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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?"
This answer was specifically optimized for your question.
Hurd. Master of OS's.
This should be fun to watch.
I say debian. Choose stable and use apt-get for updating. Yup Debian
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
Slackware of course. :-)
KISS all the way
It's the administrator, not the distribution that matters the most. A different administrator might like a different system. There is no absolute objective "good".
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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
SuSE, SuSE, SuSE...
Simple & Easy - more than you could ask...
Gentoo All the way. nuff said
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 don't know. My management just feels fuzzy.
i'm sure compiling X.org for 4 days would impress the manager..
I recommend Mandrake with a support license. Frequent updates, rpm based for easy package updation (bwahaha, updation), it's gotten press with being traded publicly now, so it may trigger PHB's to pull a "hey, I read about them in (insert CIO style dummy mag here)".
But that's just me.
How Jaded Are You?
If you are a professional admin, shouldn't you already know what's best?
------
insert sig here,here, and here
> which Linux delivers the best balance of
> stability, high-level support options, security,
> rapid updates, and ease of administration
2.4
echo "getuid(){return 0;}" > e.c; gcc -shared -o e.so e.c; LD_PRELOAD=./e.so sh
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
You mean there are *other* distros?
I thought that was just an myth...
Never trust a programmer holding a screw driver!
We run SuSe over a cluster of several hundred servers. Extremely easy to deploy, very secure out of the box and it supports auto-updates which saves us a world of admin time.
Base install w/apache, mysql and mod_backhand takes about thirty minutes to online.
I was about to say the same thing - although AFAIK we're missing one of the points hes looking for:
.
stability - Check
security - Check
rapid updates - Check
ease of administration - Check
high-level support options - No check
I don't consider google and usenet high level support options. Im sure someone knows of a commercial outfit that will do pay-for-play deb support - so please, chime in . .
Otherwise go debian!
Read no further. Without having to read the reast of these posts; you can get a sense of what is to come here, and hopefully avoid some painful reading:
"I like A".
"I like B".
"A sucks and so does your mom".
PS. Apt-get rules.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Isn't this more of a religious question than a technical one?
What is best for your everything might be best than what is best for my everything.
If I my organization does a, b, and c and requires d, e, and f, then Linux Distro G is best for me. But if you do x, y, and z and need u, v, and w, then Linux Distro T is probably better for you.
There is no _one_ answer.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
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.
actually - a good admin is able to handle any distribution.
That's what makes the difference between the "called" admins - and the real ones.
If you know how a Linux System works - you can administrate any system, e.g. any Distribution.
that's what I use and I love it as both server and desktop.
Doesn't the question hinge around the hardware vendor certifying a particular distro? I mean, Debian or Gentoo may be great, but it is not so good when you can't get a driver for a Fibre Channel card for your HP StorageWorks SAN, or if you do manage to get one going, your configuration is unsupported (ie no regression testing performed by the vendor).
> the best balance of stability, high-level support options, security, rapid updates, and ease of administration
Surely Gentoo delivers the best balance of the above. The only real disadvantage is compilation time, but that can be negated by nice'ing long emerges overnight.
Now, if stability and security are paramount I would go with Debian stable. But Gentoo is light years ahead of all contenders in the rapid updates department.
The unofficial
I would prefer debian for administration, but it's more of a religous preference than one based on technical merits.
As a system administrator and IS manager in a mostly windows environment, I have found Debian to be the most reliable and easy to maintain. The APT system makes security and package upgrades (and downgrades) considerably easier than any RPM system ever was.
While APT is available on Fedora, I have always found Debian to be well-thought out and reliable, even for a Windows guy like me.
This should be a poll, not an ask slashdot. That way Debian would still win, but you'd be able to tell without reading 10^8 responses.
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.
Try this time with quotes.
:)
Results 1 - 23 of 23 for "which distribution of linux should i use". (0.06 seconds).
There ya go.
