"Gentoo unsuitable for mission critical servers"

TheCoop · Posted: Wed May 28, 2003 10:06 pm Post subject:

most of those comments above can be addressed by this:

Gentoo is, by its very nature, an 'unstable' distribution. It isn't meant to be debian stable, it is meant to be on the cutting edge and if being on the cutting edge means letting a few things (eg documentation) lag behind, then so be it. These forums more than make up for any documentation available

However, it is easy to use gentoo for production servers. Just dont set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS and look carefully at what the ebuilds do. If you are a proper sysadmin you will do that for any linux distribution, not just gentoo.

And about the etc-update. It does that so your edited config files dont get nuked, you can choose what you want to merge and what you want to delete in the new /etc files an ebuild puts in. What;s the problem with that?
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Matje · Posted: Thu May 29, 2003 12:00 am Post subject:

Mezz:
* All your "problems" with portage touching files in /etc ... It doesn't, it puts the new files there and you can use etc-update to update your current files. It NEVER touches any of your current configfiles, unless you tell it to by unexporting the CONFIG_PROTECT variable. Also, etc-update nowadays has an "interactive" option. You first upgrade the files you know you changed yourself. Then you let the rest of the files be overwritten by the updates automatically. It beats having no update examples and maybe leaving out important, new functions in packages.

* The 'lack' of installer gives you more power, since you control almost every step of your install (except the bootstrap process)

* If you install on fifty boxes, there are likely to be a lot of them (if not all) which are alike, take a disk image and copy it to the other boxes. I myself would rather install fifty boxes with gentoo manually as with Red Hat or Suse. Won't say Debian or FreeBSD because I haven't tried that yet.

* Agree with you on the prefix part, you should be able to choose what you want. Post a request on bugs.gentoo.org. I also disagree, it works for me, there's no need to change it for me.

* Those patches mostly are security fixes and stuff which won't harm you. The actual influence on package builds is done by USE parameters. Don't you think that those binary packages of debian or freebsd have patches applied? Again, the idea of an emerge option to disable patches is good: bugs.gentoo.org

* The documentation of Gentoo is by far the best I've seen in the linux world

* Changelogs should be updated more reguraly, I agree

* There should also be a printable version of the documentation, although I've noticed the latest version produces much better results. Please note that results also vary based on which browser you use...

* As far as I know, after you've bootstrapped, you have a "bare-bone-system" on which you can start to go into any direction you want. You want an apache box? emerge apache. You want a desktop machine? emerge xfree... I don't really see your point here. As long as you stay out of the masked packages, you will be running a very stable gentoo box. And gentoo allready has a -stable branch. It's: don't use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~x86'

* As far as I'm concerned, KDE isn't exactly a thing you run on a "mission critical server" Things will break, yes, that's linux, it breaks, you try to fix it. And users don't have to just sit and wait, they can take an active role in the development, they can search for solutions and post them to bugs.gentoo.org. Besides, waiting before a package gets into portage takes a lot less time then it takes to get into debian-stable (or so I've heard

)
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darkcoder · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2003 10:48 pm Post subject:

In terms of installation and bring a server up and running in no time definitelly a binary based distro (RPM, deb, whatever) is the best choice. But people that got a look to RedHat official books, probably read that the authors recommend to download the latest versions of the services' sources you'll need and compile them manually, which in fact break RHN, and put you in some way in the same position as Gentoo.

But for maintenance I found gentoo a lot better. Got less problems with outside sources, don't break as many rules as RH or MDK.

Anyway if servers have similar hardware, you can compile only once, compress the OS as a file and extract it on the other server. And that's easier than running an installer again. :wink:

Mario

darkcoder · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2003 10:52 pm Post subject:

And BTW, when I said in same position means compiling sources manually. RH cannot compare with Gentoo in terms of maintenance.
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Evangelion · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 6:22 am Post subject:

samokk

laika · n00b Joined: 25 Jul 2002 Posts: 30 Location: Plano, TX

The simple answer to most everyone's complaints here is simple: Maintain your own portage tree. It's quite simple and allows you maintain exact control over your servers. You can place ports/slots in an unstable branch and test these at your leisure, while maintaining what you deem stable for the rest of the network. Yes, version control is the real advantage of Gentoo, even above local compilation.

Black · Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2003 11:35 pm Post subject: Re: Version Control?

gabe · Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 2:53 am Post subject:

That list basically just sums up the generic stereotypes of every major Linux distribution that are floating around every online Linux community.

