Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu

David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"

Comments

did not know that....

[cheap.computer]

I did not know that ubuntu was a player in the server market.

Re:did not know that....

[Rik Sweeney]

I did not know that ubuntu was a player in the server market.

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition

Re:did not know that....

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

"I did not know that ubuntu was a player in the server market."

It isn't. If you have your own staff of qualified Linux admins, I suppose you could use any distro you like without any major hassle. However, I'd personally feel more comfortable with a server-centric distro like RHEL or its free cousin, CentOS (or some other server-centric distro...those are just the ones that came to mind). That way, I can let RedHat or whoever is responsible for the distro deal with the security/bug issues and spend scarce resources to hire more folks that generate revenue for my company.

Cheers,

Re:did not know that....

[jedidiah]

I did not know that ubuntu was a player in the server market.

THIS is what makes it "news that matters".

Re:did not know that....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu server is not the same as ubuntu desktop... do some research before you make claims like this. Ubuntu server is SERVER centric appealing to enterprise class deploys. They have a very good pricing and support model in place. RHEL and CentOS are great distros with good support as well... but they are not perfect. Look at RHEL's recent incident with their RPM servers. My point is, just because Ubuntu has a great desktop linux os, does not mean that their server OS is fruity.

Re:did not know that....

[brion]

Actually, the only difference between "Ubuntu Server Edition" and the "regular" Desktop version is which packages get installed by default.

That's one of the things we like about Ubuntu -- the 'supported' version (should you want a support contract, or even just security updates for a longer period!) isn't a totally separate distro from what folks use at home.

When Red Hat split "Red Hat Linux" into "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" (supported, but for $ only) and "Fedora" (free, fast-changing, no long-term security updates), they lost the benefit that techs would likely be running the same version of the software on their desktops and servers.

Re:did not know that....

[edmicman]

Does RedHat support CentOS? If you want a "name brand" server OS, then go with RHEL. But in my mind if I'm looking at free server distros that I support myself or with a community, CentOS and Ubuntu Server are on the same level...

Re:did not know that....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the only difference between "Ubuntu Server Edition" and the "regular" Desktop version is which packages get installed by default.

Are you sure this is true? I hope not. I want a "server edition" of an operating system to actually be optimized for servers. (Yeah, call me crazy.) There are many kernel options/optimizations which ought to be set for servers. Of course, I'd probably just compile my own kernel anyway, but whatever...

Re:did not know that....

[petermgreen]

I think the default kernel is different on the desktop and server installs (ubuntu like debian is happy to let you have multiple kernels installed at once). They also use a different installer (debian-installer rather than thier own livecd based installer).

but the package repositries are exactly the same.

Re:did not know that....

[brion]

Google will point you to Canonical's "Ubuntu Server Edition" FAQ pretty easily.

Re:did not know that....

[Yfrwlf]

Exactly, and "customization" for the most part shouldn't be based on really weird "tweaks", it should mostly all be about the installation/removal of software or modules or whatnot. If you want a faster system, remove X, Y, and Z. If you don't want a GUI, remove X. There shouldn't really be anything super special about a "server" edition vs. a "desktop" edition other than default software selection, and on the same note it'd also be nice if there wasn't anything super special between distros, too. It's all Linux, it should all play nicely together. The main difference usually seems to stem from the file hierarchy being different due to where that particular package manager and package format chooses to put it's files, a difference that could be made more dynamic via corrected and standardized XML tags that allowed a package format to be adopted by more than one manager. Then, we could have cross-distro package installation of at least one format, which would remove the "we chose Ubuntu because it has a lot of packages compiled for it specifically" problem. Once Linux software is compiled once by the actual devs who made the program instead of by distro compilers making their own "specially tweaked versions", we'll all be free from distro lock-in, and choosing Fedora over Ubuntu will matter a whole lot less because it will be a simple matter of changing to any repository you want, even Ubuntu's if you like their "support", or manually installing any package updates you want. Or more appropriately, we'll have repositories directly to the developers of the program, so we get our updates from them directly and quickly, and not be forced to be dependent on the distro package maintainers.

Once Linux is free of it's distro proprietarization, maybe software vendors will be much more anxious to target it and create Linux packages, maybe then we'll finally start getting a lot more games for Linux, among other things.

Re:did not know that....

[itlurksbeneath]

CentOS and Ubuntu Server are on the same level...

Not so.. You can buy support for Ubuntu from Canonical, you can't buy support for CentOS. CentOS is a separate effort from Red Hat altogether.

Re:did not know that....

[RiotingPacifist]

It runs a server kernel which is optimized for servers, but other than server specific programs, most of the stuff is optimized for desktops and ease of use (dbus and all that included). It does lack ubuntu specific tools but when dealing with something the size of Wikipedia id guess that doesn't really matter

Re:did not know that....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so your statement is false, like I thought. There's more to the "server edition" than default packages.

Re:did not know that....

[williamgrant]

No, it is just a different default package set (and a slightly differently configured installer). The kernel flavours are just more packages.