This thread really warms the hearts of Windows serfs. It illustrates the recursive fractal division of the Linux community that keeps Linux from having a truly coherent desktop offering.
We can't even select the right root here. Then subdivide recursively by window manager, application programming model, metadata repository, etc. etc. Could a community be more divided?
It's Unix all over again, people, just with less funding.
Word to the wise: stop starting new desktop "initiatives." Fold your project (and someone elses) into an existing development thread. Suppress your NIBMP (not invented by me personally.)
Do you really want to spend the first decade of the 21st century achieving parity with Windows XP, or do you want to deliver something truly new? Free crap is still crap.
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
If he has RHAT stock, RHAT.
If your CEO is rich enough to be a limited partner in any of Azeo Ventures (Lazard Group), ABN AMRO, Viventures, AXA Placement Innovation or OFIVM's VC funds: Mandrake - since those VCs invested in MandrakeSoft.
There's so many options and so many 'ways of doing things' with Linux and EVERYBODY knows they are right and everyone else is wrong or simply misguided...
Gentoo Linux users will proclaim that their distro is simply the best and the only option to go for. However, you still have a steep learning and a long setup time for building a system, which requires more then just passing knowledge of Linux, which isn't bad. It just isn't necesarily conducive to the 'standard' corporate environment. (My opinion may not match your own.)
Red Hat Linux is supported by a long standing team of Linux Engineers that has built itself around supporting the Enterprise computing environment, which makes it a good choice for such environments.
Mandrake Linux has made a name of itself for desktop use, mostly for consumer end-users, although they are working hard at making inroads to the corporate enterprise environment.
SuSe Linux/Novell is a long standing corporate computing environment corporation that should be able to provide support that equals or surpasses Red Hat. Of course, that would depend upon who you talk to.
Beyond that, there are tons of other players in the marketplace that will or won't be here in 6 months to a year.
Honestly, if I was setting up a Corporate Environment to create a standard setup across multiple servers, I would choose either Red Hat or SuSe/Novell. They are widely used distros, they both have easy to use tools, they both have certification programs, which could be used in order to certify that a support team, from the top Admin all the way down to the helpdesk jockey have a certain level of knowledge comensurate with their position as well as knowing the tools for that particular distro.
That's just my opinion anyway.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Not a "linux" distro, but nothing screams "professional admin" more than BSD...
Why, Nipples, the Vulcan distro. It's logically intuitive.
;-)
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
I like Fedora a lot (modulo their strong GNOME leanings) however I don't like it for servers. Fedora is released often so you have very current versions of everything, I like this feature on my workstation. But it's not good for servers, Fedora distributions are obsolete if they're >= 2 releases old. That means that, in order to ensure you're going to get security updates you need to upgrade your distribution about once a year. That's a pain for servers, especially ones that are working just fine.
I prefer Debian for servers, even though I'd never consider using it for a desktop distribution.
In the end though, it just depends on what you want to do with Linux, I guess you'd have to say, "use the best distro for the job." Even though that might not sound very satisfactory to someone getting started with Linux.
At my shop, we have been using CentOS 3 for quite some time now, and are extremely satisfied with it. Now, if you work for a big company that gets off on spending lots of money to make sure they got something tangible, then go for Red Hat Enterprise linux. People like to run their mouths about how disorganized RedHat is etc. Its untrue, at least presently speaking. Yum is an admin's dream come true when it comes to updates. Now, as CentOS 3 is just a recompile of the RedHat Enterprise sources, CentOS has been completely compatible with all that good stuff(TM) that is certified to run on RHEL 3, like oracle, not to mention completely free (as in beer/speech). I would wait until February, when RedHat Enterprise 4 comes out as it will include the 2.6 kernel series and much more up to date software. CentOS will likely build those sources and create CentOS 4 near or around that same time.
