Is Gentoo a Geeks/Linux lovers OS only?

[trouby]

Is Gentoo good only for Geeks/Linux lovers OS?

Syshalt posted this :
"But I personally wouldn't build a webhosting company around it. The problem of Gentoo is the same as its strength - it's a constantly developing platform, it doesn't actually have fixed "versions". Something like FreeBSD "current". I think everyone here, who uses Gentoo for long, remembers more that one time when the latest "emerge sync && emerge -uD world" broke his system in some way. Gentoo requires constant attention - not a problem for a geeks desktop, but may become a problem for hoster."

Is that correct? or maybe using Gentoo as a production server is stable and reliable enough?

Did anyone try to use Gentoo as a production server in critical environments?

Help will be appriciated!

[garn]

I think everyone here, who uses Gentoo for long, remembers more that one time when the latest "emerge sync && emerge -uD world" broke his system in some way.

I'm not a long term gentoo user but I'd say the simple answer is don't do that . a server should be updated for security or bug fixes, features only when needed. If apache 1.3.x is working fine and there is no bug/security flaw that affects you, don't switch to 2.x, it may cause troubles. So I'd say emerge updates for software that needs to be patched (openssh security flaw for example) and emerge updates for software that you need the new version of, but don't blindly update the whole system, gentoo or not.

[PowerFactor]

I think everyone here, who uses Gentoo for long, remembers more that one time when the latest "emerge sync && emerge -uD world" broke his system in some way.

I'm not a long term gentoo user but I'd say the simple answer is don't do that .

I am a long term gentoo user (using it coutinously for over 1.5 years now) and I agree. I don't think I've done a "emerge -U world" sinc May 2002.

... don't blindly update the whole system, gentoo or not.

Indeed, you can shoot yourself in the foot with any distro, or any os for that matter, gentoo just gives you a fully loaded chaingun to do it with.

And if you're looking for people running gentoo in a production environment you should check out these two threads.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=91396
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=56321
rather than starting another one.

It never hurts to search.

[Lovechild]

Is Gentoo good only for Geeks/Linux lovers OS?

Syshalt posted this :
"But I personally wouldn't build a webhosting company around it. The problem of Gentoo is the same as its strength - it's a constantly developing platform, it doesn't actually have fixed "versions". Something like FreeBSD "current". I think everyone here, who uses Gentoo for long, remembers more that one time when the latest "emerge sync && emerge -uD world" broke his system in some way. Gentoo requires constant attention - not a problem for a geeks desktop, but may become a problem for hoster."

Is that correct? or maybe using Gentoo as a production server is stable and reliable enough?

Did anyone try to use Gentoo as a production server in critical environments?

Help will be appriciated!

Absolutely true - Gentoo can break from tme to time - especially on ~arch. I personally know people who use it on production servers, not for large corporations though - but if you keep the CFLAGS to a minium, add -fstack-protector and keep track of the hardened Gentoo work then you have a stable and nice server.

Of course one shouldn't "emerge rsync && emerge -u --deep world" as a cron job - like any other server an update should be planned.

I personally would have no second thoughts about putting Gentoo on my server at home, I can stand a few days of downtime if I must - on a production server, where I was ultimately responsible for maintaining ~99% uptime and my job was on the line... I doubt I would put anything but RedHat if I had to pick a Linux distro (I think I would put FreeBSD on it if I had the choice).. Gentoo is a bit to young in my mind, such distros as RedHat has a thing that makes it more suitable in my mind - proper QA.

But in the end I doubt I would want my production server to be compiled from scratch - I want such a thing up and running as fast as possible, downtime due to the need to compile say apache, or something like that would be unacceptable in most cases.

[daha]

Indeed, you can shoot yourself in the foot with any distro, or any os for that matter, gentoo just gives you a fully loaded chaingun to do it with.

anyway you when you get wasted by that chaingun, you can allways use bandages to prevent any damage you have received ;-]

[gwydion]

I personally would have no second thoughts about putting Gentoo on my server at home, I can stand a few days of downtime if I must - on a production server, where I was ultimately responsible for maintaining ~99% uptime and my job was on the line... I doubt I would put anything but RedHat if I had to pick a Linux distro (I think I would put FreeBSD on it if I had the choice).. Gentoo is a bit to young in my mind, such distros as RedHat has a thing that makes it more suitable in my mind - proper QA.