Re:did not know that....

[1lus10n]

Why anyone would consider this a problem is beyond me. These are two completely different objectives.

The software footprint on a desktop/laptop is huge. A server shouldn't have anywhere near that much crap installed/running.

Clearly this is the mindset that got windows into the server market. Its also the reason that I chuckle when I listen to windows admins try to talk about technical problems. (if it involves the word "click" or "icon" your doing it wrong.)

Re:did not know that....

[collinstocks]

Actually, the only difference between "Ubuntu Server Edition" and the "regular" Desktop version is which packages get installed by default.

This isn't entirely true. The server edition also has an optimized kernal, though you'd have to go to the website to find out the exact specifications that they optimize it to. I think that it is something like better utilizing more memory and multiple cores. I think that virtualization is also improved for the server version.

These are things that you might not necessarily want on a desktop computer.

That said, you can make the server edition act like the desktop edition by installing one of kubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-desktop/xubuntu-desktop (others?) in order to get a desktop environment.

Re:did not know that....

[onefriedrice]

Well, the kernel makes a big difference, so I guess it's both technically true and meaningless to say that the only difference between the desktop and server editions is the packages.

The same is true for most other distros, too. Fedora/RHEL being the notable exception.

Re:did not know that....

[badkarmadayaccount]

Agree. BTW, check the sig.

Re:did not know that....

[Yfrwlf]

Interesting, but of course Linux has the main oomph behind it right now, and luckily many features are being shared, between all kernels and OSes out there right now. I believe this problem can be solved easily within Linux, without having to switch to P9 or Minix or anything else, but those are certainly life savers should anything completely fragment Linux.....more than it is now. =P

The Burgdorf Packaging API is one solution that will help solve the Linux package standardization issue, as well as more top-level solutions like Klik and Zero Install.

Re:did not know that....

[turbidostato]

"This isn't entirely true."

You can install the "server" kernel on an "Ubuntu desktop edition" and you can install the desktop kernel on an "Ubuntu server edition". Well, in fact you can install *any* package you'll find on a server edition in a desktop edition and viceversa. Do you know why? Because the difference between the server and desktop editions are just which packages get installed by default.

Re:did not know that....

[collinstocks]

I stand corrected. Thank you.

Re:did not know that....

[badkarmadayaccount]

Why not bolt on the P9 userspace on a fbsd kernel, throw in a basic gnu userspace in /usr/compat and update the linux abi module more often. Hell, just implement the kvm interface and you can use drivers in userspace (user mode linux ring a bell?). P9 made a deep impretion on me with the fact that every process, application, user, etc. has a namespace (i.e. a specific view of the system). That includes /bin. Just my $0.02.

Re:And?

[Rik Sweeney]

How is this news?

Well they either should have stuck with 7.10 or waited for 8.10.

That's news...

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

In related(ly boring) news, Sun Microsystems replaced 200 old worn-out keyboards on their office workstations. Also, a handful of Microsoft employees patched their OSes, and some guy in Phoenix got a paper cut on his finger.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

8.04 is a LTS release. Which is obviously the reasoning behind the version choice.

Re:And?

[TooMuchToDo]

News for nerds. Check.

Stuff that matters. Well, to some, probably. Semi-check.

More surprised at the mess they had before

[ACK!!]

For such a large effort, it seems wild they had so many different distros running in their environment.

What do you guys think?

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that it's good to standardize on the best OS for your needs, but to find out which one is best you should first try running a bunch of them.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[somersault]

I think it likely that Wikipedia started out as a small pet project, and just happened to grow piecemeal as they needed more and more resources as they grew in popularity. They wouldn't have been sure to start with just how popular they were going to become, how could they? Also take into account that perhaps they had been using different OSes in a consistent way (though I don't expect that to be likely), like some were just for webserving, some held a quick database of current articles, some machines held compressed archives, some were for intended for virtualisation and testing out of new designs, that kind of thing?

Anyone who has written a small well planned (or perhaps not so well planned) application but then been asked to make many, many, many changes over the years will be able to sympathise I expect. It's much easier to design a large coherent system than grow one out of a smaller system..

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[David Gerard]

I believe the devs (the sysadmins at Wikimedia are also called "devs") experimented with a wide range of OSes - various Fedoras, Red Hat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Solaris 10, OpenSolaris - in various situations to see what was best to work with. This is a rationalisation from that.

Realistically, it's all Unix and it'll all do the job. So it then becomes a matter of picking one your team is comfortable with. With armchair sysadmins' distro wars, "perfect" is the enemy of "good" - there's nothing you can do with CentOS that you can't also do with Ubuntu, you eventually just have to pick a damn distro and stick with it.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[Tango42]

Your mistake is in thinking it's a large effort - they started with just volunteers and then had only one or two full time staff for a while with the technical stuff still being done by volunteers. The first technical person wasn't hired until August 2005, four and a half years after the launch of Wikipedia (which, by that point, was already a top 50 website according to Alexa), they only have around 5 technical staff now. It's a very small project from that point of view, it's just a hell of a lot of servers!