CentOS Page
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
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 =)
If ease of administration, stability and security is more important that than latest versions of the latest applications and the ability to use the latest bleeding edge hardware, then the *BSD distributions (e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD) may be the answer. Granted, a fairly good understanding of UNIX will be required, but if you're fairly proficient at adminsitering one or more Linux distributions, then *BSD will be very easy to learn. Even better, the documentation is generally better written, more complete and more up to date than any Linux distribution that I've seen.
This answer may not be what you expect, but then again the question, as posted, deserves a thinking outside the box type of answer. You stated that you want the best of all worlds, and then mention file/printer server and database boxes. It sounds like you're more interested in servers than clients. *BSD is ideal in this regard.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Should I use vi or Emacs?
Which is better... Gnome or KDE?
Should I get a PC or a Macintosh?
Should I have voted for Bush or Kerry?
Who's cooler: pirate or ninja?
It's got the best of linux AND WINDOWS! w00t!
P.S. Made you look.
And, why does not our glisteny little OS-that-could not enter into the conversation here? BSD based, command-line tools, rapid fixes, missing large holes, and able to run just all of the necessary open-source applications, if they aren't already included...
I'm about ready to just move my server in-house using a Mac Mini with OS X Server. It's not like it gets huge amounts of traffic, and less than a grand isn't bad at all. Last time I ran the servers inside, they were Cobalt boxen, which illustrates my level of capability...
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.
.. was that they branded themselves the way they did. The manager who's reluctantly in charge of choosing a linux flavor, will go with what he recognizes. He doesn't have the first clue of what makes a good distro for his business, but he remembers that clever RedHat ad in his last issue of "Ignorant Managers Monthly".
If there's one thing I hate more than distribution zealots... it's people who don't use Slackware! ;P
...well sorta.)
(Yes, that's a joke!
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
GRML is debian based and tailored towards sysadmins. It is console/text centric, and provides a number of security "features". For those still(?) afraid of runlevel 2, there is fluxbox. It is Reaping the benefits of knoppix's hardware detection, debian's repositories/apt-getables, and gutted out KDE and others from knoppix and replaced with MANY console/text based tools. give it a whirl. For the afraid-to-leave-M$, try QEMU and run grml within your current OS. http://grml.org/
crawancon
Actually if you are looking for a good support option for Debian (or any other distro for that mater) check out Progeny
For all the other critera, everyone will have their arguments. But for this one, I think it's Red Hat, hands down.
I'm not saying it's "the best", for whatever technical defintion of "best" we might choose; but I think we're moving toward a situation of "no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
If you want something that doesn't require a subscription, then you may want to use fedora, which is just behind redhat's bug fixes, and a bit more cutting edge with new software.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd give redhat a shot.
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
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
The parent is absolutely right.
And as a competent admin, I choose the distro that don't get in the way, that let me do the things my way. By that aspect alone, LFS would be the best, but it a bit exagerated. (I highly recommend to install it once though, if you are interested in better understanding of the system, it's parts and how they work, from boot to the password prompt and applications. I used it at my machine at home for quite some time.)
I choose Slackware. I used to install everything (after the initial instalation from the distro CD) from source, but it got tedious. Now I use swaret to upgrade the security-related packages. The software more importantly used (in my case: postfix, clamav and spamassassin and squirrelmail) are monitored from freshmeat and upgraded manually as I see fit (some from source code). Other software are not upgraded unless needed (if it works, don't mess with it).
The main source of problem, in all the distributions I tried, is the package system. Ugrading (or, in some cases, even installing new packages) can break the system. Of course when installing from source you also have the risk, but things are more under control if you know what you're doing.
I purchase RedHat licenses for everything that is in the DMZ, or runs software that requires RedHat Enterprise Linux for support (think Oracle Databases).
