Gentoo as a Production OS

[i92guboj]

Of course, what c0d3g33k is completely right. You have no right to be "enraged" at all in any case. Gentoo devs are volunteers who sacrifice their spare time to make your life better.

[alistair]

[steveL]

[nixnut]

merged above nine posts here.
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[-Craig-]

I DO use Gentoo in a production environment (for about ~1 year now) and did not get into trouble (yet? ).

My tips:
- use "normal" cflags
- have minimal USE Flags
- use a "Test-Box" (which can be a VMWare Installation) for updates
- if the updates are ok on the "Test-Box", emerge them on the other boxes
- use a portage mirror so that every box has the same portage version
- you really want to keep your boxes' configurations the same. Don't go mad and change USE-Flags etc. on one of them.
- try your best to keep a homogenic environment; you really don't want to search for the reason why packet xy worked on all, but one of your servers...

I'd say it depends on the purpose of the system if you can use it in a production environment; if it's a simple mysql/apache/php system, it would be a good idea, BUT if you're stuck to special versions of them (because your applications does not work with newer ones), you should compile manually under /opt.
It always depends on what you want to do with your system.

[Dagger]

I've been using gentoo in production live environment for last year.

tips are similar as others:

- stable ARCH.
- normal CFLAGS
- minimal global USE flags. (only add USE flag when I require functionality in packages.use)
- scheduled monthly updates
- test machine for all new packages (VM for stable arch testing before updates and other other machine for insanely experimental packages - mainly SVN builds, which are hardly ever in portage anyway)
- daily configuration backups
- daily crucial data backups


In hosting datacenters I mainly use RHEL and Debian (although personally I would prefer to use Gentoo)

Gentoo isn't the easiest to maintain system ever as much depends on you, where in other (read binary) distributions this work (testing, configuring) is done by someone else.

The main advantage of Gentoo is flexibility and well "It works for me" (TM)
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[Eckos]

I find Gentoo to be as stable as the next distro imho. I find myself breaking a distro that uses rpm's and what else package system more than I have with Gentoo. Gentoo is more up to date with 75% maybe less or more than the other ones. And that's what matter's to most to me. I don't run a stable machine. I might run into a few problems here and there. But i'm always able to fix them with this awesome community. Try that with some other distros. Gentoo is "my rules, my way"(TM). And it gives me more comfort. Can't say that with Ubuntu or Suse.

[andreas_st]

[djinnZ]

The only thing I find problematic with gentoo is the long time to full update the system after due to dependancy breaks.
By example if in an update the tiff or jpeg library will be merged on the system and I must stop cups for the time to complete the emerge world, running revdep-rebuild and re-emerging cups and ghostscript.
The easiest solution for me is to have a chroot (on a dedicated HD) to build all the needed binary packages. So I can update the system weekly or every day without any problem (but my server is not 24h for day up). Having a dedicated test machine can only be better but is not an obbige.
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[red-wolf76]