Why, exactly, is Gentoo not "server" friendly?

jmcphe · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 7

Nicing portage is one thing. I simply don't let gcc go multi-threaded. That way it only runs away with 1 of my cpus. Sure, it's degradation, but if you run it after 22:00 or on the weekend, there is no observed end-user impact.

Now if we could only figure out a way to compile the packages on 1 system, then shipped the compiled binaries off to the 100 other systems in prod, we might have a business case to get gentoo into the enterprise world.

madchaz · Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2003 10:36 pm Post subject:

tdb · Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 5:42 pm Post subject:

asv · Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 9:38 pm Post subject: just a thought

I could never see running gentoo on a production system that was mission critical. Such systems cannot not have precious cpu cylcles taken away to compile updates. Does gentoo stables address this issue at all?

EvilTwinSkippy · Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 6:18 pm Post subject: Gentoo on servers...

Frankly folks, I think a lot of us are wasting grey-matter cycles wondering about computer cycles.

For my part I have 9 identical servers. One is my sacrificial "compile on me" server. It hosts a universal copy of my portage tree over NFS, the others leach from it. (The busy server also has every package installed in use on the network.) My "busy server" builds packages. I also work out all of the nasty nasty details with package X slugs package Y requiring a rebuild of package Z. The fruit of this labor is saved on the network, and when emerge runs on my other boxes, they suck down the pre-built binaries. There is still a lot of wailing and nashing of teeth with any upgrade, but at least I don't have to worry about compile time!

A word of warning, you can get into a world of trouble if you aren't careful! I had a box that I performed one binary update of python on without updating GLIBC. Suffice to say, it's time to whip out the live-CD and get medival.

I'm starting to adopt a system of releases rather than piecemeal upgrades. Makes life simpler.
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bmichaelsen · Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2003 12:41 am Post subject:

my little home server runs gentoo
http://michaelsen.kicks-ass.net
A firend told me he buyed a server (webpage/email and stuff)
and guess what:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=kukus.net
it is running gentoo!

Greetz, Björn

heresiarch · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 5 Location: Needham, MA

I'm currently attending Olin College , and all students are required to have the most current rev of the school laptop. Since me and some friends have started using Gentoo on a few old P3 boxes as students servers and on all of our laptops, we have had lots of success with passing around binary packages. We don't have it automated yet (we hope to when the school year starts) but we currently informally ask around before doing big installs (kde, X, etc) and see if anyone else has the packages for our laptop. This saves vast amounts of time, at zero cost to optimization. This is my dream environment for gentoo - we get all the great fast packages, without the annoying compilation step. Eventually, we want to build a stage2 tarball for our laptops to help new users install gentoo on campus. Ultimately, it would be really cool if we could just image the drive and copy/paste a working gentoo setup with wireless all setup, things like i8kutil ready, all our local network drives auto-mounted, etc. Should help getting more students on gentoo.[/url]

madchaz · Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2003 5:34 am Post subject:

heresiarch · n00b Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 5 Location: Needham, MA

Yep, we've already got that setup. The problem is, it's hard to use the laptops themselves as distcc hosts - they are constantly turning on and off and are almost always on wireless. So for now, we have the P3 boxes acting as distcc hosts, which has worked well. We've had to mess with the balance to keep jobs on all machines, but it's still working well.

wbreeze · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 53 Location: Langley, BC

Hmzaniac · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2003 11:57 pm Post subject:

The way i have it:

export /usr/portage read-only over <insert favourite network file system here>. Mount it on your clients. This means you only have to emerge sync on your server, and if you build packages in /usr/portage/packages, that will also be exported, and can be used for emerging precompiled packages.
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Brazil · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2003 6:08 am Post subject: Would be nice if...

It would be nice if you could limit the amount of CPU usage when you are compiling something... I don't know if it could ever be possible, or if there is already a way to do it... Lower priority? A new user account and lower process priority?

But if CPU is important for your production environment, it would be cool if you could use distcc on all of your servers and only use 10% of CPU of each box... or just take a day to compile...

Just a thought... What is limiting from making this possible?

And as far as I can tell why a BSD is better than a Linux distro for a server, or just in general for stability/reliability is because the people who develop the BSDs are control freaks... Both Linux and BSDs use virtually the same common libraries... GNU is the OS!! (will cause flames) What would you get if Steve Jobs knew how to program? BSD! (more flames) It's nice to have a body of people to make sure what is going into a system... and I guess there is not as much as a coordination in developing in the Linux community... but I can just be as much as a control freak and do it all myself to make a Linux system just as good... and Gentoo lets me do that. (flames are burning me now)

Anyway... that's what I think... maybe I just said some of that to cause trouble, but I do think it is possible to do things just as well throughout w/ Gentoo as a server.

But wouldn't it be cool on an OS, if your could control the CPU usage for a compiler?

