Gentoo in the corporate world? [solved]

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Hi.

I'm a new user of Gentoo, but a not-so-new user of Linux. I started out in the RedHat world a year or two before they started hitting the mainstream news. Anyone who has been around for that long probably knows exactly why I wound up here: Larry the cow says it all, but Larry obviously had less tolerance for "the state of things" than I do.

I've installed Gentoo on a VMware session successfully. I didn't go all the way to a production system because that's not practical, but I'm satisfied that my skills are up to the task of installing a Gentoo box and, after some research in the security howto's I think I can make production system. There are undoubtedly some additional gotcha's I will run into, but I'm fairly confident I can handle that.

I have to say right off the bat that "emerge" is a really good hack! If this is doing what I think it does, it is EXACTLY what I'm after. I've been eyeballing Gentoo for a year or so now maybe, right when I realized that a source-based distribution is the only one that makes a whole lot of sense. Gentoo came along just in time.

Here's what I'm after: I need to update some servers at my work. I loathe the idea of using RHEL or RedHat anything for that matter. I want to know if anyone is actually using Gentoo for an enterprise installation and what the real costs are. Here's my guess based on what I've seen so far:

I think installation time will be extremely high. I'm guessing my second installation will probably take 8 to 12 hours, for a minimal system on page 12 of the instructions. On the other hand, I suspect that the cost of keeping the system up to date will be much lower than it is for an equivalent RedHat box, both in labor and in real money.

Questions:
- How many people are using Gentoo in real businesses?
- How hard is it to justify the additional installation time as worthwhile?
- What are the real costs of running this OS as opposed to RedHat Enterprise Linux? (or any other mainstream distro)
- What is the greatest difficulty in making this distro work in business?

In rereading my post, it seems that I imply nobody is using this distribution for real work. I don't think that way, I just don't see any documentation on this site regarding that sort of installation. Is the site staying away from that topic because of the ... commercialization of other distros?

Sorry for so many questions all at once. This seemed to be the most appropriate list for several reasons, so forgive me if it should go elsewhere.

brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

Woh there, you're calling emerge a hack? You need to step back and rethink your position and figure out what's really going on in the Gentoo world. emerge is by no means a hack. It is a tool that is a part of Portage that aides in the compilation and dependency checking of packages being installed on the system. I may get criticized/flamed for saying that. I am not trying to be disrespectful, I just disagree with you saying that emerge is some sort of hack.
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1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm using the old-school open source definition of "hack." As in, the Linux kernel is a good hack. High praise, not disrespectful at all.

Am I showing my age here?

Hacker: A programmer who is working on a project. Typically considered to be a SKILLED programmer.
Cracker: A morally challenged psycho with no respect for the work of others.
Hack: . An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.

I found the definition of "Hack" from dictionary.com. The definition is still there, although it is quite a bit further down the list than I would have thought.

brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

I took the meaning of hack as it being a program that is put together very haphazardly and it being a miracle that it works. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.
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1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Maybe I should have chosen a more universally understood term. It's curious that this hack/hacker phraseology has become its own diametric term in the same industry. I've never really understood that. It's really a drag that the bad term is the one mainstream society adopted and somehow worse that the mainstream definition found its way back into the programming industry.

The problem is, with the definition of "hack" that I used I don't know of any other word which has quite the same connotations. I'd probably start using the new word if I knew what it was.

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

There are bad hacks and good hacks, hacker's and cracker's. Just an FYI for Brims since I think his mind has been deluded by the media. I think he should look at these links. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/related.html, and http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html If you want to learn the truth about hacker's. and 1clue your not wrong or showing your age, everyone else is showing how much power the media has. keep using those term's like that. It may cause initial outrage but it will help to enlighten people. point them to the jargon file like I am if they think your wrong.
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curtis119 · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 11:20 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo Chat.

Gentoo is used in the Corporate world. What you may want to do is have a single (or a farm) build server that creates packages. Have all your systems sync to that server and set it up with ftp or http as your PKGDIR server. Now all your other systems can install the prebuilt binaries.

Of course, all that depends on building the binaries generically enough to work on all your different systems. If your lucky enough to have a homogonous hardware environment then you can customize the packages as much as possible and then simply make a disc image and clone it. Installation couldn't be easier this way.
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XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

and as far as using it for business. I think you would want to go with hardened sources for security reason's, also I wouldn't recommend doing ~arch anything unless necessary. I can't say any more about using it in business because I don't know.
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1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Thanks guys.

I never saw that dictionary site, just spent a couple minutes browsing.

I was thinking of an internal mirror and then build off that, to save T1 bandwidth. I'm in a pretty small company, the hardware is not homogenous. As for a generic binary, I guess we could go with P3 or better and get some performance improvements. I'd like to avoid that because, if I'm not mistaken, Portage allows periodic synchronization, right? That would seem to me to allow the most flexible automatic update mechanism I've ever heard of. Especially if you have it compile each package specifically for the box in question, with just the packages present.

Is there a document somewhere that covers this sort of thing? It seems fairly straightforward but there has to be some sort of gotcha. Unlike certain other distributions who don't seem to want you to change the package repository site, Gentoo makes it immediately obvious how to change the package repository. It would be interesting to know if someone has taken the additional step to make a package caching proxy with memory, so it would keep current copies of everything anyone has asked it for?