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[David Gerard]

The first technical person was Brion, who'd done the job as a volunteer for quite a while before that.

I started editing Wikipedia in early 2004. I believe they'd just made the radical jump from one box to three boxes.

Now stuff is structured in a horizontally-expandable fashion. "Add some more Squids." "Add some more Apache servers." So a single platform is an obvious win, and picking one platform to standardise on is actually more important than which of various near-indistinguishable free Unix-like operating systems that could all do the job they pick.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[Tango42]

I know, David, I'm Tango (Thomas Dalton). If you want to play timestamps, my first recorded edit was December 2002 (it was very small back then!) ;).

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[brion]

That is an entirely accurate summary of the situation. :) We still have a tiny technical staff, and re-organization of things that got thrown together in a hurry long ago is an ongoing task.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[David Gerard]

Ah, sorry, didn't correlate your Slashdot and Wikipedia names!

You actually have seniority over me, then ;-)

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[jlarocco]

Yeah, the headline plays up Ubuntu a bit too much. Sounds like they could have simplified by moving to almost anything with consistency.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[ZarathustraDK]

BOW TO YOUR SENPAI!

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people who end their posts with "what do you guys think" or "discuss" are morons.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[nschubach]

I think it's a credit to Linux. If so many different distributions can run under the same roof so easily without too much of a headache, it means that migrating your office to another distribution can be done over a long term instead of a steep upgrade hill. You can maintain the leading edge software in whichever distribution shines at the time and know that you should be able to migrate into the next big thing fairly easily.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes. Run along now.

The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[101010_or_0x2A]

If its been going on for 2 years, it may well BE the BreezyBadger. Is Ubuntu the most reliable distribution for a high performance server farm? I;d say a stripped down and extremely customizable distribution such as Gentoo might be a more reliable way to go..

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Aliencow]

With Gentoo, you have to be much more careful about what you update and when. They probably went to Ubuntu because it is based on Debian, and they can obtain support from Cannonical directly if needed.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

Ubuntu server edition is stripped down and customizable, as well. I assume they didn't use the desktop edition.

This may be an outdated experience, but...I ran a single server with Gentoo for a while - until updating became such a tremendous pain. Manually merging configuration changes and such is simply not a good way to spend time, and neither is reading release notes to see whether I can simply use the old config and ignore new changes. Ubuntu is nice because installing and updating apps is easy, there is a wide variety of apps available for it, and it's quick and easy to install. Gentoo distro installation was a very lengthy, manual process - has this changed?

I'd agree with others that say that CentOS may have been a better choice, but in my eyes the choice between the two comes down to preference of package management systems rather than any difference in security or performance.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Tubal-Cain]

Ubuntu is nice because installing and updating apps is easy, there is a wide variety of apps available for it, and it's quick and easy to install.

I was going to post asking what Ubuntu has over Debian, but then I remembered Canonical.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Ron_Fitzgerald]

I guess that is my question then is why not run a Debian farm?

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[chris_mahan]

Support.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[norminator]

I second your comments on Gentoo. I had originally thought it would be a good choice for my MythTV box on older hardware... and it was fine, at first. After about two years of occasional updates, the updates got really painful. Updating config files sucked, and often packages wouldn't compile, I spent hours googling various compiler messages. At one point the mythtv package got upgraded to version 0.22, then it wanted to backdate it to 0.20. Unfortunately the desktop system I was using as a frontend was running Ubuntu, and I had version 0.21 on there, so things were all screwed up. I finally went to Ubuntu server, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

If someone has the time to invest in understanding the whole portage system and knowing how to get exactly what they want out of it, and if they don't mind managing all of their config files after each update, then Gentoo is probably fine, and I'm sure it is ideal in soe situations. But it's definitely not for most people.

[standard Gentoo complaint]
Also, it takes a long time to compile stuff.
[/standard Gentoo complaint]

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Anonymous Coward]

And what does Debian have over Ubuntu? Hewlett Packard

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Ubuntu server 6.06 LTS for a stand-alone web server, it's been running about 18 months.

There is no substantial reason to pick Ubuntu server for me because I'm not buying support. I just picked it because I'm also running it on the desktop and I can develop & compile on the same dev platform at home.

It's been running rock-solid stable. Security fixes are rolled out promptly and install smoothly.

To be honest any distro will do for a web/java/database machine that you self-admin. The main difference will be in the quality of the support.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[brion]

Having played with Gentoo on the desktop, I can tell you that I would never, ever, EVER, *EVER* allow it to touch a machine that was expected to be online to perform actual work.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[thrillseeker]

they are running Debian - Ubuntu is Debian with, ah, lipstick on it - and it works very well.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Narnie]

Is that anything like lipstick on a hockey mom?

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[billcopc]

I run several different distros, each one suited to a different environment / usage pattern.

My desktop is Gentoo, I update every day, and it runs like a dragster.