But in the end I doubt I would want my production server to be compiled from scratch - I want such a thing up and running as fast as possible, downtime due to the need to compile say apache, or something like that would be unacceptable in most cases.

on this note... I'm currently "making a distribution" if you will, using Gentoo because I like the tools (read: portage). Only one of the servers I'm currently working on will be build-from-scratch. Just the first. After that, since I'm using sane CFLAGS (march=i686 mcpu=pentium3 -O2 -pipe) the rest will be installed using packages. On top of this, there will be no stage 1, 2, or 3, but my own custom stage 4; for a few different reasons -- primarily that almost all of our servers are almost all identical, and in the cases where they are not, I setup the system with optimizations, but still kept a little bit of portability in mind.

Also, I'm covering many bases with extremely broad USE flags and building with genkernel --config (everything already built as a module). again, this increases the portability.

What it comes down to, is this: I love gentoo, I love portage, and yes, it is stable enough for what I'm doing. No, I won't be doing any emerge -U world's and just letting them go. I'll most likely setup all my clients crons to emerge -Upv world and email the output to me, so I can see what I need to upgrade on each, then setup trusts through ssh and script the installs.

It's a bit more convoluted than just using Redhat, but by God I know what's going on with the system, what's installed, I _don't_ have to learn a new set of system management utilities (read: rpm & redhat-config-*), and after a bit of groundwork, it'll be easier for me in the long-run.

[Syshalt]

IMO in order to become a platform, ready for wide deployment, Gentoo would need a possibility to fix system versions - well, again, like FreeBSD. Gentoo is already the Linux distro, closest to FreeBSD in its nature (that's why I use it), but not close enough in this sense. One should be able to install it, run updates on a regular basis and be sure that he won't screw up the system by the latest update.

BTW, am I the only one who got his php.ini overwritten by the latest php update (just a couple of days ago)? Or was it just another etc-update glitch? I doubt I'd be happy fixing php.ini at 30 servers...

Don't get me wrong - I really like Gentoo, although I'd probably use FreeBSD at my desktop if not those hardware issues (emu10k1 midi, lirc). But IMO it's a platform for geeks - improved LFS, if you want.

[ronmon]

As Lovechild points out, a good commercial distro like RedHat might be appropriate for mission critical stuff as it is pre-tested before package updates are released. That's how they make money, and rightfully so. Then again, if you had a test machine running Gentoo with conservative make.conf settings that produced .tbz2's and you checked them out before installing them on the rest of your machines you could essentially do that yourself.

My desktop machine and laptop both run fairly aggressive and similar options and I always test the latest stuff on the desktop before upgrading the laptop for practical (i.e. work) reasons. But my router box is a very old gentoo-1.2 installation with extremely conservative settings and still uses stuff like gcc-2.95.3 and linux-2.4.19.

The chaingun analogy sounds pretty good. If I'm going to shoot myself in the foot I would prefer it was with .22 . So just keep in mind the purpose of a particular machine and adjust your settings accordingly.

[trouby]

That is right, all of y'a, FreeBSD is very stable and all but Fbsd is another issue, that are many things that don't compile smoothly on Fbsd,

Also, after you strip all dist you have same kernel, same compiler, same glibc, etc... so the real different is the management tools(rpms/partage,whatever), the packages, updates and so on, I personally don't like RedHat, even while installing prodcution servers (and I do that a lot) I never use RH, I like to know what's going on with my system, and the prove for that is when you install RH as a minimal installation you find out that you have a 900MB OS installed, and yes, this is the minimal (try out by yourself!) and you end with lots of libraries, documents, configuratin files and so on that you'll never use that do one big mass within your system, and that is obvious, even while installing the redhat-setup-tools they require about 6 packages to run, that's why I would for sure go to dist like Gentoo/Slackware or LFS which ofcourse have their own obvious disatvantages compared to Redhat, and saying I'm not afraid to install now Gentoo as a production server will be a lie, but i'll give it a try, I just won't use the emerge command until I did it on a test server and saw that the results are stable.