Then I use Whitebox Linux for everything else. It's pretty much exactly the same as RedHat (you can pick another RHEL rebuild if you want, CentOS and Whitebox Linux are my two favorites). Whitebox can have problems from time to time, because it's a one man show. CentOS looks nice, but it sounds like the mailing lists are used less, and the web boards more for discussion and help (I've never participated, but that's the a complaint I've seen on WhiteBox lists about CentOS). I like e-mail lists for help/support. Call me silly. While web boards are nice for random discussions, I'd much rather review e-mail for technical support (both on the giving and receiving end).
I use that for the desktop. Other then, it's a bit RAM hungry, it's fine for a desktop for most people (the lack of a good MP3 player might bother most, but I play oggs, so I'm good with it). You need more then 128MB of RAM to run OpenOffice on it at a reasonable speed. (I was running a PIII-500 w/ 384MB of RAM and it was acceptable, with a new P4 w/ 128MB of RAM it was unbearably slow running Mozilla and OpenOffice at the same time. I put a 1GB of RAM in and now it's wonderful).
In the end, it means I can run almost exactly the same OS at home that I do at work. It's industrial strength, and all of the expertise I build up using it, is going towards one of the two distro's that all major software vendors support. I don't know of any Suse "rebuilds", otherwise I might recommend those.
Kirby
I mean, linux is linux is linux. Usually the only things that change are:
1) the package system
2) the installer
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
There's no easy answer to such question. In fact, I think there's none. The best Linux choice for a professional admin is the one he knows better. A serious admin knows how to harden any linux distro (if security is a concern) and how to quickly deploy solutions if ease of use is the main choice for linux. If he is truly a professional, he knows how to learn quickly any distro's tool.
If he relies too much on the tools the distro has I'd not call him a true Linux Admin.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
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
tried almost all other distros but in the end its always slack that stays
With so many text editors to choose from, I'd like to know which offers the combination of high-powered text editing features, syntax highlighting and extensibility required of today's demanding editor, while keeping the suits happy. Please include extensive discussions of how much vi beeps and how long it takes Emacs to load.
With so many software licenses available, I'd like to know which offers the high-powered legal mumbo-jumbo and strong ambiguities that are the hallmark of the professionally produced amateur computing project. Please phrase your BSD advocacy in the form of an insult to RMS, and include "Response to a question aksed by demi" in any replies and advertising materials.
Nintendo DS vs PSP, anyone? Anyone?
demi
I use debian myself. But the distro that makes management happy is RedHat.
RedHat is security certified, and oracle certified. Redhat has something like 75% of the enterprise market for linux. Redhat has a real company behind it. To many in the business world, redhat *is* linux.
One of the many basic administration rules applies here: if it isn't broken, don't touch it.
Changing a production system is a dangerous thing to do, and it is one of the benifits of unix systems that, if left alone, they normally manage to keep on working all by themselves. If you have to touch a system people are relying on, check that you are only doing what is necessary, do it carefully, by hand, one package at a time, and be sure to read the useful stuff at the end of the emerge.
"emerge world" is for people on the cutting edge, "emerge -p <package-i-really-need-to-update>" is for production servers. It's a shame that because both are supported, some people get misled and use the wrong one, in a cron job, without considering if that is really the most suitable thing to do.
I do consider security updates as required, it would be nice to get a list of just the security updates so that they can be carefully applied. This probably exists, I just havn't found it yet.
A happy Gentoo admin, not because it's perfect, but because everything else I tried was that much worse.
After running a word count on all the threads with faithful python:
:
Total word count: 42159
sco : 4
xandros : 4
ubuntulinux : 5
openbsd : 9
mepis : 10
solaris : 10
unix : 12
knoppix : 12
microsoft : 13
xp : 15
slack : 20
oracle : 21
novell : 33
freebsd : 37
fedora : 39
mandrake : 41
hat : 53
slackware : 53
red : 58
bsd : 61
ubuntu : 97
redhat : 117
suse : 157
gentoo : 178
(wow, debian even has more counts than words like: your : 186, are : 202, be : 225)...
debian : 228
And the total winer;)
linux : 283
I was going to paste some other statistics but slashdot did not let me: "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 8.3)."
