Fedora on the server
Nathan G. Grennan
fedora-list at cygnusx-1.org
Fri Nov 14 03:58:29 UTC 2003
On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 17:50, Dave Oxley wrote:
> My company is buying a new Dell server (2x2.4GHz P4 Xeon, 2Gb RAM, 73Gb
> RAID 1 SCSI) for our production customer facing web site and I have been
> trying to decide on which Linux distribution to use. It needs to run
> Apache, tomcat, sendmail, mysql, php and bind and have minimum downtime.
> We normally have about 25Gb of HTTP traffic a month, but is likely to
> double over the next 12 months. I am not fussed about having paid for
> support (that's my job!)
>
> I was going to choose RH9 (after deciding against Debian), but I just
> found out about Fedora. Is Core 1 suitable for this type of environment?
> Or would you recommend I go with RH9 or Debian.
>
> Cheers.
Unlike other replies, I would recommend Fedora Core 1 for servers. I
recently upgraded 10(4 dns, 1 web, 1 mail, 1 backup, 1 monitoring, 1
misc, 1 dns/web/mail/backup/monitoring) servers from Red Hat 9 to Fedora
Core 1. Did I have problems? Of course. Could it be a little better?
Yes. Did it have bugs similar to those seen with a Red Hat 8.0 to Red
Hat 9 upgrade? Very much so. Is it stable after you get the details
worked out? Yes. Are there quite a few important package upgrades? Yes.
Overall it didn't go as well as I would have liked, but better than I
expected.
My only concern so far is how much of a mess are updates going to
become. Between security updates currently sitting in testing, potential
messy forced package upgrades, and less than a guarantee from Red Hat
that they will make updated packages available for Fedora Core in a
timely fashion, I am a little worried.
My analysis of distributions that leaves me with Fedora Core:
Debian: stable - too old, testing - some packages too old, unstable -
rawhide and still some packages too old
SuSE: Pay for box set, no isos, ftp install a few months after release,
and hence a No Go.
Mandrake: Too buggy, seems like complete lack of QA(Sadly RH9 and FC1
are a little closer to Mandrake than RH7.3 than I would like)
Gentoo: Shows great promise, install process needs a lot of work,
compiling Everything from source isn't what it is cracked up to be, and
still needs a little more security infrastructure.
Red Hat 9: Pretty good, but now out of date and updates going away soon
Red Hat Enterprise 3: Too expensive, too restrictive of a license, and
will in the not too distant future be too out of date.
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