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?"

Comments

Re:Ubuntu

[yamla]

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.

One vote for SuSE...

[badasscat]

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.

Re:SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gentoo

[Talrias]

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.

Now onto my advice. :) 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.

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

Re:SuSE What more could you ask???

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:Debian of course

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.debian.org/consultants/

Re:Debian of course

[direwolf puppy]

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.

Re:Gentoo and Debian the only serious contenders

[lysander]

I, a Debian user, tried Gentoo on two machines. Here were the problems I found:

• Gentoo's idea of security updates is not yet fully developed. There should be a logical step between "this is a security problem" and "ooh, here is a new version". glsa-check needs to work in concert with portage, rather than as an afterthought. This will get better.
• Gentoo's build process doesn't include sensible FEATURES flags by default. In particular, collision-protect, maketest, sandbox, userpriv, and usersandbox really need to be on. I don't want to be building as root. I sure as hell want software to run its own tests to make sure it works (especially if I were trying crazy optimization flags, which I wasn't). And collision-protect, to make sure that packages weren't overwriting other packages' files, seems like a bright idea as well -- except that it doesn't work. I have to turn it off every other week to 'emerge world' for updates. It needs to work, and it needs to be on by default.

Re:Debian of course

[kinema]

Actually if you are looking for a good support option for Debian (or any other distro for that mater) check out Progeny

Not Gentoo

[Drakino]

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.

Re:Personally...

[opkool]

Yes, Mandrake is pretty good:
* 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 + /etc
* 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