Just real quickly,
I'm a huge fan of gentoo, so I'd pick that first, and SuSE comes up in
second for me.
I'm currently trying to find an angle to work gentoo into production
here for us. As far as linux goes, we're primarily runnin Sles.
Mike
On 3/24/06, Matthew Stringer
Hi,
been having a debate at work about our new hosting platform.
Basically we offer basic dedicated linux server hosting where each user gets their own identical linux box to run web, mysql and qmail services.
The servers are managed by ourselves and we look after OS patches, security, software etc.
The platform on a whole will be centrally managed where we can PXE boot servers and role out a complete production server, role out patches and new software etc.
Nothing unusual there!
However the platform is quite large and could be running up to 1000 servers.
The debate centres on which distro to use, we can't go down the Enterprise Linux route due to costs.
Given the numbers of servers we don't want to have to upgrade the OS every 5 minutes because the distro we're using is no longer supported.
Most of our enterprise linux boxes are running Red Hat so an obvious immediate choice would be Fedora, however it seems largely a development platform for RHEL and they stop supporting old versions after 18 months which means we'd either have to upgrade all the servers to the current release (which could cause problems as upgrades do) or back port security fixes ourselves which isn't cost effective. In addition Fedora's legacy support isn't very good which runs the risks of breaking customers code.
Suse is my personal distro of choice and has support for 3 years, upgrading the OS every 3 years is obviously far less of a concern and IMO the legacy support is better.
However given the launch of Open Suse I'm concerned that this will spell the demise of Suse Pro and thus I'll have another Fedora on my hands.
Do we know if this is likely to be the case?
If so we'd probably be looking at Gentoo or Ubuntu the concerns with them are that it will introduce another flavour of Unix into our data centres (Currently have to manage Solaris, HP-UX, AS400, Suse, Suse Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, Free BSD and Windows 2K & 2K3 boxes).
Thought it would be interesting to hear folks views on here.
Matthew
-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com