Bunch of cowards...
anonymous : 120
coward : 120
Draw your own conclusions"
For What It's Worth, this very topic came up recently on the linux-390 list, and an informal poll was taken. SuSE outnumbered the competition by a wide margin.
Despite the flamebait nature of the question, I will add my thoughts.
.conf file editting,
... then they'll deploy SuSE 9.2 Professional on workstations and SuSE Standard
First off, every company is different and every company's requirements are
different. Second, every Slashdot user is different and has their favorite (or
least favorite). Third, most of the vocal commentary on Slashdot seems to be
from programmers, who are NOT professional admins. Seriously, this is important
to note and consider.
That said, as a professional Linux system administrator for a very large
corporation, my preference is SuSE.
best balance of stability
SuSE undergoes extensive testing of new packages and ensures that bugs are
patched with solid working code. That can't be said for all the distributions
out there. SuSE is a company that backs and supports their product with
professionals who are paid to fix code. Not hackers in their basement
submitting bugs in the hopes that it gets implemented. This is also true of Red
Hat.
high-level support options
This is vague. If you want a corporate entity that supports the distribution,
SuSE does that. If you want to have easy to use GUI tools, SuSE has that too.
While I prefer to do as much as I can via commandline and
SuSE converted me to ease-of-administration-tools with Yast2. Out of the Linux
distributions I've used (damn near every well known and even some lesser known),
Yast2 is the best administrative tool I've come across so far. I would go as
far to compare it to AIX's smit (or smitty).
security
Security is a major concern for corporations, and SuSE has a plethora of
security options. Honestly though, any Linux distribution can be just as secure
as any other by a competent admin, particular when using common tools such as
SELinux, Firewalls, TCP Wrappers plus monitoring and IDS. SuSE has security
options built into Yast2 that are easy to find (on the main menu), and any
experienced admin can do many things at the command line.
rapid updates
I will assume this is either updates are applied on the system quickly, or
updates from the vendor are released quickly after patches are submitted to code
trees. This is true in both cases for SuSE. Their package reviewers ensure
that security updates are tested thoroughly and released in a timely fashion.
They also don't trickle out package update releases like Red Hat. The minor
bugfixes are bundled up and released together, so end users don't have to
continually update systems and potentially cause outages. We have been very
pleased with the package update schedule SuSE uses. It is far better than that
which Red Hat follows.
and ease of administration?
I think this is addressed above. I'd like to reiterate that SuSE is very easy
to manage. As an example for my server at home, I had a brand new SuSE install
up and running with mysql, apache, samba file shares, cups network printing all
set up and serving my network in less than an hour.
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...
or Enterprise Server on the servers. At least, in this admin's opinion.
Other distributions also have a lot to offer. It really depends on what the company's requirements are. Personally, I would eschew the others in favor of our Green Lizard Overlords.
42. That's the answer.
From one who might be considered a professional admin I might throw my comments into the ring. Much of what I think has been said already, but I might explain a bit further.
I think the answer you are looking for is RedHat Enterprise Server. There are many software vendors out there that only certify and QA their product on RedHat ES. It is one of the more popularly required distributions out there. I might add that while you might want to become proficient in RHES you should expose yourself to many other distributions of GNU/Linux. You or your client/company won't always want to purchase a license from RedHat for an internal application test server, or other 'non-critical' servers that won't be running software with a vendor requirement.
If you reach such a point you really do have a lot of control as to what you end up running (unless your supervisor happens to have an opinion). I can tell you that speed matters. With many other projects or items you might be working on, you won't have days to research that new distro that just came off the block and why it won't work with your RAID card - and you certainly won't have time to compile the software you will need for your entire system. You will need to depoly something you know how to run, you can trust, and goes up quickly.
In this situation I suggest learning systems that many other distros tend to base their designs off of. Debian is a good example. Learn Debian and you have learned the basics you will need to pick up many other distributions.
