gentoo as a server

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Bill Cosby · Post by **Bill Cosby** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 9:49 am

Hey there,

is anyone using Gentoo as a server, and is he happy with it? I am really tempted to wait for Debian "etch", since security updates and stability is a main factor. Or should I get Ubuntu Server?
So what are your experiences?

Thanks in advance
Bill

PsychoX · Post by **PsychoX** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 9:56 am

I'm using Gentoo as a server and home workstation and I think it's great.
It's best choice for me

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 10:28 am

Debian Stable should be the first choice for a server where stability is important, I reckon. Gentoo is a power-user/control-freak's distro - it has other strengths.

I use Gentoo in a server, but that's because I also use it as a desktop, and would rather use just one distro for everything.

RageOfOrder · Post by **RageOfOrder** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 10:30 am

I run a Slackware fileserver in my room. Once you set it up, you really never have to touch it. Stable as a rock.

I imagine Gentoo would be a good choice too, with all the flexibility.

Diezel · Post by **Diezel** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 1:01 pm

The last company I worked for uses a Gentoo server as their primary mail server. About 100 employees use the mail services provided. Only webmail is public though. We use CentOS in front of it as a mailgateway.
I like Gentoo in every way but for company servers we now run CentOS due to the RH compatibility and the ease of yum. It less hassle in my opinion than Gentoo, on the other hand my home servers run Gentoo and I've never had any problems with them so I guess I'm just paranoid that some update might mess things up on critical servers. Due to the compiling that is.

nico_calais · Post by **nico_calais** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 3:33 pm

I use gentoo as a home server and it works fine.
It's up and running for 37 days now and don't complain.

PaulBredbury is right. If it's a professional server, you should use debian which is an improved distrib in the professional environment.

mudrii · Post by **mudrii** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 4:46 pm

I run Gentoo on multiple server gateway with pptp support, wireless gateway, web server apache2 php5 mysql5 as streaming server with helix, vsftp and some other more and some are pure 64 bit and other are 32bit with RAID1. In time had some minor problem that was fixed easily.
Uptime around 300 days because of kernel and security updates.
I always will go with gentoo just avoid emerge --sync dally

Bill Cosby · Post by **Bill Cosby** » Fri Nov 24, 2006 11:37 pm

I think I will give it a go, since I most likely will be using it as a multimedia thingy attached to my TV too

Cadorna · Post by **Cadorna** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 1:46 am

i run Gentoo as my router at home, for my 2 others Gentoo machines, a desktop/test server and a desktop machine.
But the important thing is that i also run it on a production server of my own, and also on other 10 production servers on the company i work (have done others for our clients), each one with different hardware specs (x86 or amd64), and providing different services, mail, mysql, apache, tomcat, postgresql, etc, and each one is solid as a rock, I have to mantain just 2 stage4, one for x86 and one for amd64, only update packages that are informed to have any vulnerability (using a great script found in this forums using glsa-check), update the stages, and if every thing works right, update the production systems (not compiling, just emerging the binaries created on the stages).
everything has been working as a charm, we just finished a Redhat 9 -> Gentoo migration of our Qmail mail server, and its rocks!
After building lots and lots of servers using different distros, I had found Gentoo to be the best convination of "most solid+no bloated software+ease of management" distro for server and desktop ever (if you know what you are doing, thanks to its great comunity and documentation)

PaveQ · Post by **PaveQ** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 7:20 pm

Bill Cosby wrote:Hey there,

is anyone using Gentoo as a server, and is he happy with it? I am really tempted to wait for Debian "etch", since security updates and stability is a main factor. Or should I get Ubuntu Server?
So what are your experiences?

Thanks in advance
Bill

I use gentoo in server, and it works great for me, since I don't need it to be perfectly stable. For you, I would recommend debian. The distro for a job.

Etch will be released soon.

Insanity5902 · Post by **Insanity5902** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 9:54 pm

i run 3 - 4 public servers. 1 of them is cent-os, the others are gentoo. I prefer the gentoo ones. I know how to use and how to get it to do what I want.

They are just as reliable as my CentOS Mail server, and actually In the next few months I am looking to move my mail server over to a Gentoo server running Xen w/ multiple Gentoo domU's. The flexibility of Portage is awesome with servers. Being able to manually mask versions so you only get updates under a certain version release is real nice. Compiling sucks, but it is a small price to pay for something you have so much control over.

