[CLUE-Tech] Managing multiple servers (long)

[Bill Gjestvang]

Dan Harris wrote:

> The idea of rebooting and 
> upgrading from CD's every 6 months is just not appealing to me.

> 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.

You are wise to consider Debian.  I've run both RedHat and Debian on 
servers that handled the ecommerce of several of the world's largest PC 
manufacturers (outsourcing is funny that way).

I have to say, I definitely prefer Debian on servers.  Updates and 
upgrades are so easy.  The only thing you have to reboot for are kernel 
upgrades.  Package handling, historically, is much better than RPMs. 
And no functionality changes happen to the code, so you can run updates 
from cron without fear.  Dunno how good RPM is these days, but I've seen 
it blow away a samba config file without even installing the new version 
of the file (on RedHat 6.x).

Debian's "stable" version doesn't stay as up-to-date as most other 
distros, but the security fixes come very quickly, and for low 
maintenance, you don't want to be changing software versions all the time.

I've run RedHat (4.2-7.3), Debian (2.0+?), Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, 
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD (and Solaris, SCO, and Windows*). 
Currently I'm running Gentoo 1.2 on my desktop, and FreeBSD on my 
firewall, though I'm sometimes tempted to switch both back to Debian. 
Gentoo is nice, too, though.
-- 
Bill Gjestvang

Looking for a good (SAGE Level III) Unix/Linux Sysadmin?
What a coincidence!  My employer is closing their Denver office.
Drop me a line, and I'll send you a resume.