[CLUE-Tech] Managing multiple servers (long)

[Dan Harris]

I wanted to get some advice from others here on distro suggestions, 
hopefully without causing an all-out distro war. But we're all adults 
here, right?

Anyway, here's my scenario:

I cut my teeth on Linux with Redhat 5.2 and have just stuck with RH ever 
since.  RPM was a really nice feature.

Then, as I started using more and more cutting-edge apps, I found myself 
installing more things from source.  Sometimes, because that was the 
only available form, sometimes because the rpm's were stale.  Soon, I 
started having problems with RPMs like "libXYZ requires libABC, lib123, 
libCRX, libblahblah" errors, aka "dependency hell".  I was thinking 
"what the hell?  If you know you need them, go get them already!".  So I 
learned about up2date and RHN.  So I tried running up2date several times 
  but was denied because of high-demand on their servers.

Fast forward a few years- I now manage 8 redhat servers that are all 
mission-critical systems.  Over the last few days I've realized that 
every system is a completely different animal, with different versions 
of everything, including the distro itself.  The idea of rebooting and 
upgrading from CD's every 6 months is just not appealing to me.  I have 
very little time to play sysadmin any more, nor the money to hire 
someone to be dedicated to this task.  I need to spend as much time as 
possible writing code, not applying patches and recompiling.

I was so frustrated with a dependency problem last night that I was 
ready to dump redhat completely.  So I started looking around at other 
distros.  Debian of course has apt, which sounded really appealing since 
it would handle dependencies automatically.  But I hadn't heard of 
anyone using debian in a 'corporate' environment yet.

Then, I looked into paying the $60/yr per system to subscribe to the 
'basic' redhat network.  The idea of letting up2date run willy-nilly on 
my system, updating what it deems necessary is a bit scary for me.  I 
dont trust that it's not going to overwrite something that I carefully 
"configured --with-one-million-custom-options" with a 'default' install.

Am I just being paranoid?  Should I bite the bullet and succumb to the 
'rpm way or no way' approach of redhat?  Or, is there a better distro 
out there to do what I want?

I'd really like some advice here from people who have been faced with 
the problem of managing multiple servers (i expect to be up to 20 
servers within the next two years).

Thanks!