My servers run CentOS. Easy to maintain, kind of retarded thanks to RPM, but usable. Most importantly, it's such a widely popular distro that I can delegate tasks to practically sysadmin, in a pinch.

My boss really likes BSD for firewalls and DNS servers. It's rock-solid, low-overhead and we can pretty much forget about the machine once it's deployed. Don't even care to update it unless a vulnerability is discovered...

I would like to use Gentoo on servers, but that would require a fork. Gentoo itself is a bleeding-edge tweaker's delight. They break stuff all the time, and the user is expected to figure it out on their own. That's fine for a desktop machine, and the payoff is usually worth the effort, but on servers every minute counts. If you're down for two hours because some dutch kid broke the latest build, you're in hell!

Now if someone could spin off an ultra-stable fork of Gentoo, with the necessary glue to ensure smooth upgrades, and an official binary package repo for those time-critical panic moments, I could definitely see it gaining a foothold in the datacenter.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[steveg]

*My* workstations are all Gentoo.

The workstations I *support* (about 90 of them) are not. They're all running Ubuntu 8.04. My x86 servers are all running Debian Etch.

I love Gentoo on my desktop. I can get it set up exactly like I want it. But the "fiddle factor" is very high, and I don't particularly want the workstations I support to take that much of my time, or come to that, be all that configurable.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[FishWithAHammer]

Your drooling over Gentoo kind of ignores the fact that the Gentoo developers are a bunch of screaming morons and can't seem to get straight which one's their ass and which one's their elbow.

As-is, I wouldn't even use Gentoo on a desktop. (How long has Nethack been masked because of their stupid-ass games policy?)

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that is my question then is why not run a Debian farm?

Because with Ubuntu they can obtain support from Cannonical directly if needed.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[Kooty-Sentinel]

My Personal servers run Gentoo.... and since I have time to tweak the system and I'm the only one administrating it, it's perfect.
Even my uptime is pretty good considering a home server. The last reboot was because of a power outage long enough to kill my UPS

[kooty@numbserver] ~ $ uptime
15:50:39 up 62 days, 1:29, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
[kooty@numbserver] ~ $ uname -a
Linux numbserver 2.6.26-kooty #4 SMP Wed Jul 30 23:13:47 MDT 2008 x86_64 Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 265 AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

The corporate servers I set up and manage are all running Ubuntu Server 8.04 though.
It all depends on how much time you are willing to put into the server, and your personal preference.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[PhasmatisApparatus]

can't seem to get straight which one's their ass and which one's their elbow. I'm sure comparative Goatse's of each would help them out.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[onefriedrice]

His drooling over Gentoo? It's abundantly clear from his post and yours that he is many times more insightful and rational than you. His post says something meaningful as he describes the uses of various operating systems and concluding that Gentoo is not a good choice for servers, while you're just bashing Gentoo's policies and crying about Nethack.

Of course, this is slashdot, so you get the 'insightful' moderation. Congratulations.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[onefriedrice]

Interesting. You've played with Gentoo on the desktop, and you think you have a clue about its potential for use on a system for "actual work" online. Right. Sorry if I'm not entirely convinced, especially considering that many others of us are completely up to the task of administering Gentoo to do real work.

Congrats on your choice to run Ubuntu servers. I'm sure it will prove to be a solid platform for your needs. But don't presume to tell us which distros are or are not fit for "actual work" unless you have a clue.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[billcopc]

Quite frankly, if I wanted to play Nethack, I'd unmask it and compile it like any other package.

There's a reason why it's hard masked, and while some people may take offense to their beloved Nethack being called "insecure", I'm quite thankful that someone takes package management seriously enough to point out potential issues with the software I use.

It's funny how Gentoo polarizes people so much. Yes, there are quite a few imbeciles with five-mile-long CFLAGS, and there are some packages that get updated twice a day for no good reason at all, but overall it's been the most consistent, reliable, satisfying distro I've ever used. I actually like seeing the dozen patches applied to each package, as it shows there's someone actually using and criticizing the software to make it better. It also saves me a ton of effort, as I would have had to find and install those patches anyway, and many of them come directly from Gentoo users.

I guess it also matters that I'm a developer myself. When Gentoo breaks, I can usually fix it on my own with minimal effort. Obviously a non-programmer would go spam Yahoo Answers and rip all their hair out... and that's fine, everyone's free to use whatever suits them best.

Re:The changeover went like a Breezy Badger

[billcopc]

The fact that your vengeful response got modded Insightful, tells me Slashdot needs to give out less mod points to less people.

I'm not drooling over Gentoo, and I'm certainly not evangelizing it to every half-bred techno-weenie on this dirt ball of a world. In fact, I wish they'd make it even _harder_ to get Gentoo, in order to weed out the non-hackers. This distro is not for them, and they will not be happy with it.

You don't waltz onto a construction site, jump in a backhoe and then yell the foreman's ears off because it doesn't have air conditioning and ABS brakes. Well Gentoo is that backhoe. Only trained people should use it, everyone else can happily putter around in their Ubuntu sedans and Fedora Civic hatchbacks...

go on....