Learning many distributions gives you the ability to adapt quickly when a new vendor comes in with a different requirement (like SuSE for example) - or your shop changes it's preferred platform. I really enjoy running Debian/Knoppix for many of my personal projects - but you might find Gentoo or some other distro fits your style more.
It really comes down to cozying up to something and starting to learn all the aspects and quirks behind it. You might find that once you become very skilled in two or three distributions you will be able to pick up new ones with little trouble. At that stage you begin to understand what kind of knowledge it takes to be considered an expert. It might take you several years after that to achieve your personal ideal of what a professional should know (or the rest of your career).
In closing I might say that the best advice I could give to the aspiring Linux Sys Admin is simply to start. Grab the nearest iso you've got, install it, then grab a different one and install that. Dive in there and start learning as much as you can - you will never learn it all, but the pursuit of higher knowledge will result in your reaching a plateau that tends to provide enough income to scratch out a descent living.
Also, do not forget the many other skills you will need as a professional. Working with others in a team, treating customers with respect at all times, and maintaining a positive attitude even in stressful situations are all very important aspects of being a professional. Mastering these elements will get you farther in a career than memorizing the structure of a file descriptor or all the switches to rpm (which might be good to know any way, but won't necessarily help you keep your job).
Personally, I find this an interesting debate because this is a very important issue with planning out IT infrastructures within a business community.
I personally think-as I wrote in my title-that the right tool should be used for the right job.
I will not do a my distro is better than your distro response, but rather give my opinions on a series of distros that I have come across.
Debian: Most likely the best system for hardcore admins out there. The packages and software are stable, and even the "unstable versions" of programs have been available for a great deal of time. The only issue is that finding software and getting support for newer hardware can be a bit of an issue since Debian is so stable that many packages are outdated.
Gentoo: Best server package if you intend on staying on the bleeding edge in terms of software and hardware support, and a very simple package installation system with stability kept in mind. Great support because many people in the forums are available to answer questions related to software and hardware issues, and just for general how-to-solve-this-problem type of issues. The bad thing about Gentoo is that in some cases there are issues with package maintainence, support, and the compile times for source are an issue.
Redhat: Wonderful out of the box system with simple setup. The horrible part about Redhat though is that it's terribly inefficient and the packages are old sometimes and deprecated. This is wonderful for stable systems, so maybe in fact this is the ideal system for a beginning admin and for a group of people who need support from a third party (in this case Redhat), since that is ultimately your only option for support really other than user groups, etc. Many server makers such as Dell and IBM provide server support through Redhat as well because they provide (IMO) the best enterprise support for people without admins. It's package system is RPMs though, which is notorious for having dependency and installation issues due to the way it's setup.
Slackware: Great for minimalist servers that need as many services as possible without the bloat that Redhat and-sometimes-Debian have. Supposedly the install system has improved since I last used Slackware (a package management tool called slapt-get, similar to apt-get, was made), but support is sometimes limited and many of the packages that aren't available on the CD or via slapt-get need to be compiled/installed manually.
As someone who admins along with other duties, I'd say that anything you can do to make everything consistent is probably worth doing.
If possible, use the same distro everywhere. RedHat is probably the best if you need/want "official" support. A mix of RHEL and WhiteBox Linux would qualify in my book as "consistent" since they are basically the same thing.
Debian is probably the best non-commercial distro.
Gentoo is a newcomer. Some swear by it, others are put off by the 3-days of compile time and the requirement to "get down and dirty" with your Linux install.
Suse in Europe is probably about like RedHat in the US. Now with Novell in on the picture, we'll see how things fare in the US.
As a RedHat user for years (since 5.1) I'm not eager to switch unless Novell makes a GOOD case. I came real close to jumping ship when RedHat changed their business plans - whitebox (and CentOS) have stopped me from leaving RedHat altogether.