I have found Gentoo to be quite stable. However, it is not "tried and true." No one has been running Gentoo with an uptime of 3 and a half years on their mission critical server, as I am sure some folks have with Debian stable, RH, and Slack. Until Gentoo gets old enough for this to happen, there will be naysayers.
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Crg · Guru Joined: 29 May 2002 Posts: 345 Location: London

sschlueter · Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2003 7:46 pm Post subject:

gilesjuk · Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 7:04 pm Post subject:

Main problem many distros have is they use very recent versions of GCC. For mission critical work I would not use anything so recent, compiler bugs do happen.

Also a binary distro is easier and faster to update, if you have to update many servers then you don't want them out of action for long.
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Zeitgeist · Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 7:52 pm Post subject:

Linux itself isn't ment for mission critical work. I think that term is overused because everyone has different levels of what it means.

Solaris, HP-UX, AIX etc is for mission critical work, Linux is not ready and will not be for some time.

avenj · Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 11:31 pm Post subject:

JHuber · n00b Joined: 24 Jun 2003 Posts: 33

I have been using linux for ooo aroung 6 years now. i recently moved to gentoo just to try it. also i wanted a distro that was fast, easy to maintain, and as stable as say winxp (which on my windows box is very stable). so far gentoo has fit those requirements. i didnt want an overbloated binary distro for my main system. in short the server in my house runs redhat and my machine runs gentoo. gentoo was not advertised as being the answer to your file, print and application server needs, its a distro for people that want a fast stable gaming machine. at least thats what i see
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mmealman · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 348 Location: Florida

If I want a Linux server setup that a monkey could keep going, I'll use Debian stable with apt pointed to security updates.

That said, our servers at work are migrating to Gentoo.

The compile times are easily gotten around via distcc and frankly in another 3 years when everyone is using 10Ghz machines it'll be a complete non-issue. I personally like to have a lot of control over the software on my servers and Gentoo gives me that control.

But I think the future of Gentoo on the server becoming more mainstream will probably depend on Gentoo projects like Hardened Linux.

JHuber · n00b Joined: 24 Jun 2003 Posts: 33

sorry for the reposts. button didnt seem to be working but apparently it was.
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zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

I encourage everyone to visit the arstechnica.com open forums and read the battles section. Out of all the places that I have searched on the web, I find that one has a very diverse audience of "newbies" "elite dudes" and all types of zealots and techno enthusiasts. I think they have some good threads in the battle section about running servers, render farms, and all types of missions.

Koon · Retired Dev Joined: 10 Dec 2002 Posts: 518

Zeitgeist · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2003 9:40 pm Post subject:

gilesjuk · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2003 10:43 pm Post subject:

avenj · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2003 12:29 am Post subject:

avenj · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2003 12:30 am Post subject:

Koon · Retired Dev Joined: 10 Dec 2002 Posts: 518

On patches and Solaris legendary reliability and uptime :

In both cases a properly-configured machine will last forever. You will have to stop the service to upgrade software and reboot the machine to upgrade kernel, in both cases. Don't believe that Solaris has less patches than any Linux distribution, that's a common misconception. And I've found the upgrade path from version to version to be easier with Gentoo Linux than with ANY other OS. Upgrade to Solaris N from N-1 will bring you a lot of downtime. Keeping Gentoo Linux current will bring you ~0 downtime.

-K

labrador · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2003 Posts: 316

In many server rooms there are a variety of boxes and platforms. And many of them need their CPU cycles for doing their main task. I once developed an email quota checking script in perl that took 1.5 seconds to run on my Sun Ultra 1. Against the same data, this script took 5 minutes to run on a faster mail server machine. The reason why? It was handling over 60,000 spam emails per hour. You can bet that any compiling, or even switching off the service for a few minutes, would cause the upstream data to pile up and mail to be possibly lost.

I understand there is supposed to be a way to compile on machine A for machine B, but if you take into consideration the server room is running many platforms that can't help (Novell, Windows 2000, Solaris, BSD), then you are looking at the picture of having another machine with gentoo just for compiling duties.

Another issue that I think needs consideration is that Gentoo has not been around long enough for ground shifting changes to have occured. All operating systems have points where they cross the line and you need to reinstall almost everything to make it compatible with glibc dependancies, xfree dependancies, etc. When these happen, then we will be in a position to judge how smooth Gentoo's maintenance system really is.