[pablo_max]

This may sound like I am trolling, but I am really trying to figure out how this is at all news worth of in any way amazing...
I can see if perhaps they went from all MS servers to Linux that would be interested, but to go from older versions of Ubuntu to a newer version just seems...obvious.
So I ask seriously, can someone explain to a slight ubuntu user like myself; whats the big deal?

Re:go on....

[somersault]

It isn't just going from other versions of Ubuntu, they are consolidating from several different Linux distributions. I found it interesting news anyway.. I'm even about to go and RTFA!

Re:go on....

[David Gerard]

I put the story in the queue as an insight into how a top-10 free content site run by a severely under-resourced charity does its stuff. And it's all over the press this morning, fwiw.

Re:go on....

[norminator]

The newsworthy part to me is that they had a hodge-podge of distros on a large number of servers, and they standardized on one distro which most people don't usually consider first when they think of a server distro.

Also, it's nice to know about what a large project like WikiMedia is using.

Re:go on....

[brion]

It's not *super* exciting, but some folks seem to be interested in hearing that Ubuntu is a perfectly good server distro, and gets used for this in the wild. ("Ubuntu: not just for desktops anymore!")

How many admins?

[Colin Smith]

Cos a general purpose distribution isn't exactly ideal for providing scalability, particularly when your machines pretty much all provide the same service.

The network is the machine.

 

Re:How many admins?

[Kuj0317]

You are wrong there. A homogenous environment (up to a certain point) is MUCH better for scalability. Need more power? Get a new box, apply the standard customizations, throw it in the mix.

I agree that a cookie cutter approach like this does not yeild the greatest performance per box, but it does allow for a better performance/administration ratio.

Re:How many admins?

[brion]

Mass installation of a customized distro can do better than mass installation of a general distro (eg, the kernel and software can be optimized for your use case).

And indeed, we use a slightly customized Ubuntu, in that we have our own patched versions of some packages (PHP, Squid, MySQL, some custom PHP extensions, etc) tweaked for performance or features we need, plus custom meta-packages to install the configurations we require on different server sub-types.

This is pretty easy to do on any distro with a decent package manager. I still like apt better than yum, though!

Re:How many admins?

[Colin Smith]

And a custom distribution designed for the purpose scales orders of magnitude better still. Build a system which does only the job you want, boot it over the network on 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 systems just as easily. Just a few people are required.

I agree that a cookie cutter approach like this does not yeild the greatest performance per box, but it does allow for a better performance/administration ratio.

Nope. You have too much state on the machine. You have binary versions, library versions, config files all to manage and distribute. Over time the individual machines diverge in their configuration, even with tools like cfengine and puppet. Which means that errors begin creeping in and things start failing.
 

Re:How many admins?

[denttford]

This past week, I installed Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL (for a friend). First time I'd used a RH linux in years. I'm taking that machine back to Solaris, Open Solaris, or Debian. I haven't wiped CentOS* yet, but I have to ask - does anyone prefer yum/rpms to apt/deb?

Maybe it is a bit of a flamebait, but I am curious...

*Of the three, CentOS was the best, but when SELinux is on by default and refuses to play nice with FreeNX out of the box - a major package offered by the installer - meh. All this to be a Scratchbox machine and drive a stupid Sun Ray I have lying around.

Re:How many admins?

[Shadowruni]

Hello Brian,

Thanks for the information!
A question I have is what are you guys using for your backend transport? Ethernet, iSCSI, Infiniband? I'm just wondering how your handling of interserver traffic made any difference as I can see that having a major impact on performance.

Re:How many admins?

[stevo3232]

apt can run on fedora/centos/etc.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apt-rpm

Re:How many admins?

[Colin Smith]

Try this for an idea... The whole concept of "installation" is wrong.

Build your own distributions. One per purpose.

Use something like RockLinux

to build a ramdisk image which contains all of the software and configuration required for a particular application. By "all" I mean "only". You end up with a single file which you put on a tftp server, you boot your servers over dhcp, they pick up the OS image and boot to the image on a ramdisk.

e.g. You might have one squid image, one PHP app server image, one Mysql rdbms server image etc. When the image boots it does whatever is required to run the app successully. e.g. putting a filesystem on the hard disk.

The benefits:

• Zero server configuration. (or close to it) this means no need for YUM, no RPM, no APT. No dependencies.
• Massive scalability because of above.
• Only tested images reach production. You know it is going to work because the production image is the same single file, you know exactly how it is going to perform because you tested exactly the same file already.
  
• Everything is version controlled and completely repeatable as part of the build process.

2 admins can run 500-1000 systems in a site easily because there is really only one machine; the network. Logarithmic increase in effort with the number of systems.

Re:How many admins?

[neurovish]

Since I've never really used apt/deb, I'll say that I prefer yum/rpm over it. For servers that install normal stuff once then just patch every once inawhile, I don't see anything wrong with it. It isn't very hard to create my own packages either. I'm sure .deb works just as well, but no commercial linux (i.e. something ISVs support, aka SLES and RHEL mostly) uses it, so there's really no chance of it gaining a foothold where I work. I don't really find myself saying "stupid rpm/yum, it should do *this*".

