Inputs on Gentoo as a Office server

[kreda]

Hi all,
I am planning to use Gentoo Distribution for my office server. I am planning for following utilities there.
1. Firewall
2. router
3. Backup system
4. Shared drives
5. Printer services
7. A small email maintenance for my small office

So I had been using Suse tilll now and enjoying the automatic bug releases and updates through Yast. Does gentoo provide any such eeasy methods to keep up with the changing updates? Is it easier for me anyhow with Gentoo? Other than optimizations and personlized services in Gentoo, does it provide any other better provision for my needs?

I will be very much happy to share views from this friendly forum.
Thank you,
Kreda
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Woman like Linux too!

[shira]

sure, it'd be really easy

just emerge rsync && emerge -u world every so often or when you see a security update and you should be golden

[shira]

dbl post

[fragbert]

IMHO, the #1 business argument for Gentoo is this:

Your distro will never be 'out of date' or 'unsupported'. For example, with RedHat, they are phasing out the older 7.x releases. Your only option if you want to run stable, secure, and current software is to upgrade. But doing a complete upgrade of RedHat (or basically any distro except Gentoo) is extremely painful. With Gentoo, on the other hand, you can upgrade only what you 'need' to upgrade, and you'll never be out of date as long as you emerge sync every once in a while.

To answer your other question (How can I stay up to date with Gentoo): just run 'emerge sync' to keep your /usr/portage directory up to date with the latest ebuilds. To check which packages need to be updated, run 'emerge -puvD world'. This is emerge --pretend --upgrade --verbose --deep. And you can run it again without the -p and it will upgrade those packages, although it is usually better imho to upgrade groups of packages at a time rather than the entire world, since this has caused problems in the past.

Good luck,



Michael