Linux Distro?

[Martin_Hell]

Hi guys,

I'm running a hosting company and after some tries with different Linux Distros we've come to the conclusion that CentOS works best for us and is the most reliable one in our opinion.

But i'm interested in what Distro you guys are using on your own servers. Please explain why you've choosen the distro and if you've tried any others before.

Thanks,

[Borbus]

Debian. I switched from CentOS to Debian and never looked back! What about CentOS do you find attractive?

[Kreuger]

I've never tried CentOS but I used Debian for a home server before and it was great, very stable and flexible to what I needed.

[night_stalker_z]

Debian if it's for a server.

[Martin_Hell]

Debian. I switched from CentOS to Debian and never looked back! What about CentOS do you find attractive?

I find CentOS attractive because it's almost never a problem with it, infact i can't remember having any problems with CentOS. It's very stable and our load is very low all the time. We are also hosting VPS's and most of them are running on and with CentOS and our customers are very positive to CentOS so far.

[Borbus]

Well I have found them to be equally stable. I've never seen either of them crash and they've both done hundreds of days of uptime no problem. I just prefer apt to rpm, though. I run a personal dedi box which I do all kinds of stuff on that you'd never do on a production web server. I found Debian's massive library of packages to be most beneficial.

But if you're quite happy with what you have running on CentOS, I don't there is any point switching to and other GNU/Linux distribution. I would recommend trying out FreeBSD or NetBSD, though. If uptime is important to you then these can beat any GNU/Linux distro (not necessarily for stability, but Linux gets security patches every few weeks most of the time which require a reboot of a GNU/Linux box, the BSD kernels haven't been patched in ages).

[markwolfe Veteran]

...

I just prefer apt to rpm, though.

...

Argh!

I was just mindlessly browsing when a disturbance arose within me. Someone, somewhere, had just stomped on my "pet peeve" button! :p

On the serious side, I'd like to point out that you are comparing a package manager to a file format. :wacko:

Now, making a comparison of yum install php versus apt-get install php can be debated. Both work perfectly well.

Most people unfairly hang the albatross around the neck of "RPM" because they have tried to manually install individual rpm files without a package manager, and found that some files have certain dependencies. In fact, Debian DEB files have the same dependency requirements. The DEB or RPM file contain references to other packages that are required. YUM and other such managers handle these in RPM-world, just as APT handles these in DEB-world.

[Martin_Hell]

I'm not thinking of changing. But it's always interesting to know what other people are using and what they think.

I've heard that FreeBSD is quite good and i might try it sometime but not at the moment. Thanks for the view though:)

[Borbus]

Argh!

I was just mindlessly browsing when a disturbance arose within me. Someone, somewhere, had just stomped on my "pet peeve" button! :p

On the serious side, I'd like to point out that you are comparing a package manager to a file format. :wacko:

Now, making a comparison of yum install php versus apt-get install php can be debated. Both work perfectly well.

Most people unfairly hang the albatross around the neck of "RPM" because they have tried to manually install individual rpm files without a package manager, and found that some files have certain dependencies. In fact, Debian DEB files have the same dependency requirements. The DEB or RPM file contain references to other packages that are required. YUM and other such managers handle these in RPM-world, just as APT handles these in DEB-world.

apt and rpm are both package management systems. I wasn't comparing apt-get to yum... I used yum and I don't have a problem with it. I'm quite used to installing packages from source and finding the dependencies myself but if I'm going to use package management I would use apt because I've never had a problem with it, whereas I have had problems with rpm. It's also proven itself to be extremely stable to me (like that time when I accidentally removed every single package on a ubuntu system and managed to restore them all).

[markwolfe Veteran]

apt/aptitude/apt-get is a package management system.

rpm is a basic installer.

Please understand that you are NOT comparing like items.

The Debian equivalent to "rpm" is "dpkg". And I bet you would never dream of managing a system by installing individual deb files with dpkg. Yet people have no problem slagging rpm files because they tried directly working with them using the rpm command.

dpkg/rpm are an a totally different level than apt/yum

You seem to think that the "rpm" command is the Red Hat (and derivatives) equivalent to apt. It is not.

[Borbus]

Oh yes, you are right. Sorry.

I actually haven't ever used rpm by itself, but I have used dpkg, I just forgot about it. It is funny how easy it is to forget the foundation when you are so used to working with higher level stuff.

So I suppose what I mean is I prefer apt to all of the rpm based package managers like yum. And I dunno how easy it would have been to restore every single package using yum by looking through the rpm logs, but it wasn't much of a pain with dpkg and apt.

[bsquirle]

CentOS here.

Stable, good release cycle.

Relation with Red Hat and thus easier to find packages & information on the internet.

& Support through the RH link, when thing get fixed in RH, these changes will also come to CentOS.

Yum is a very nice package manager, couldn't live without it. It will do most of your package jobs and can be easily expanded with other mirrors.

And RH is the base for XenServer, so I don't have to know 2 different systems.

FreeBSD, not to much experience, and for the things I tried, did not get along with it to well.

Guess I'm too used to using Linux.

Debian

What is it that attracts you to this distro?

Personally, yum can take over the functions of apt.

Stability and uptime should be equal, they use the same kernel & software.

I only had the impression the release cycle was either a bit to short (some to recent packages) or to long.

(But that could be an impression, I never had the chance to really compare CentOS and Debian release cycles.)

I've heard good things about Debian, but for everything I hear there's an option on CentOS.

(Not that CentOS is the better distro, it's at the moment just the better choice for me, but that ofc can change.)

Suse

Couldn't let go of the GUI on that one, which is not a good thing for a server, so I dropped it :-)

Gentoo

Tried it, no way that I will host a production server on that.

(These are personal opinions.)