-Brazil

Pythonhead · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2003 3:08 pm Post subject:

I have not deployed it on various servers for two reasons, one which was stated before, compiling times. On some servers I don't have the time to take the servers down to compile. I can't have dozens of users affected by compiling and the nice command only goes so far. In some situations having a binary package that has been heavily tested is great.

The second reason was because of requirements of a commercial application vendor that only gives support on Red Hat machines.

That leaves a lot of other appropriate uses though, and I've deployed it happily elsewhere.

Pythonhead · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2003 3:09 pm Post subject: Re: Would be nice if...

wbreeze · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 53 Location: Langley, BC

sschlueter · Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2003 9:45 pm Post subject:

sschlueter · Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2003 10:04 pm Post subject:

For servers, security and reliability are important.

The gentoo way of dealing with security vulnerabilities is to upgrade to a new version. But new versions of software package often contain more changes than just the security related patches. This may have some unwanted side effects and may break things somewhere else.

The command "emerge sync" is completely unsecure at the moment. There are lots of mirror servers out there, and if only one of them is operated by a malicious administrator or if the server got compromised, you may get a different portage tree and if you emerge an ebuild and run the software that was installed, your machine might be compromised as well.

markan18 · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2003 Posts: 11 Location: wonderland

I have done what it has been said before in this thread. That is setup a compile server where i compile and create binaries for all the packages i need (emerge sync && emerge -ub world). Then, i export the entire /usr/portage tree via nfs. On all the others machines, i try to upgrade by mounting /usr/portage from the compile server and do a "emerge -uk world". It works for some packages but often portage does not "see" the binary package and try to pull the source and it fails because /usr/portage is exported read-only. When i try to install software that spans over a large number of packages (like KDE) its even worse. When kde is not installed and i want to install it, emerge -p kde and emerge -kp kde does not give the same results on the same machine, i wonder why.
The installation of kde using the sources works great but the installation using binary packages barely works because some packages appears to be missing. Also the make.conf (same USE for all) file is the same on all my machines and the compilation option are quite conservative. In fact, i compile for i586 because i still have some old pentiums around. Finally, i tried the "fixpackages" command but it has no effect. Thats why i can't use gentoo on more than a few machines because compile all packages on all machine is not an option, i need to be able to use binary packages.
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Daemonfly · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2003 Posts: 46 Location: Pa - USA

In my situation, it's more of a hardware support issue.

An example is my Compaq ML350 dual 600Mhz server (no longer supported 1st model). It has the normal hardware, plus some Compaq upgrades/optional parts. FreeBSD 5.0 installs on it without a hitch - all hardware is found automatically, and works perfectly.

None of the Gentoo 1.4 versions, even release, install on it . Even the newest updated 1.4 live CD doesn't even boot completely. System boots from the Live CD, but then errors & says the cd is not a Live CD

. Doesn't matter, as most of the hardware is only supported in Linux by hard to find drivers(rpms) for Red Hat - and had to do a pretty extensive search just to find most of them.

Gentoo goes on any other PC that it will work on. The ones that it doesn't work on are ones that, with my luck, have hardware that is not supported under Linux at all. I don't feel like going out & buying extra network/sound/video cards just to have Linux run on those PCs.

As for general problems. Yeah, compiling time and the Emerge system can be an issue on production servers. But, you don't have to compile or Emerge your software, it's just one option.

meta · n00b Joined: 22 Aug 2003 Posts: 45 Location: Cambridge MA

Yeah, what he said.

I spent three days off-and-on trying to get Gentoo with EVMS to run stably on a quad SMP system. I tried EVMS 1, EVMS 2, multiple kernel versions, I even tried to build the RedHat kernel... It seemed to work, but when put under load it would lock up at random, not even giving me any kernel panic or error log output.

Then I installed RedHat 7.3, and that worked first time.

nickrout · Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 12:37 am Post subject:

all this crap about not having gcc on a server is exactly that, crap.

BSD is widely considered one of the most stable and secure server OSes. By default on BSD machines you use their ports system to update software, ie you compile it from. Like gentoo they also have compiled binary packages, but like in the gentoo world real men don't install binaries.

Therefore I'd wager that a good number of those stable & secure BSD machines are running a compiler, and it doesn't seem to worry them.

chiringuito · n00b Joined: 18 Aug 2003 Posts: 1

It all comes down to what you need to run, and how you run it. I can crash BSD servers on the hour if I misconfigure/abuse them.

If the server is mission critical, test - test - test.

Hey people run 'mission critical' Windows servers, can Gentoo be worse?

Gentoo servers can be just as stable and fast, and if configured/administered properly - secure...

fimblo · Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 4:04 pm Post subject:

On a completely other note- I saw your signature Axl, and just want to point out that:

cdunham · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 8:22 pm Post subject:

Crg · Guru Joined: 29 May 2002 Posts: 345 Location: London