Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2441 mails)

[Hans du Plooy <hansdp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,

We have to setup a server for our company which wil basically be a
website hosting server, running apahce2 with php and all the rest,
mysql, and postfix.  Domains will be as many as the hardware can take.
Hardware are dual 3Ghz Xeons, 2GB RAM, Intel server board in a 2u
chassis, two 15k rpm SCSI discs in a hardware raid-1, two hardware based
gigabit network controllers.  The machine has two live IPs, both on the
same subnet, both with 100mbit bandwith to the outside world (dunno
about the contention, but it's fairly low - expensive hosting facility
for high bandwidth availability).

The question that I'm struggling with, is which version of SUSE to use.
SLES made very good impressions on me, but I will have to add some
packages and also upgrade many of the packages that it ships with.
Which makes me wonder if it is worth the money to pay for SLES
(basically for the support) if I'm going to void the support by fiddling
with the internals.  Also considering that we have a handful of very
capable and experience linux sysadmins.

Which brings me to 9.3.  I had my doubts, especially reading some of the
reports on this list, but I must say, in my experience so far 9.3 is by
far the best 2.6 based SUSE distro yet.  I have not had a single problem
with anything, I have it running on a number of desktops and an ever
increasing number of servers.  Packages are up to date, enough that I'll
have to change very little, and performance so far have been excellent.

What would be the merits of taking SLES9 over 9.3 in this case?  I do
realise that SLES' kernel is probably more optimised for network
throughput than 9.3, but will two 100mbit connections actually push 9.3
to it's limits, especially considering the hardware?

Thanks
-- 
Kind Regards
Hans du Plooy
SagacIT (Pty) Ltd
hansdp at sagacit dot com