If you aren't careful, it can cause a lot of problems, so be sure to know what you are emerging and what updating each application will do (example, around apache 2.0.50, the config structure was changed, and wouldn't restart upon update. If I didn't learn that on my dev machine, then my production server would of been down for half the day)

So it is all about how much control and time you want to put into it.

srlinuxx · Post by **srlinuxx** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 11:31 pm

I love gentoo, lawd knows I do, but if I had to do it over again, I'd probably go with a binary based distro for my public web server. It takes away from valuable system resources to accomplish the sometimes-quite-involved updates and I think it's a bit harder to track down the occasional problem packages. It's been quite reliable, but if it ever goes belly-up, I'm gonna go back with debian or centos or something like that I think. I really don't think I'd go with ubuntu tho. ...but to each his own.

mzperx · Post by **mzperx** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 4:09 pm

When you use gentoo as a server, how do you do the updates? When I updated gentoo, I _always_ faced with the problem of broken packages, and these. Then I googled around the world, read xyz package upgrading guide, and forums, etc.
From where do you know that an upgrade will be a simple "emerge --sync; emerge --update world" or you must do some extra things (and what are these things)?
Can couse the update any service unavailable effect? (ie while you are upgrading apache?)

jhunholz · Post by **jhunholz** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 4:27 pm

When running Gentoo on a server, I always test the updates first on another box. Doing this can help filter out the packages that could cause your server downtime. I've been running Gentoo on servers for almost as long as I've been using Gentoo, though, and really love having it as a server OS.

Cadorna · Post by **Cadorna** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 4:44 pm

mzperx wrote:When you use gentoo as a server, how do you do the updates? When I updated gentoo, I _always_ faced with the problem of broken packages, and these. Then I googled around the world, read xyz package upgrading guide, and forums, etc.
From where do you know that an upgrade will be a simple "emerge --sync; emerge --update world" or you must do some extra things (and what are these things)?
Can couse the update any service unavailable effect? (ie while you are upgrading apache?)

as i stated, i only update packages with vulnerabilities, never do an emerge -u world or someting like that, and i have a a testing box to check every update
if and upgrade of a package, needs a lot of re configuration, i just learn all the steps, probably make a script or a text file with those changes, what i mean is, i make a lot of previous work with an update, but you would have to do more or less the same even with bin distros, if you servers are so important, you can't trust the QA of any distro, BSD flavor, Microsoft or Apple

Bill Cosby · Post by **Bill Cosby** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 5:34 pm

I must admit I am still undecided, somehow I think I will go with Debian "Etch" though, it seems reasonably stable and a good distro as a whole.

I actually would use OpenBSD if it weren't for my Nvidia-Drivers I need

Cadorna · Post by **Cadorna** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 5:38 pm

Bill Cosby wrote:I must admit I am still undecided, somehow I think I will go with Debian "Etch" though, it seems reasonably stable and a good distro as a whole.

I actually would use OpenBSD if it weren't for my Nvidia-Drivers I need

go for it, Debian is always a great choice for servers too

justwantstohelp · Post by **justwantstohelp** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 2:09 am

I use hardened gentoo as a home server. Except for ocaml/mldonkey, everything works great with the hardened toolchain.

MM23 · Post by **MM23** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 3:14 am

lighttpd(or apache2, but lighty is better :p)/mysql/php take only about 20-30 minutes to emerge on Gentoo, and they're such well-supported stable packages I've never had a system break using them, even using testing.

Gentoo makes a fine server.

Cadorna · Post by **Cadorna** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:25 pm

justwantstohelp wrote:I use hardened gentoo as a home server. Except for ocaml/mldonkey, everything works great with the hardened toolchain.

oooo yes, all of my servers are hardened too, and every package I've needed had work flawlessly

denstark · Post by **denstark** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 4:34 pm

I've been using Gentoo as a web, ftp, and file server for a while now... actually, I have a pretty decent uptime too. 152 days now.

Bill Cosby · Post by **Bill Cosby** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 6:31 pm

Cadorna wrote:
justwantstohelp wrote:I use hardened gentoo as a home server. Except for ocaml/mldonkey, everything works great with the hardened toolchain.
oooo yes, all of my servers are hardened too, and every package I've needed had work flawlessly

A question here, in the hardened docs it says that the binary drivers won't work with an hardened Xorg, but the nvidia drivers have an dlloader useflag, do they actually work with hardened now?
Seems it must be the case, since it was the elfloader who held them back and xorg7 uses dlloader as default now, right?

Cadorna · Post by **Cadorna** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 6:44 pm

Bill Cosby wrote: A question here, in the hardened docs it says that the binary drivers won't work with an hardened Xorg, but the nvidia drivers have an dlloader useflag, do they actually work with hardened now?
Seems it must be the case, since it was the elfloader who held them back and xorg7 uses dlloader as default now, right?

sorry, can't answer your question since none of my servers use xorg, and my desktops have nVidia cards, but none use hardened

Corona688 · Post by **Corona688** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 10:10 pm

I use Gentoo on a small server at our small business. It works. The trick to keeping the update headaches down is to concentrate on what you REALLY need; if X blocks, and you don't really need X, throw it out completely and fix the important things.

Shucklak · Post by **Shucklak** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 7:21 pm

I've set up dozens of servers and from my experience, Debain distros I just find to be easier and quicker to set up.
As for stability, I can't say one of them is more stable than Gentoo and vice-versa. I have an Ubuntu server I use at work and a Gentoo server at home and both are incredibly stable. Ubuntu is great at work because I don't have to spend a lot of time with it to get my stuff done. Gentoo is great at home because I love customization and there is nothing better than it.
It really just comes down to your preference in OS. If you want to spend the time go with Gentoo. If you're looking for a quick solution go with something else.

Good Luck

gentoo as a server

gentoo as a server

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