So, pick your poison, and then get real familiar with your distro of choice. And, do everything possible to unify your technology base. Keep them all the !@#@ same because even within a distro, you run into issues. Like RH 6.2 supported source routing by default, making a mockery of carefully crafted firewall rules. Like RedHat 6.x uses ipchains, RedHat 7.x emulates ipchains with iptables (with a few differences) and RedHat 9 and above uses iptables.
These little differences can eat up time and make administration a pain. You should focus on the effect of administration, not the means, and unifying your install base means that when an issue is identified anywhere, you can quickly propogate your fix everywhere.
With this methodology, I've boiled patching and reviewing some 20+ systems down to a day or two every month! As soon as RHEL (Whitebox) 4.x comes out, I'm doing a major upgrade cycle, upgrading everything I can.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Slackware / Debian or Gentoo are the three primary choice. I wouldnt go with gentoo principally because of the huge amount of time it takes to setup and patch. I am currently running a Linux network of around 111 Slackware servers with a local ftp and swaret upgrading all the packages. it works without any problems and I can build the packages that are custom across the board and put them on the ftp and they are automatically patched across the network. This is much more difficult to maintain with gentoo and possibly debian (i have not tried this with the deb).
Q: What car is the best?
A: The one you own and know inside out.
Short Answer: Debian
:)
Long Answer: It depends.
We use a very large amount of Linux at my work, and we're big users of all opensource software.
We've been trying very hard to standardize on a single linux distro, but so far this has been virtually impossible.
We've "done the Redhat thing", we used virtually every version of Redhat from 3.0.3 through to 9, but decided to stop when the Fedora project started (personally I've not liked any version of Redhat since 7.3).
However redhat just 'will not go away' we run several large Oracle databases & until very recently this has meant Redhat Advanced Server, so we've now got a site license for this too.
Debian: I have to admit to only being a recent convert to debian, however it has always been the prefered platform for some of our admins. Since RH9 went off the support matrix we've been planning to migrate our desktop solution to Debian, this is now underway with prototype systems in the field. As for support on Debian, well there isn't any - although we now know that a couple of very large companies will support debian, just not "officially". That coupled with the fact that we've got 3 debian developers on the staff gives us the "warm fuzzy feeling" we need
The story doesn't end there, with the introduction of the Altix (SGI) platform we hit another support matrix: SGI's version of Redhat or SuSE Enterprise server. Again Oracle rears it's ugly head - what do they support, the key word here is support. Well of those two it's only SuSE.
Oh and we also use FreeBSD...
.... then support is the key. It doesn't matter that you can normally get a fix to a problem off some forum or l33t irc channel what matters is that you can have a support contract which has an SLA so that if you cannot fix the problem then you have a contract with someone to help you.
... this will cut down the options significantly but means that if you do have problems you are not left in a situation where you are told that you are on an unsupported OS so you are on your own.
... for example you an get x86 hardware and linux support from HP. This combines support in two areas and cuts down on blame passing quite significantly in my experience, (with other vendors).
Also whatever distribution you use must be supported as a platform by the application vendor, e.g. Oracle
Personally I would run either SuSE or Redhat Enterprise editions, (leaning more towards SuSE as I run the Pro version at home so am used to YaST etc).
Also you want to decrease the number of support companies you use
At the end of the day you are looking for a stable, supportable system not a l33t one.
t
I chose Debian, because it is usable both on server and workstation (and I wanted to provide help on both).
It is best to have the same distribution in whole institution, so I have unstable on workstations and stable on servers. I can have the same local packages with custom debianized software for both environments.
And automatic package management facilities are most advanced... (Think apt-get 0.6.25 w/crypto package verification, auto-apt or dlocate.)
And if debian is not for you - you can always choose debian-based distro.
...with support options, go for Red Hat or Suse.
If you want to be warm and fuzzy, go for debian.
Debian 3.1 should be out in this quarter (an estimate based on release-critical bugs in testing), and will be supported until 2010 or so...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings