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Which Linux for Professional Admins?
LazloToth asks: "Short and sweet: with so many distributions of Linux to choose from, and so many of them good to excellent, which Linux delivers the best balance of stability, high-level support options, security, rapid updates, and ease of administration? If an admin wants to standardize on one Linux distribution and have the best of all worlds on everything from file-and-print servers to database boxes, what, in the experience of the Slashdot pros, is that Holy Grail of Linuxes - - the one that does it all while also making upper management feel warm and fuzzy?"
I agree, though I still prefer Debian itself for servers which will not run any GUI at all. But then, I tend to be fairly conservative in my distributions for servers.
I tried FreeBSD but gave it up. The main problem was that it does not run the 4.x versions of VMWare, unfortunately still a requirement for me. However, I also found that Debian did a better job managing configuration files.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I'm gonna give my vote to SuSE... the ease and speed of updates is one reason I've stuck with it, after giving up on Mandrake and Red Hat/Fedora. YAST2 (the built-in setup utility) is just such an easy and powerful tool, and it "just works" - you can set it to auto-update if you want (it sets up a cron job for you if you select this option), but even on manual it will identify critical patches separately from non-critical patches, which makes it easy to pick and choose.
Plus, it's Novell now, so it's owned by a "real company", which may or may not be something your own company/organization is looking for (some business do require some level of centralized accountability and support).
I've also been pleasantly surprised with SuSE 9.2 in other areas - it's the cleanest and easiest-to-use distro out of the box that I've used, with no obvious bugs that I've seen. No reason not to use it, and lots of reasons to use it. YAST2 is a big selling point, in my opinion.
Keep preaching, Faithful!
SuSE
- great administrative tools to support large networks
- rolling out new servers / workstation with auto-yast with pre-installed configuration/software
- YaST - Best configuration tool under the sun for Linux.
- 10+ years experience + now Novell.
Yes, I personally like Gentoo, but I really think this is something you have to test for yourself, like buying a new house or car. You can be recommended, surely, but the best way to choose a new product you want is to test it yourself. Wikipedia's overview/comparison of Linux distros will give you a guide and allow you to make your own choice.
:) The most important aspect of a Linux distro, in my opinion, is the package management system. Ideally you want a system which makes it easy to upgrade, doesn't screw up configuration files, is easy to use, and has a great number of packages available.
Now onto my advice.
For the record, I use Gentoo on my home computer, and Debian on my server (as well as a Windows XP box for gaming).
Chris
aterr - an open source threaded discussion board.
Well he did ask for high level support and stability. SuSE is now owned by Novell so I would say that answers the high level support issue.
For support I would have to put Red Hat and SuSE at the top. I think SuSE has newer stuff than Red Hat "Not counting Fedora". Mandrake is very good but I have no idea how good their enterprise level support is. That may actually depend a lot on where you are. If you are in France Mandrake maybe a clear winner for support. In Germany SuSE may have an advantage.
If one of the BSDs is an option the best supported one is probably OS/X.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
It's my understanding that you can get Debian support through HP. I know you could get per-incident before, and according to this, it looks like they support Debian as well as the "more commercial-friendly" distros.
You rush a Miracle Man, you get rotten miracles - Miracle Max, TPB
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
Actually if you are looking for a good support option for Debian (or any other distro for that mater) check out Progeny
I hate to say this, but after running Gentoo on my home server for a year, it is not enterprise worthy.
Main reason?
Sure, on the surface, Gentoo seems easy to update. Problem is, updates break things. Time and again, I have watched emerge upgrade things, possibly give me important info somewhere in the millions of lines of code it scrolls pointlessly, then I reboot to a service not acting right. This last emerge cycle left me with:
Samba in a broken state. Non protected shares worked, anything else gave access denied. Why? Someone decided to move the default location of smbpasswd and didn't notify me in a way to catch it since I wasn't watching emerge line by line.