Anyway, thanks for posting the thread, I was happy to see that it opened a discussion

Bye.

[ebrostig]

Moved from OTG to Gentoo Chat..

Erik

[mmealman]

You guys are such sissies

I've got a Gentoo server setup for prod use as soon as I get some apps off the older Debian box it's replacing.

I ran Debian unstable in production for 5 years without any hiccups and Gentoo stable is a lot less likely to blow up than that. You just always always always test your upgrades first on a beta machine before doing anything on a production box. You should be doing this with any distribution though.

The only thing I'd like to see for Gentoo in a corp environment is the ability to emerge pre-compiled binaries off a dev machine. That way you could test and compile on dev and then just have the prod machines pull the binaries off of that box. In effect, your dev machine would sync and pull from the Gentoo main sites while your prod machines would sync and pull binaries from the dev machine.

It's something I want to write when I get some free time.

[Retriever II]

I han't used the --deep flag since I did in fact screw up my gentoo box many months ago, and neither have I blindly done an emerge -U world.

As long as you always check to see what you're updating, you should probably be ok. If stability is an issue, I'd think Gentoo would be just as stable as any other distro if you're not trying to update your packages all the time. Get it setup the way you want and leave it at that.

[gilesjuk]

I'd say yes, the install process is rather complex and that fact that it is source based isn't suitable for all. You're hardly going to install Gentoo on the PC of a friend then tell them they need to leave their PC on 12 hours to compile XFree86.

However once installed and configured it just works, no harder to use than any other distro then.

[gigatexal]

gentoo is great with uber fast comptuers the compile times suck at least for me.

a binary portage system that is up to date would rock


Also a server gentoo distro would be nice!

alex

[Vishruth]

I ran Debian unstable in production for 5 years without any hiccups and Gentoo stable is a lot less likely to blow up than that. You just always always always test your upgrades first on a beta machine before doing anything on a production box. You should be doing this with any distribution though.

Not everyone will be able to do something like this. And even if they could, I don't think they would want to do it. As far as I know - a stable os, which doesn't too much of management and yet sufficiently carries out the tasks given to it, is what most people prefer to use on critical environments.

Even otherwise, Gentoo is not for the average busy/lazy/newbie chap, imo.

[Zeddicus]

Nah, my art major roomie (definitely not a "geek"...well, not a linux geek) is now running KDE on Gentoo and loving it. Once Photoshop was running in WINE, it was golden

[gwydion]

I personally don't like RedHat, even while installing prodcution servers (and I do that a lot) I never use RH, I like to know what's going on with my system, and the prove for that is when you install RH as a minimal installation you find out that you have a 900MB OS installed, and yes, this is the minimal (try out by yourself!)

God, tell me about it. One of the servers I mentioned above is a drop-in Exchange replacement for one of our clients... Started by trying Redhat & Bynari Insight Server. My boss (not a linux guy by any stretch of the imagination) actually ran the install, so I had gnome on the server. Feh, I probably should have started over right there, but hey I wasn't feeling too ambitious. Anyway, I went ahead and started getting into the Bynari install and setting everything up. Holy molasses! I couldn't believe it was running so slow, on a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB of ram! It felt like my old P75 machine from high school. On top of that, it just "felt" different. I can't really explain it beyond that, just that I seemed to keep getting frustrated for little to know reason because it didn't act like a "normal" linux distribution (I'm used to Debian/Slack/Gentoo). Then, to top things off, I start adding the clients users to the LDAP database, and on the second account I get an error message (can't remember it now) that seems to be something out of the twilight zone. Granted, it's probably more of a Bynari issue than Redhat, but still... it only adds to my frustration at this point. And I can't find a resolution anywhere on the net. Time to reinstall.

Anyway, thanks for posting the thread, I was happy to see that it opened a discussion

You're welcome

You guys are such sissies

Am not!

The only thing I'd like to see for Gentoo in a corp environment is the ability to emerge pre-compiled binaries off a dev machine. That way you could test and compile on dev and then just have the prod machines pull the binaries off of that box. In effect, your dev machine would sync and pull from the Gentoo main sites while your prod machines would sync and pull binaries from the dev machine.

Easy. Setup your dev box with the 'buildpkg' flag set in FEATURES in /etc/make.conf, then mount /usr/portage/packages to the server via NFS. When you've certified a package as stable, and are ready to emerge it, use the -k (or -K ?) flag: 'emerge -k <package-name>' ... and voila! QA'd, tested binary installed and peachy-keen!

[mmealman]

Easy. Setup your dev box with the 'buildpkg' flag set in FEATURES in /etc/make.conf, then mount /usr/portage/packages to the server via NFS. When you've certified a package as stable, and are ready to emerge it, use the -k (or -K ?) flag: 'emerge -k <package-name>' ... and voila! QA'd, tested binary installed and peachy-keen!

Very cool. Thanks for posting the tip.

[gwydion]

No problem. I might also add a plug for something (two things actually) I found earlier today:

The Gentoo Server Wiki, http://www.subverted.net/wakka/wakka.ph ... oServerFAQ, a very good resource for people interested in setting up Gentoo servers.

and from there I found this paper, Bootstrapping an Infrastructure:
http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/b ... strap.html

Definitely worth a read, it's a great overview on a very insightful way of looking at network design and implementation. The addition of cvs (or other revision control) to the network is great. I don't think I would've ever thought of it before reading that... well, take a look at it for all the goodies

[shm]

yes, currently.

[Athas]

but don't blindly update the whole system, gentoo or not.

I'd say that it's fairly safe to update a whole Debian Stable system

[labrador]

I can't believe what appeared in this thread about Redhat. You have not made it clear which Redhat version you are talking about, but assuming you are comparing the free version with free gentoo and Debian, then you are wrong.

Redhat OS is barely QA'ed Only the Enterprise Server is QA'ed, and that is the version that is deployed in a serious way in industry. The .0 releases of Redhat are "community" releases, with cutting edge and barely tested packages slapped together. These are the real beta versions for the Enterprise paying server customers. There is no sign that Redhat intends to release any more stable community releases. You can expect to see 10.0, 11.0, etc. Their web site makes it very clear now that the "community" version is intended for hobbiests (i.e. don't run a web server or mail server, etc. on it).

What you get in Redhat 9 is an experiment to find out what should be done for the next version of Enterprise Server, which is kept behind by a year or more from the cutting edge versions of stuff. Personally, I've seen some strange things in Redhat lately.

Version 8 was released with Apache 2.0 and mod_perl 1.99 Beta. I couldn't get them to work. A quick visit to the mod_perl project made it as clear as day why. The developer states that the beta 1.99 does not work with Apache 2, only Apache 1.3. Redhat did not QA mod_perl with even a "Hello World" mod_perl script!

Redhat 9 was a joke in my test install. It set up linear in the lilo.conf, which caused a no-boot immediately on first boot up. I fixed that with lba32. Then the wireless driver, which was working OK in 8.0, was flakey - it showed about 50% packet loss. No problems when rebooting to Windows XP so it couldn't have been an environment thing. I updated the kernel and driver for the wireless card and then it was OK.

Redhat "Enterprise" OS is QA'ed. But the non-Enterprise versions - the free versions, are not well tested. This is why you see so many ex-Redhat users here looking for something that has a nice user community, a large user community and an easy way to get software maintained.

Debian's update system is better than Redhat's, although you have to know what to put in your apt sources to get the stable and security bits.

Having a large user community is important for determining how many packages will be supported in the distro, how many HOWTOs will appear for that distro, and how long the distro will be supported for (e.g. you can still find packages being made for redhat, 7.3 outside of the Redhat organization, but this won't be true of 8.0 and 9.0 in a year's time).

Redhat has market share, and like Microsoft they have decided to leverage it for money. They want money for the up2date access, they want money for a distro that has been QA'ed and has a service life longer than 12 months. I'm not making this up from rumours, go read it on the Redhat site.

