On 12/1/2009 9:09 AM, John wrote:
Fedora - a little too dynamic for use as a server. This is to be
expected as it is a development system which I don't think is aimed at a
production like environment, plus the latest release seems very desktop
oriented.
FC supposedly changes too much. I might use it on a test box, but never
as anything close to a production server. But hell, our first Linux
servers were Gentoo based and we ran with them for the first two years
of testing the waters. (Prior to that we were a Novell NetWare /
Windows Server / Solaris shop. Now we're down to just Linux & Windows.)
Centos 5.4 - while it looks like a good choice, there has been some
political infighting going on recently which makes us a little nervous
about its future. In addition we have found that a number of the core
packages we wish to use are out of date (postfix, dovecot, amavisd-new
among them).
There are two ways to use CentOS/RHEL. One is to stick only with the
binary-compatible RPMs (i.e. the [base] & [updates] repositories). In
which case you're only going to get security fixes that Red Hat has
backported into the versions that were there at release. Since RHEL 5
is getting a bit long in the tooth, that often means older versions of
packages that are missing newer features.
However, you can also choose to pull selective packages from other
repositories like ATRPMs or RPMForge. At that point, you're no longer
binary compatible with RHEL 5, but for the most part it doesn't matter.
This is what most shops end up doing, they use as much as possible
from the base/update repositories and only pull in specific packages
from the 3rd party repo's.
Personally, we chose CentOS for a bunch of reasons:
- it closely tracks RHEL
- books/training on RHEL 5 generally apply to CentOS 5
- migrating from CentOS 5 to RHEL 5 is a logical progression
- if I have to bring in a consultant, it's easy to find those who are
familiar with RHEL
- I consider RHEL to be the gold standard of server-side Linux
We're currently running CentOS 5 w/ postfix, dovecot, clamav-milter,
amavisd-new, spf policy daemon, spamassassin and squirrelmail.
I'm not overly concerned with the infighting that took place over the
summer. It was worrying at the time, but seems to have been properly
resolved in the following months. And even if CentOS did go belly-up,
we'd simply take our knowledge and migrate fully to RHEL. Which, in
terms of worst-case scenarios is not all that bad.
Ubuntu 9.10 Server edition - I am not sure what to say here. While at
first glance it seems to be an ideal solution a, free server
distribution with a Canonical backing it up. However, the setup of some
packages seems to us "odd", overly complicated and arbitrary.
Ubuntu LTS would probably be my 2nd choice, tied with openSUSE. I
strongly considered SUSE back when I was debating what to replace Gentoo
with. There's also Debian and a handful of others.
openSUSE - not tied, but some concerns over the Novel /Microsoft deal.