Apache was broken. It would start one process and hang. Examining the error log showed a problem in PHP. For some reason, it missed a package that has to be recompiled every time PHP is upgraded.
Postfix has been broken in the past by similar, as well as my imap server. Filing a bug report on one of the changes was simply met with "so, deal with it" basicially.
Gentoo has a lot of hype. Actually using it across 10 servers scares me though. It turns out to be worse then any other distro in the amount of work needed to keep it up to date, since you get to spend time hunting down problems. At lease SuSE was nice enough to generate messages to root about important changes I may need to check on manually.
Yes, Mandrake is pretty good: /etc
* Mandrake is Linux, as it is as stable as all other Linux distros
* includes recent versions of software
* easy administration: point-and-click interfaces (with text versions using ncurses) plus the classic ssh + vi +
* company commited to GPL Mandrake golden rules
* LSB-compliant (Linux Standard Base)
* The company is making money (the company will be here for a long time)
* 2 main versions
- regular version (including gratis download edition)
- corporate edition (including support 24x7 and all that jazz)
And, oh, yeah, Mandrake has a native apt-get like tool called urpmi, with both GUI and text interfaces.
Peace
Now, it's very likely that the above poster upgraded his config files blindly and this is what messed up his installation, FYI config files in Gentoo aren't automatically overwritten, you're supposed to "merge" / manage them, and the process isn't very simple.
So, what to run in Production? Ideally you roll your own to production, Gentoo makes a great base system, trim it down to minimal files you need to do what your server needs, and then lock down all permissions. Ideally your production server will be as tight as it can be and still do its job. So keep a "master/build" server that has all your development files on it, and then a "production" server that only has what's needed to run on it. Make images of your production, and update by updating the master server, then the test production servers then the production servers. If you're running yum/emerge/urpmi/etc on a live production server you're opening yourself up for many risks.
Oh, it's hard to go wrong putting FreeBSD into production also, too bad it's
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
You do realize that there are three distinct flavours of Debian -- well, four, actually -- with varying policies on updates?
Debian stable is enterprise grade. Bugs and security fixes are backported, very slow upgrade cycle (typically 2 to 3 years), extensive testing. It is, in my experience, the only truly stable (in the tradition of Solaris and BSD) Linux distribution. It's great in an enterprise environment because you don't need to upgrade it frequently, and the Debian security team provides security patches that don't screw your system up -- you can configure apt to download and install security updates immediately in the background. Debian stable is the server you put in the corner and forget about. It'll run forever.
Then, there's Debian testing, which will eventually become the next stable. For most people who don't need the very latest software (especially GUI environments) but who do want more frequent updates, testing is ideal. It's not much less stable than Debian stable, much more up to date, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks constantly (like Gentoo).
Debian unstable, despite its name, is actually quite stable -- I rarely have any problems with it. It's good for a desktop machine when you want the latest and the greatest, and are willing to spend some time updating the machine (because you'll need to do it frequently).
Those are the big three that people run. There is a fourth: Debian experimental. This contains packages that haven't made it into unstable yet, usually because they have bugs or other problems. I don't know anyone (other than clueless noobs) that would try to run experimental -- what's much more typical is to run unstable and pick occasional experimental packages out by hand.
People that talk about how far behind Debian is usually only use stable, which is the default install -- but upgrading to testing or unstable is trivial (ie, one command). Understand that for enterprise servers, new is not the same as good. Take a look at Solaris and see how old a lot of the included software is -- that's because you're supposed to configure Solaris (and most servers) to do what you want and forget about them. Debian follows this model. Stable is amazingly stable.
The only real issue (as some other posters pointed out) is that many commercial vendors only support stuff like RHEL and SuSE, which ties your hands sometimes. But in other situations, Debian Stable beats the pants off of both of those offerings in terms of stability -- they never fail (well, almost -- x86 hardware is flaky, after all, but that's not Debian's fault).