One thing I just don't get about Gentoo: why is it necessary to specify the CPU flags when the type of hardware you have can be detected?

Wouldn't a better solution be to fix the way the kernel is compiled for all of Linux, and then everyone would get a faster linux more highly tuned for their system?

[gwydion]

Redhat has market share, and like Microsoft they have decided to leverage it for money. They want money for the up2date access, they want money for a distro that has been QA'ed and has a service life longer than 12 months.

Of course they want money -- building a distribution as they have takes alot, as does Gentoo. What we do with a large supportive community, they do with some proprietary (or at least distro specific) software engineering and on-staff develepors. Also, please don't try to act like Redhat is Microsoft, trying to enslave all us poor Linux users into some quasi-borg mindset by selling a product, or that they have never done anything for the open source community. They employ many developers who are contributing to OS projects -- have you? What about supporting a company that _does_ give back to the community, even if you may not agree 100% with how they do it... have you ever done that? I know I have, on both accounts.

I guess my point is this: Redhat is a for-profit company, period. Surprise! They want to make money! True, they've made some mistakes and bad decisions (installing stuff to weird places, breaking xmms, breaking kde) but so what? At the end of the day, they have a decent linux distribution for their target audience, and contribute back to the community. That's more than a lot of companies (Transgaming, anyone?) for sure.

One thing I just don't get about Gentoo: why is it necessary to specify the CPU flags when the type of hardware you have can be detected?

Wouldn't a better solution be to fix the way the kernel is compiled for all of Linux, and then everyone would get a faster linux more highly tuned for their system?

Let's pretend: I am a poor struggling CS college student who uses Linux... and I get a hand-me-down 486 that I can use as a router/firewall/web server/whatever. I really like Gentoo, but can't install it because it takes too long to compile. I'd install it from my main desktop box, but unfortunately the CHOST CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS are auto-detected and applied. Now I have to go through a hassle to get the system to install with support for a different cpu.

Second illustration is the server I'm working on right now. I'm building a box with just about every use flag known to man and certain generic choices here and there, because it's pulling down a bunch of software to be compiled and saved as packages. I can then use those packages that are still tuned (albeit generically) to what I need to install multiple servers & workstations throughout a network rollout. I would have problems if I couldn't pick my own optimisations, and choose which platforms I wanted to compile for. The CPU flags aren't auto-detected or mysteriously applied without user intervention, because that's the point -- everything is under my control when setting up a system.

[KungFuHamster]

Don't we already have live, 4 threads about this topic already? *

Gentoo Chat:"Is Gentoo A Geek Only Distro?"::Slashdot:SCO


*This post is merely a puerile and pointless attempt at humor that has no nutritional value whatsoever. Furthermore, it contains several pounds of pure lard, 500mg of nicotine, and a coyote armed with an Acme Blast-O-Rocket Jet Pack.

[charlieg]

Syshalt posted this :
"But I personally wouldn't build a webhosting company around it. The problem of Gentoo is the same as its strength - it's a constantly developing platform, it doesn't actually have fixed "versions". Something like FreeBSD "current"."

Well, not to diss on Syshalt, but I wouldn't want him to be my webhost.

I would expect a webhost to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the core applications involved. Really, it's not that much to pick and choose what you need, and I'd go as far as to say it's preferrable. Just going with the 'default stable branch' is a cop out and shows not just a lack of enthusiasm but a general lack of understanding of your platform.

This isn't MSCE world. You do have to make decisions from time to time and the ability to make decisions is what should make your webhost stand out from some 3rd rate base MS / Distro-Linux based webhost.

Besides, just because Gentoo doesn't do a regular 'stable' release, doesn't mean that there aren't stable applications available. It's up to you to know from your own experience and the information available whether or not an application is stable. Hell, I wouldn't trust a default stable release of a distribution or operating system anyway - I mean, you need to patch up Windows and the outdated packages that come with the 'most recent' release of your favourite distribution most like have had security / bug-fix update releases anyway.

/me apologies for not reading the whole thread in advance.