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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.
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
i'm sure compiling X.org for 4 days would impress the manager..
If you are a professional admin, shouldn't you already know what's best?
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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
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.
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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.
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.
Tell your boss to shave his butt. :)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
http://www.debian.org/consultants/
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?
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
While I concur that Gentoo and Debian are both great distros (i've managed to get a few gentoo boxes in at work), the problem comes from the lack of enterprise support for things such as Oracle and EMC. Oracle only runs on RedHat and maybe SuSE, and EMC software is only supported on RedHat and SuSE. While I have managed to get a gentoo box connected to an EMC, it doesn't have their PowerPath software for failover, etc. That and it took me a week to get the stuff working properly. If Oracle and EMC supported gentoo, i'd set our redhat licenses ablaze. Unfortunately the only thing gentoo/debian can do is web/smtp/dns which is fine if you run mysql/postgres as your choice of database, but these days in an enterprise environment you are stuck with at least one RedHat/SuSE box.
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.
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.
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