Re:How many admins?

[jacquesm]

That's exactly how I configure clusters (only then I only have the one image for everything, not several specialized ones).

It works like a charm and the best bit is if a machine dies you just replace it or let it sit there.

Shared storage is a bit of an issue with such a setup, look at glusterfs if this stuff interests you.

Re:How many admins?

[brion]

It's pretty much all gigabit ethernet internally; our core switch is a Foundry BigIron RX-16 of some variety, with some smaller breakout switches aggregating traffic from each rack.

We're not really doing SAN stuff; app servers grab most of their data from the MySQL databases, and bulk file uploads are pushed up via NFS *shudder*.

From a quick peek at our DB server stats, it looks like even our busiest DB servers are only topping out around 8 megabits/sec, so we don't have a big incentive to go to anything fancier than GigE. (10G between racks might start to make sense at some point, but for now 1G is plenty.)

Our uplinks to the internet are physically some scary fiber for 10G, whose details I leave up to our network manager. :)

Re:How many admins?

[MikeBabcock]

I can't say I run into issues with yum/rpm on a day to day basis maintaining a couple hundred machines running Fedora/RHEL. My only real complaint about RPMs is the SPEC file format, but otherwise, the packaging system works fine for me and very reliably too.

Re:How many admins?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't wiped CentOS* yet, but I have to ask - does anyone prefer yum/rpms to apt/deb?

Maybe it is a bit of a flamebait, but I am curious...

Sure. yum vs. apt: Usable UI, lots more commands/control, doesn't require you manage your metadata by hand (I want to do that about as much as I want to type my email in binary), writen in a usable language for sysadmins. rpm vs. dpkg: It's well known that rpm is a superset of dpkg functionality, and even with the major amounts of PR money that canonical spends it's still more common for third parties to have rpms only.

The more appropriate question would probably be, why are debian/ubuntu users still shouting about apt-get which is basically unchanged functionality wise from from 10 years ago.

Re:How many admins?

[David Gerard]

It's not apt vs yum or rpm vs deb - it's how well the repository's maintained. apt has a good reputation because Debian's repository is superbly well maintained. But Fedora's yum repos are much better maintained than Fink's apt repos.

It's not the software, it's the repository quality. Actual humans making sure everything plays nicely.

Re:How many admins?

[mikechant]

does anyone prefer yum/rpms to apt/deb

Having used yum/rpms/yumex on Fedora and apt/deb/synaptic on Ubuntu, I've got the following two observations:

1/ At the time I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu, synaptic was a lot faster than yumex
2/ Synaptic is a very nice easy to use but flexible gui frontend.

But really I'd be fairly happy to use either on a reasonably fast machine; on a slow machine I think the apt/deb route would probably be a better experience.

CentOS is free RHEL

[Hero Zzyzzx]

So it's unlikely the decisions were influenced heavily from a budgetary standpoint. If they wanted to stay with a free RHEL derivative linux that's essentially identical to the one you pay for, they'd be using CentOS.

They chose Ubuntu. Maybe they just like it better? I think you can factor cost of out the equation.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[AgentUSA]

The question is, do the have paid or donated enterprise support from Canonical?

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[nauseum_dot]

I think that there was an administrative change. It sounds like the team was heavy Red Hat. They then added Fedora because funds got tight, it was free and was still official Red Hat. Finally, a few admins who had a preference for Debian (and its cousins) were brought on to replace a few former Red Hat admins who were originally there and they made a case standardizing on Ubuntu LTS 8.04.

Finally, I think another major part of it is that if it all goes to pot you can fall back on Canonical for support. You can't fall back to Red Hat if you install Centos.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't fall back to Red Hat if you install Centos.
That seems rather strange, does that mean you can't purchase support after the fact?

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Hero Zzyzzx]

I'm sure if you asked nicely enough, RedHat would find some way to take your money.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[somersault]

*whistles nonchalantly*

Oh, hello! I couldn't help but overhearing you, and I feel I must expound some smug knowledge I have gained by actually R'ingTFA..

Behold the quote!

Wikipedia could just as easily have made the switchover to all Red Hat, but that would have cost more money, he said. "It would seem to me that if money weren't an issue here, there wouldn't be anything keeping them from upgrading everything to Red Hat."

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Tango42]

Brion Vibber was the first technical hire (August 2005) and is still the CTO. A few more people have been hired over time, but I don't think anyone has left (not on the technical side, anyway).

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[David Gerard]

Note that's an analyst quote, not a Wikimedia quote. I'm not sure they actually bothered asking Brion.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

Bleeding edge unstable and experimental versions of programs vs over patched old but tested version of programs in in rpm format - Which one would you use in a production environment?

Ubuntu wins again - who wants finished programs when you can have 5 years worth of cAptive updates instead!

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Drew M.]

