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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?"
Hands down. Its debian, its got support, and we're going to see a new release every six months until they run out of cash. :)
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Don't you think that if there was a holy grail of Linux distros, that there would be more then one Linux distro? If people agreed on what you asked, there would be less distros to choose from, unfortunately all of them have their downsides, thus listen to what everyone says about their favorite distro, and do what I do, choose Slack. Oh you want a reason? How about "'caus"
Honestly I would choose slack or debian (different reasons for each) and then boot off network, change one image you change them all... then have box specific apps on the local hard drive etc. BTW: get a lot of ram
RedHat and SuSE both have software and hardware vendor support. You might find that companies with an existing relationship with Novell (or even a nostalgic one) will tend towards SuSE, but like in the days decades ago when "Nobody got fired for buying IBM", you'd probably have your best defense against a pink slip with RedHat.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
And answers like this (I'm not arguing the point, I think it's valid) are why Linux has made few inroads on corporate desktops. PHB's want one answer to all of their IT problems. Not "Well it depends, we could use Distro A, but Joe likes Distro B better. Although Distro C has better support..." then they end up with Windows XP because there is no "It just works." answer for Linux.
No sig for you!!
I work for a fortune 500 company as a Tech. (Only tech for california now, we've been completely outsourced, the only reason they keep me around is because im not afraid of spending my weekend running adaware ;)
Anywho, our marketing support department uses several high end production printers nearly 24/7, so stability is key. Last year the printers were hooked up to each members Windows Machine. (No, I didn't set this up, and technicly im not supposed to change it) But recently with increesed adware on the marketing support's computers (i should say one of them, shes an idoit.. anyways) and printers going 'down' due to this single person, the office manager came to me and asked what he could do to stop this from happening. (It has happened almost 10 times this year alone). So i suggested Installing a linux box to handle all the printers.
Needless to say, he was extremely skeptical. (Having computer-phobia) So i took another non-priority department, and set them up the way i wanted to see marketing support setup. A few days later, he wanted to see how it worked, so i showed him. At the time, i only had my mandrake cds on me, so i used it. He was extremely impressed about how 'cool' it looked and felt. It wasnt in his words.. 'blocky' (i assume he meant text based) I showed him around the system in general (not a thing about printing though heh) and he fell in love with it after i explained how there isnt any 'adware/spyware' in Linux {At least i dont think there is.. linus help us if the day comes} and how linux itself very rarely crashes. Today i just finished installing Mandrake 10 on his main computer, tomarrow i get to begin converting marketing support.
Anyways, Mandrake has always been my personal favorite for computer-newbies/Phobic people, mostly because the install, general 'mandrakness' feel of the system isnt much like tradtional linux . IMHO, its much more graphical in nature, and other more 'common-office-type' people can easily get accustomed to the enviroment.
Since your a system admin, also take into account that training new people to work on the new systems may/might/will be easier than on another distro. You also never know if your boss wants to poke around someday, its always nice to let them have their fun.
My suggestion for linux: Mandrake
My Suggestion in general: FreeBSD
FreeBSD however is a whole differnt story =)
I like Gentoo. All my home machines and one of my work machines runs on Gentoo. Nor would I dismiss out of hand the idea of running Gentoo on a server.
However...
As an administrator, I'm not particularly intrested in a distribution that will "teach me the inner workings of Linux". Stability and predictability are lots more important for production machines.
The new servers I'm putting on line now are all running Debian, and I'll be switching some old RH9 servers to Debian as I get the time to do that.
Someone earlier emphasized package management as a prime requirement for easy administration. Debian does that very well. Gentoo is also pretty good, except when things break, which does happen. I see Debian as more stable, Gentoo as more configurable. For a desktop, I'd choose Gentoo, but so far I'm leaning to Debian in the server room.
My biggest objection to most of the commercial distributions is that they are far too "versioned". If old versions had security updates forever, that'd be fine, but having to do a disruptive upgrade every few years on running servers just because there are no more security updates on the running version is quite inconvenient. This is one place where Gentoo really shines, being essentially "versionless". Debian makes version shifting relatively simple, so I'm comfortable with the relatively infrequent version bumps I'm likely to see.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Standard. Maybe a bit above due to easy, high customizablity.
You can always get hardened gentoo if you need that extra level of security...
Yeah really. Asking Slashdot users which Linux to use will produce more results than asking google.
Maybe not. Re-read the question again, and what he's really asking is what makes managers feel warm and fuzzy.
Nothing makes my managers cream in their jeans more than the words "vendor support". That alone is what drives people toward other Operating Systems (Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, Windows).
If my business was just switching to Linux, and they wanted the best, my immediate suggestion would be Redhat. It's been around for years. It's a publically traded company (which says something about it's stability), and it puts together a widely supported and recognized operating system (AS 2.1 and RHEL 3.0). In addition, it's going to run most of the proprietary database software (including Oracle and Sybase), and just about every piece of open source software you might need for running a business is included on the distro CDs.
I've been a Redhat user since 1998. I love RH 7.2, but think every free distribution since then has sucked. Which is why I have begun switching to Gentoo for my desktop. It takes awhile to compile everything, but it seems like it's gotten around dependancy hell.
In general, Redhat for business and critical systems, Gentoo for SA workstations.
Im going to have to run with SUSE here.
We mainly use redhat/fedora here, and I do have to say that all of the things that I've "fought" with redhat to get working properly "just work" right out of the box with SUSE.
Scenario:
I wanted to unify all logins across linux/windows machines on my companies user network.
We were running an NT4 domain controller and using local passwd authentication for all linux servers/workstations.
The natural solution to this was to set up an ldap server, have all the linux machines authenticate off it, and then replace the NT4 domain that would authenticate off the same ldap database. While we're at it, we thought we should enable fine grained access control lists for local filesystems, the samba interface, oh, and they should work over NFS as well. (acl.bestbits.at)
After about 2 months with redhat battling compilation issues, config issues, library issues, and other issues, rpm issues, and a bottle of aprin. I finally managed to get an openldap server up and running, with samba3 authenticating against it in a test environment.
Another month later, I got the ACLs working.
I about kicked myself in the head when, upon evaluating SLES9, I found that during installation it acually gave me an option to use ldap as the main authentication mechanism. Also, it has a built in, YAST controlled CA magement system, replacing all the scripts that I had written to handle ssl certificates.
I recreated my entire test environent in under an hour using SLES9.
On the client end, Suse 9.2 "just works" in every imaginable way. The only things I had to install myself for workstations were enigmail and slocate.
To this day, I still have a few redhat machines that blow up when trying to use ldap/ssl, but everything suse has worked perfectly the first time.
Naturally, it comes with a bunch of databases, a kickass update mechanism (yast), an automated setup tool (autoyast), and now has very nice support from the nice folks over at novell.
On the flip side, I would probably still use redhat for "mission critical" things, as redhats QA proccess is insane. You wont get the nice new extras, but thats because the bleeding edge tends to be unstable.
Also, another thing that needs to be thought about is "googleability." Googleability is a measure of how quickly you can find your problem, then an answer to it, using google. Redhat has much higher googleability that Suse, or any other linux distro for that matter (except perhaps debian), but to be fair, Suse (from my brief experience) tends to have less problems.
In conclusion: Suse for your internal network/workstations/etc. Redhat for your webservers and other things that should have obscene uptimes.
-s