The simple solution, of course, is to mirror a public mirror, so that's probably what will happen first unless somebody knows of a more selective product.

Part of my idea of "hardening" a box is to just not have services available for things I don't intend to use, not even kernel support. If I'm careful about what's on the box, secure the services I use and am careful with firewall access, I think I'd be as secure as could be expected for a small company with no real IT staff.

curtis119 · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 11:54 pm Post subject:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml

That is a list of all the official documentation. There is a doc for setting up sync mirrors and package/distfiles mirrors.
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XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

hardened sources is probably overkill for a small business.
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1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Oh, dang.

I should have R'd the FM on my own. I saw that page when I was installing and forgot about it. Sorry.

Ya, hardened sources are a bit much to deal with, maybe later though.

Thanks again you guys have been a lot of help.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Xeno,

Regarding hardened sources:

I just read the intro and maybe a bit more. Might not be as difficult as I had thought. Either this stuff has taken great strides since I last looked or I hadn't looked all that hard. Or both.

I think first I'll get a real box running Gentoo with services I need. The first box in a distro is always a throwaway anyway, so I'll try to learn what I can about Gentoo and make sure that box is not accessible in any way from the net.

Thanks, I wouldn't have even looked had you not mentioned it.

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

no probs.
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brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

I know. I was merely giving you some good reading material. I wasn't trying to be overly critical.
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brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

We both had sincere motivations, so everything's good.
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1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Brims,

No hard feelings from my end at all. I'm sorry it was interpreted negatively, but I'm glad you came out OK with it.

As Xeno pointed out, "hack" can be good or bad, sometimes in the same sentence. Being "all hacked together" is usually negative.

Come to think of it, most places where "hack" is used in a positive way it has some verbiage surrounding it that puts it in a good light. "A good hack" or similar. Typically understated the way I was trying, because the term itself in an extreme statement. You don't often hear "a great hack" but "a good hack" is sometihng I've wanted somebody to say about my stuff for years now. I get lots of praise, but never from somebody in the hacker subculture. I've wanted to contribute back to OS for years, and have occasionally offered bug fixes or something. The problem is though that I can't come up with a project I think is good enough. I don't want to litter, if you know what I mean.

Sorry, I guess I really like discussing this sort of thing. Slang and subcultures and all that. This is supposed to be a help thread but here I'm wasting bandwidth.

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

maybe we should start a hack/hacker thread in off the wall? yeah think I'll do that. I'll be back with a link.
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aidanjt · Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2006 1:45 am Post subject:

When I'm reading source code if I come across a 'bad' hack, the hacker usually leaves a comment stating so, usually prefixing it with "ugly" or "nasty" as well as describing what it's doing. I've seen a few of these in the kernel over the years. An ugly hack isn't nessecerily a bad thing either. It just mean's its rather obscure, but acomplishes what it's ment to do.

As for people describing Linux as being "hacked together". Well thats just nonsense, a huge amount of professional man hours goes into our beloved kernel, it's keeping up with modern challanges and excelling other kernels in various situations.

IMO ignorant uses of 'hack' just shows how little people know about a) the english language, and b) software development.

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

hear is the thread. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3087950.html#3087950 that way this one can get back on topic.
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aidanjt · Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2006 2:01 am Post subject:

Indeed, well here's my answers to the OPs questions regarding Gentoo in the enterprise:

- How many people are using Gentoo in real businesses?
No idea, we don't keep tabs.

- How hard is it to justify the additional installation time as worthwhile?
With a compile farm it's no slower than any other distro, and you can still construct images to deploy on multipule machines like any other operating system.

- What are the real costs of running this OS as opposed to RedHat Enterprise Linux? (or any other mainstream distro)
The sallery of an administrator who knows what he's doing?

- What is the greatest difficulty in making this distro work in business?
Finding an administrator who knows what he's doing?

In my opinion no enterprise (or individual) use operating systems out of the box, they all have individual needs, different configurations, host machines etc etc..

Gentoo has near infinate configurability, as such, I belive Gentoo enpowers enterprises to shape an operating system that works for them, not having them to work around the operating system they use.

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

yes and perhaps the only real problem with gentoo as a business solution is the lack of being able to get 'support' from the organization. support is not guaranteed with gentoo.
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1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Thanks again.

Xeno, over the years I've made exactly one call to support. It was RHEL3, and they didn't know the answer. I found out it was a new issue for them (they broke my installation) and came up with a fix before they did, and posted that info back. I think the forum-based support concept is far better than commercial help most times. Not that there isn't a place for commercial help.

Aidan,

There was a post concerning some poll results that was most informative. What it told me is that not a whole lot of people choose NOT to use Gentoo in business compared with more mainstream distros, so it can't be too hard.

Never tried a compile farm and frankly we don't have the servers to support it anyway. I can live with backgrounding the updates probably, and might consider a build box. (one-node compile farm?)

You are absolutely right about enterprise operatings being tailored. The flexibility is what is keeping my attention.

aidanjt · Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2006 2:28 am Post subject:

In my experience the odds of winning russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol are better than getting good support from vendors. So-called support is way overrated, doing your own research on problems is most effective.

What Gentoo lacks in offical vendor support, it more than makes up for in community support, and outstanding documentation.