I guess the handful of bugs that I found in CentOS and filed at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ that were fixed must have been a dream. Redhat's bugzilla is a friendly place if you don't need handholding, and just need something fixed.

Of course you can always get support by purchasing a single RHEL license for a single RHEL instance that you run, while the rest of the machines run CentOS, which would still be cheaper than a sitewide support contract from Canonical.

You still have many options for support on CentOS, you just have to get a little creative.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[brion]

Canonical has recently provided us a donated support contract, but that didn't influence our (much earlier) decision to stick with Ubuntu.

Primarily:

• We liked it better
• It's nice that people can run the same version locally (who runs CentOS on their desktop? Playing CentOS vs RHEL just feels like a big fat kludge and tells you there's something broken about the distro.)
• Unlike Debian stable, and like Fedora, it's updated fairly frequently so we get a decent rate of package updates for infrastructure...
• ...unlike Fedora, it's not so bleeding edge that things die all the time (SELinux breaking everything, yay!)
• ...and Canonical actually puts out security updates for a decent amount of time.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Hero Zzyzzx]

That quote was from the analyst ignoring the existence of CentOS. I did RTFA.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[somersault]

Indeed. I've tried Ubuntu a few times over the years and they do seem to have done a great job at making everything feel well put together. The first version of Ubuntu I used kind of had the same problem as some of the other distros I have used where you didn't feel like all the toolbars on the desktop were really meant to be used side by side, but they started modding everything to fit together and improved pretty quickly.. if I wasn't using OSX right now I'd probably be using Ubuntu.

I recently set up a Windows VM as well for all the proprietary apps I have to use for work (basically only Outlook and Delphi), so I could move to whatever host OS I want without too much fuss, and am going to keep trying Ubuntu occasionally :)

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[brion]

Quick note -- we started our standardization to Ubuntu right around the time the first long-term support release (6.06 LTS) came out, offering the promise of much longer-period security updates. This was a big attractor versus continuing to play the Fedora upgrade game. (That is, even if we didn't keep everything at the latest version, we could continue to get necessary updates for old installations.)

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[pembo13]

From reading the article, I have concluded that the decision maker(s) simply liked Ubuntu, and just came up with some justification after the fact. Especially considering they were uysing RH9 in there as well. They gave no (apperent) consideration to Centos 5.2 -- which is all well and good, but they should not make it seem like it was an RHEL weakness.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[pembo13]

So the OP talked abou Centos, you rebut by talking about Red Hat?

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[somersault]

Apologies for that - sometimes I get completely on an unjustifiable rant without noticing.. :/ I was just trying to point out that I would have done the same thing, as I think Ubuntu is better integrated and more exciting than a lot of the main distros, while at the same time still being professional quality and easy to use.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[jc42]

They chose Ubuntu. Maybe they just like it better? I think you can factor cost of out the equation.

There might have been other motivations. For example wikimedia does lots of stuff in mixtures of languages, and probably uses UTF-8 encoding for (nearly) everything. I've been trying to get a good feel for how different distros (and OSs) actually handle mixed-language UTF-8-encoded text. It's been slow going. Everyone claims to support it. But it never takes long to find serious problems.

The biggest problem is how to persuade printer model X to sanely render text in non-Western languages. Suppose you have a text that's a mixture of Russian, Arabic and Chinese; can you get all (or any) of your printers to print it correctly? If so, can you point to a HOWTO file describing how you did it?

Ubuntu does have a bit of a reputation for being pretty good at this. But right now, I have a firefox window showing the page at unicode.com for the char U+2EA8. The "Your Browser" box shows a completely different glyph than the "The Unicode Standard" box. When I copy the character into an xterm window, it also displays the wrong glyph, so it's not just firefox. Tests with various apps show that some display the correct glyph, some show the incorrect glyph. I asked on ubuntuforums about this about a week ago, and there were no replies. Meanwhile, I've found a couple dozen other codes that produce the wrong glyph, but I haven't found any clues.

This isn't to pick on ubuntu; it just happens to show a problem on my screen right now. I've had lots of geekish "fun" copying some of my files around to various other machines, including several linux distros, a FreeBSD machine, a couple of Mac OSXs, and even a Windows machine, and watching all of them garble some parts of the text. Most of them don't even display all the Kangxi radicals correctly, if you can imagine.

And watching all of their printers garble the printed output. I think this might be why the OLPC project hasn't yet included any printer support.

And I won't even go into what happens with file names that contain non-ASCII characters. ;-)

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[jc42]

Oops; I just realized that it's really unicode.org, not unicode.com, of course. ;-) To be more specific, the URL is "http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html". Type in 2EA88 and press the Lookup button, to see if your browser can display the char correctly. I'd be most interested in ubuntu systems that display it correctly. Something's wrong here, and I'm not finding any useful clues.

(I wonder if there's a way to ask firefox or other browsers "What font are you using to render the selected text?" And no, looking at the source won't necessarily answer that question. It won't for that page.)

