Gentoo as a general purpose server

[kakakoka]

Greetings
I am a member of my dorms networking committee and a sysadm on the dorms servers. As of now, two of our servers, responsible for mailserving, newsserving, external and internal webserving, samba serving, printer serving, mysql based user & content management etc, are running redhat, and I wish to persuade my fellow admins to spend the summer with me migrating those servers to gentoo and perhaps even putting gentoo on a new machine which is being put into use .

Im talking entry-level consumer computers, since none of our services are "critical", - were doing this on a voluntary basis and our dorm residents are just happy to have free internet etc).

Now, none of my fellow admins are really too happy to try out other dists, but I reckon that I can persuade them if I have good arguments for migrating to gentoo. Thats where you guys come into the picture , so what im asking for is more good arguments to use gentoo on our servers.

So far, Ive thought of the following arguments:
- Portage, with its easier upgrading of packages making it more likely that we will actually upgrade whenever a security advisal comes out
- Easy rc management
- It seems to me that installing apache with php & ssl seems to be much less of a hazzle than with redhat

I doubt they will care about the fact that the system is custom-compiled for the architecture, since were not experiencing any overload or bad responsiveness of our current servers anyway, and since we have a non-expanding circle of users (there are only so many rooms in the dorm, and about 99% of ppl here have computers now).

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[TheQuickBrownFox]

If you have a distfiles mirror, you almost never have to look for the source or website for any package again.

[rizzo]

RedHat == RPM Hell.

The reason I left RedHat: I wanted to update a package, but it said I needed a newer version of rpm. So I went to update rpm, but it said I needed a newer version of bzip2. So I went to update bzip2, but it said I needed a newer version of rpm.

That's where I had had enough with those package managers. Gentoo is a million times smarter in terms of package management.

[ARC2300]

Not to sound like a jackhole, but RH sucks.

I tried updating, and either everything said it needed everything else installed first, when things did get installed they were installed in a different directory, or I had to pay to get things upgraded.

That, and RH likes to hack up their libs and the such.

Go with Gentoo. It's smaller, more customizeable, (both in packaging and kernel options), it's very easy to keep updated, and AFAIK, Gentoo doesn't hack up the glibc's for its own use.

[bmph8ter]

I used RedHat on quite a few servers for several years. It was just nice to click a few buttons and have a functioning server. I have moved almost all of them to Gentoo now. Portage makes for really simple updates, and IMHO the user community is a bit friendlier. Just remember, if they don't want to switch they don't have to. Gentoo is a very nice distro (my current favorite), but that doesn't mean it's the perfect choice for everything.
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[kakakoka]

Thanks for all your replies guys. I'll try to persuade my fellow sysadms, because to be honest, after trying gentoo, I dont really feel like doing sysadmin tasks on a RH system at all. But, those guys are, despite of being good hearted geeks, quite sceptical of new distros, simply because they feel that the time they are going to need to learn the new distro isnt really worth the difference in useability. Also they want to focus on the stuff we have to develop on top of the distro (mainly user management and content management).

I, having tried gentoo myself, and having a bit more pioneering spirit of course want to use gentoo and dont mind spending time finetuning the basic system before building stuff on top of it. And, I think, that perhaps in the end, the only way someone is going to be persuaded of the blessings of gentoo is if they are already enthusiastic enough to try it out and to ride along on the good vibrations around the forums and the irc channel.
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[Rinkhals]

Just a note to help you persuade your mates....

I have to say that the gentoo community seem very quick and helpful in terms of responding to any problems you might have.

If you've installed gentoo yourself, you'll be aware of the only caveat that I might throw in and that is that some packages can take literally days to install, even on broadband.

However, just show them the flashy Bootsplashes and see their mouths water....