[Kurse]

Hopefully people realize that CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just built, packaged, and unbranded by the CentOS team instead. The source of both is the same...RedHat.

Edited July 14, 2008 by Kurse

[dmd3x]

On the surface, I am not really impressed with CentOS. It needs a name change and a graphics design overhall. It looks and sounds cheap.

But underneath, man it is rock solid, enterprise grade, and truly excellent.

I prefer FreeBSD UNIX (FreeNAS in particular) for file servers, web servers I always use some type of Linux.

[39 Thieves]

FreeBSD or OpenSolaris

[Brian M. Veteran]

All of my linux servers run CentOS.

I just found it to be the most stable and requiring less "out of the box" work in order to get it running perfectly. My old home server based on Debian was an absolute nightmare (although I have a sneaky suspicion there was some faulty RAM involved somewhere).

[Mike]

slackware where possible, failing that, centos for me

[thealexweb]

FreeBSD is always dubbed a good and secure.

[Vlad]

I'll toss my hat in the CentOS/RHEL pile. RH has their **** together and it shows, even when you use downstream distributions such as CentOS or ScientificLinux. Lots of documentation, lots of support from commercial software vendors, and a clear path of future technology releases by the Fedora project.

RHEL's gui/curses tools to quickly configure services are a blessing, and their kickstart installation system can allow you to rapidly deploy new systems in minutes. I've used kickstart with great success to deploy new nodes or reinstall existing nodes as needed - reinstallation is often a faster solution than problem diagnosis AND resolution. I can't recommend RHEL enough in a cluster/multimachine environment.

If you're just deploying a single machine however, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even Gentoo are all good alternatives. Since you're running a hosting company, I'd say your only real choice is Centos/RHEL.

[h3xis]

I'll toss my hat in the CentOS/RHEL pile. RH has their **** together and it shows, even when you use downstream distributions such as CentOS or ScientificLinux. Lots of documentation, lots of support from commercial software vendors, and a clear path of future technology releases by the Fedora project.

RHEL's gui/curses tools to quickly configure services are a blessing, and their kickstart installation system can allow you to rapidly deploy new systems in minutes. I've used kickstart with great success to deploy new nodes or reinstall existing nodes as needed - reinstallation is often a faster solution than problem diagnosis AND resolution. I can't recommend RHEL enough in a cluster/multimachine environment.

If you're just deploying a single machine however, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even Gentoo are all good alternatives. Since you're running a hosting company, I'd say your only real choice is Centos/RHEL.

Gentoo a good server alternative? :|

[Vlad]

Gentoo a good server alternative? :|

Sure, if you know what you're doing, it's a fine server. You just don't use any crazy optimizations or bleeding edge software, you stick to the stable branch, sane cflags, and deploy a minimal amount of software to meet your needs. Most importantly, you don't aggressively deploy updates - but if you're doing real production work you don't hastily deploy updates anyways. When you need a specialized system configuration, Gentoo *is* a viable alternative. You just have to know what you're doing. Obviously if you're going to deploy a cluster of computers or run a multi-user system you should stick to something a little more mainstream.

Linux is just a tool, and sometimes Gentoo is the right tool for the job.

[h3xis]

Sure, if you know what you're doing, it's a fine server. You just don't use any crazy optimizations or bleeding edge software, you stick to the stable branch, sane cflags, and deploy a minimal amount of software to meet your needs. Most importantly, you don't aggressively deploy updates - but if you're doing real production work you don't hastily deploy updates anyways. When you need a specialized system configuration, Gentoo *is* a viable alternative. You just have to know what you're doing. Obviously if you're going to deploy a cluster of computers or run a multi-user system you should stick to something a little more mainstream.

Linux is just a tool, and sometimes Gentoo is the right tool for the job.

Why go through all the trouble of doing all of that when you could just use Debian or Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora? I mean, I guess it's cool and all if someone wants to use it but it just seems unnecessary. I can't imagine it would be any more better at being specialized than any other distro if you know what you're doing.

[Fred Derf Veteran]

In terms of RPM vs DEB:

There is something to be said of the quality of the repositories. Debian has a very complete list that is divided into stable (over a year old), testing (within the last few months) and unstable (within the last few weeks) branches.

There are also some advantages in apt over yum but a lot of it comes down to personal preference and personal experience. I would certainly lead someone towards the deb/apt side of things than the rpm/yum world.

[Vlad]

Why go through all the trouble of doing all of that when you could just use Debian or Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora? I mean, I guess it's cool and all if someone wants to use it but it just seems unnecessary. I can't imagine it would be any more better at being specialized than any other distro if you know what you're doing.

Which is why I pointed out RHEL/CentOS in the first place. Obviously if you know RHEL better than you know something like Slack or Gentoo or Debian and aren't willing to learn those then you should use RHEL. If you're comfortable with compiling stuff by hand that isn't included in these distros/readily available in repos then go for it. I've found Gentoo to be more flexible in some, albeit extreme, cases, and I've leveraged my knowledge to that end. The OP asked for alternatives and I simply suggested one. Why are you getting so defensive about this?

[h3xis]

Which is why I pointed out RHEL/CentOS in the first place. Obviously if you know RHEL better than you know something like Slack or Gentoo or Debian and aren't willing to learn those then you should use RHEL. If you're comfortable with compiling stuff by hand that isn't included in these distros/readily available in repos then go for it. I've found Gentoo to be more flexible in some, albeit extreme, cases, and I've leveraged my knowledge to that end. The OP asked for alternatives and I simply suggested one. Why are you getting so defensive about this?

I'm not getting defensive at all. It's just nobody ever suggests Gentoo as a good alternative as a server distro so I'm curious to know why you think so. No need to get touchy :p