Gentoo On Server Considered Harmful

Siker writes in to point out his blog post — Why Gentoo Shouldn't Be On Your Server — which seems to have stirred up a lot of discussion, including a thread on the Gentoo forums. From the post: "I firmly believe in updating server software only when you need to. If you don't need new features, and things are working, why change anything? If you update anything you will undoubtedly need to update configuration files. You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process... This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge."

Comments

The Problem With Gentoo...

[mattdev121]

The problem with Gentoo Linux is not the system itself, it's the stereotypes that people put against it.

Gentoo is only good for ricers, Gentoo is bleeding edge and unstable, Gentoo is only good for X deployment

The truth about Gentoo is that it is not really a distribution. Gentoo Linux does not make "releases" and it does not aim to cover one area of the market alone.

In Gentoo's packaging system, called portage, the aim is not only to provide up-to-the-minute packages (which it does) but also to provide a wide variety of both tested and verified "stable" packages as well as more bleeding-edge, testing packages.

This, along with a properly configured make.conf and /etc/portage file system, allows you to pull down the packages you want that have been verified as stable (and are also under watch by the Gentoo security project) and keep track of their libraries with revdep-rebuild.

Stop branding Gentoo with stereotypes that label it as X distribution, the project even calls itself a "metadistribution" capable of dropping into multiple roles.

Re:It's a dirty job

[VGPowerlord]

Servers are not the place for bleeding tech. Servers are the place for stability.

That is, unless you really dislike your customers that much, be they actual customers or other divisions in your business.

Nonsense

[loxosceles]

You say Gentoo wants to change a lot of stuff?

Any binary distribution has two modes of updates. One is an updated package within the same release; the other is a mass-update from one release to another. Gentoo combines the two, since the distinction is artificial. What you call "changing a lot of stuff" is merely keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall.

Anyone who considers the Gentoo update process too difficult either hasn't used Gentoo (upgrades are easy, and there aren't that many of them if you stick to stable x86) or has never dealt with package conflicts in binary distributions. That is the real horror I want to avoid, and I avoid it nicely by running Gentoo.

Re:This article makes good points.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the case of Red Hat, they'll backport changes for you so that you don't need to upgrade 50 other packages in order to get a security patch for Apache to work.

So in a way, yes, it is Gentoo's fault. It's just the way the distro is designed. Everything at the latest revisions possible. Great for a home system, not good for a server you have to maintain.

I had an OpenBSD/postfix box

[toadlife]

That would have had around 900 days uptime if my reboot-happy Windows-only-admin coworkers wouldn't have reset it in a panic on multiple occasions to "troubleshoot" (no it was never a problem with my OpenBSD box) mail problems.

I don't know what the hell it is with Windows-only admins and rebooting. The kind of instability that required reboots all the time was reduced drastically with Win2k and win2k3, yet that insatiable urge to reboot first and ask questions later still plauges my Windows-only counterparts.

Re:This article makes good points.

[zokum]

So, you upgraded from the old 1.x branch to a radically different 2.x branch, known to be a substantial partial rewrite, and expect everything to work out ok all by magic? You also seem to failed the "sentient sys-admin test" by not using 'google' to do some research. Things like say "http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/apache-upgrading.xml " perhaps?

I run Gentoo on my own machine, and most of my users WANT bleeding edge versions, a lot of custom options here and there. The system is using a hardened kernel, stack protection and everything is compiled for 64bit (k8). I don't know of any distros that can do that for every package. So far I have had 1 package problem, and that was resolved by 'uncaching' some stuff and redo the emerge of that package. In general, gentoo is easy to maintain, provided you update regularly. As for the people whining about compile times, this is a server, using it at 100% cpu now and then, provided the compilation has a low priority impacts noone. Compiler time is a non-issue, i'm not running X, soundcards, usb, video drivers, gui-browsers etc, there's not all that much to upgrade.

It should be noted that I sync the portage tree from a euro-mirror to a local mirror 6 times a day, and having 3-4 meg a sec to the files-repository makes downloads take an average of 2-3 seconds. Coupled with two beefy processors and lots of ram, Gentoo is brilliant for me. And yes, I have permission from the rsync-maintainer to synch that often.