, but I'm in the middle of a pickle here. I work for an online gaming league, and we've decided to ditch BSD as an OS on our servers due to its problems with properly running MySQL on a dual processor box as well as maintainance issues (not to mention our sysadmin staff is more Linux oriented).

I have been using and loving Gentoo for a fair while now, but there are also some who are Fedora fans. I have heard it's a fairly nice distro as well, but I was ultimately a bit turned off by RH 9 for use as a server distro.

Before I end up biasing you all one way or another, this is my question: What are some benefits of one over the other, and ultimately if you had the choice, which distro would you use and why?

Assume you have 4-5 boxen, ranging from a couple uniprocessor 800 mhz-1 ghz machines to a dual 1 ghz with 1 gig of ram. Applications used would be Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. (typical database driven website stuff) as well as postfix on a separate box for email...

Any .02 would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

-Rav

robmoss · Post by **robmoss** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 4:56 am

I think I'd be tempted to stick them on a 100Mbps local network and install openmosix-sources. Then get that working. After that you'll never even think about Red Hat. That would be one killer set-up

Ravenium · Post by **Ravenium** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 1:51 pm

Every time I think I've seen all the cool Linux development projects, someone shows me another! Nifty stuff.

Does openmosix have redhat issues? I seem to remember that their backporting of NTPL caused some severe headaches to wine, or something similar.

LeTene · Post by **LeTene** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 2:03 pm

Performance-wise, Gentoo is always going to win over Fedora so I think it's more suitable for your application here. As you're a fairly experienced Gentoo user, you know this already.

Stick to the 2.4.X kernels for maximum reliability, and leverage each gaming box for distcc as you build them up to speed up the process. At my work we went through this with a 200-node (50 x 4 blade) rack system and it was hilarious to see the last 10 or so nodes bootstrap/emerge system in under 10 minutes.

Of course, Fedora has the quick plug-and-go advantage, and if your business can't afford to take some downtime to build the Gentoo boxes maybe Fedora is the best bet. Fedora's a *much* nicer system than the "official" RH distros.

Wolfpack98 · Post by **Wolfpack98** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 2:38 pm

LeTene wrote:
Of course, Fedora has the quick plug-and-go advantage, and if your business can't afford to take some downtime to build the Gentoo boxes maybe Fedora is the best bet. Fedora's a *much* nicer system than the "official" RH distros.

For production boxes, i have the little theory that if you don't want downtime, go with a RPM-based distro. RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, WhiteBox or CentOS.

IMNSHO, Gentoo has it's advantages with absolute customization, but on production boxes (esepcially game servers) a lot of sys admins aren't going to be able to afford downtime for anything. They'll want the QUICKEST set up.

Granted, RPM-based distros have their own drawbacks, but they are the quickest to set up, and thus why they're so popular with production boxes. however, if I wanted to set up a Cluster suite, I'd go with Gentoo. Better customization, and i wouldn't exactly trust RedHat with that

Aurora · Post by **Aurora** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 2:43 pm

If you're going to run some type of server, I'd stray away from Fedora...

Gentoo is lighter and built from the ground up, so you can pretty much decide what you want and don't want on the server. Sure, you can do this with Fedora to a certain extent, but I feel Gentoo would be the lighter/faster/more reliable option.

I never liked Fedora's "bloat."

Just my $.02 worth.

30726 · Post by **30726** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 3:12 pm

Installing Gentoo doesn't take long if you use stages. But once running you'll have to adjust the niceness so the compiling doesn't interfear with the games. Another option is to have a dedicated box for compiling only and use that as a test box/binhost.

Ravenium · Post by **Ravenium** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 3:18 pm

Well hopefully no actual game servers would be run on these boxen. It would be more along the lines of forums, member database, public ftp, etc.

The reason we are contemplating the switch is because currently BSD is having serious issues utilizing both processors on our database machine with mySQL. Not to mention mySQL locks up every week or so due when the keybuffer fills up. Effectively, we're not even using one processor because of this!

Couple the wasted processor with the fact that all the machines are running a different BSD version with different builds (apparently one of our boxes has an ancient mandrake on it, ugh), and you have chaos.

-Rav

P.S. Plus, what inhuman being invented Plesk? Someone please tell me!

robmoss · Post by **robmoss** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 3:57 pm

I think Bill Gates invented Plesk.

Anyway. Why not go with Debian if you're worried about the downtime? Like Gentoo, but not quite as customisable, but so, so much better in every way than Red Hat. Every advantage Red Hat has over Gentoo, Debian has the same advantage but bigger. And they don't take 2 days to put out security updates...

Ravenium · Post by **Ravenium** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 4:09 pm

I very much like the community surrounding Debian - in fact, 2 of my roomates use and swear by it. My only real issue with it is having to resort to the unstable tree to stay anywhere near current

Mnemia · Post by **Mnemia** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 4:38 pm

I think Gentoo is nearly ideally suited for server use, if you do it properly. Set all your USE flags to remove references to X, GTK, QT, etc, and then you'll be able to build and maintain your boxes without having to compile tons of dependencies all the time. Also, have a "test"/"build" box that you actually use to maintain an image for all the other servers, and install some backup software to keep all the actual data safe. You can actually build new images in the background in a chroot'ed directory on any other installed Linux box simply by extracting a stage tarball into the directory. Then you can simply use tar to make your own custom image of the directory. Pop a LiveCD into the servers and boot from that, format, and pull the image over the network from your build box. Then you've got the server up and running again with a max of 10-15 minutes of downtime. I assure you this takes less time than installing Fedora or Redhat, since you're just untarring an image rather than installing RPMs. And your image is built offline so your servers stay up while you do it.

blatch · Post by **blatch** » Fri Apr 30, 2004 12:35 am

Personally, I'd use Debian for a server. Just stick with stable. It can update everything in no time and works like a charm. Plus you don't have to build hardened updates.

lbrtuk · Post by **lbrtuk** » Fri Apr 30, 2004 1:00 am

I'll agree with debian stable.

All their security backports are what make the difference.

DumbAss · Post by **DumbAss** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 12:41 pm

I have debian installed on my server. I was thinking about installing WBL or CentOS on the next server, but I don't know if there are ANY benefits of doing so. So I thin I will stick with debian for servers and Gentoo on my desktop.

codergeek42 · Post by **codergeek42** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 5:27 pm

For a server I would recommend FreeBSD.

psyqil · Post by **psyqil** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 6:23 pm

codergeek42 wrote:For a server I would recommend FreeBSD.

Sure, why read the first post?

Edit: Hey, what's with your ideals? BSD isn't GPL...

codergeek42 · Post by **codergeek42** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 8:31 pm

psyqil wrote:
codergeek42 wrote:For a server I would recommend FreeBSD.
Sure, why read the first post?

Sorry.

Edit: Hey, what's with your ideals? BSD isn't GPL...

Stuff released under the BSDL is still Free. The reason I think the GPL is better is because it ensures that the program and any derivative works _stay_ Free.