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Bambi Dee]

Oops; I just realized that it's really unicode.org, not unicode.com, of course. ;-) To be more specific, the URL is "http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html". Type in 2EA88 and press the Lookup button, to see if your browser can display the char correctly. I'd be most interested in ubuntu systems that display it correctly. Something's wrong here, and I'm not finding any useful clues.

U+2EA8 worked for me after installing the ttf-arphic-uming font collection. I don't have any other Chinese fonts installed; can't read them anyway. I've got Firefox 3.0.3 on Kubuntu 8.04.1.

(I wonder if there's a way to ask firefox or other browsers "What font are you using to render the selected text?"

So do I.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[judgexktf]

Starting from reason one "We liked it better" there is nothing objective about this comparison.

"Playing CentOS vs RHEL just feels like a big fat kludge and tells you there's something broken about the distro.)"
Why is that ? "just feels" i think you kind of nailed the sentiment there, "just feels". There isn't much of a technical difference between RHEL and Fedora besides that Fedora focuses on bleeding edge and RHEL on stability.

"Unlike Debian stable, and like Fedora, it's updated fairly frequently so we get a decent rate of package updates for infrastructure..."
Use RHEL/CentOs.

"...unlike Fedora, it's not so bleeding edge that things die all the time (SELinux breaking everything, yay!)"
Again use RHEL/CentOs. Besides Ubuntu updates have their fair share of screw ups too or did we already forget about the OpenSSL fiasco *COUGH* http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/13/1533212 *COUGH* ?

" ...and Canonical actually puts out security updates for a decent amount of time."
Have you seen the CentOs roadmap ? http://dag.wieers.com/blog/files/centos-intro-1.3-en.png So that means support until 2014. Thats one year longer then Ubuntu LTS, which goes to 2013 !!

I can't begin to phantom why this post is +5 informative.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[jc42]

Hmm... When I ask apt-get to install the ttf-arphic-uming font, it tells me "ttf-arphic-uming is already the newest version."

So that's not what's going wrong. One funny thing is that the wrong glyphs are actually the glyphs for another character that's nearby. The difference in the code values isn't always the same, but in the couple dozen chars I've found where the wrong glyph is displayed, the one displayed has never been more than 8 away. This would probably be a clue for someone who knows the code well, but to the rest of us, it's just bizarre, especially since there's no obvious pattern to the chars that are rendered with the wrong glyph. And what is display has always been a valid Chinese glyph; just not the one for that code point.

Anyway, I have seen a number of comments that ubuntu is the best system so far for displaying multi-language text. But it's far from perfect.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Bambi Dee]

I have no idea what's up with your off-the-mark glyphs, and my Unicode needs never really extended beyond phonetic symbols and "pretty" punctuation -- I'm guessing (feebly) that whatever tries to pick the ideal font for some unicode range may have less of a chance to err with as few Chinese fonts as I have installed... maybe?

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Bambi Dee]

I have no idea what's up with your off-the-mark glyphs, and my Unicode needs never really extended beyond phonetic symbols and "pretty" punctuation -- I'm guessing (feebly) that whatever tries to pick the ideal font for some unicode range may have less of a chance to err with as few Chinese fonts as I have installed... maybe?

(Then again, isn't that exactly what should not happen with Unicode? Never mind me...)

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[1lus10n]

So here's a quick summary:
Fedora - Developers distro, not for servers and not for the "set it and forget it" crowd.

Debian Stable - Fully "set it and forget it". Literally.

CentOS/RHEL - Its the same thing. Literally. You might not like it because it "feels" like a kludge, but Red Hat isnt trying to win fan boys hearts, they are trying to win the war. Step one is to get people to stop talking about linux like its kool aid. (I like "my distro" best !)

The war doesnt start on people's desktops. It starts on their office machines.

Ubuntu - Desktop OS goes server. Change known quantity items for untested stuff because the guiding hands are college kids and hipsters.

The reality is this story shouldnt even be a story. The OS is obsolete. Apache, Squid, Oracle, Sendmail/Postfix, Jboss, Weblogic, Websphere, *LDAP, P* etc etc. They all run on every platform out there, the key is getting all your network, storage and platform (hardware + OS) items in a row so that the top level application can be spooled up and out in minutes.

Google accomplished this by writing middle tier software to allow spanning of thousands of systems (relatively) transparently. For those of us without that much time and money the next best thing is to standardize our platform and manage it with proper tools (ie puppet, splunk etc).

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[shutdown -p now]

Linux has been mostly UTF-8 throughout for several years now. Fedora was the earliest mover, if I remember correctly, but most of them are there, and the filesystems (or rather, filenames) are UTF-8-encoded by default, too. Those problems you describe are mostly Unicode implementation problems in specific, and mostly desktop, apps. A typical Linux server box wouldn't even have X installed, much less those apps you mention. Meanwhile, most text-mode apps, and particularly daemons/servers, are 8-bit clean, so if the OS uses a multibyte (incl. UTF-8) locale, they'll just happily work with that.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[somersault]

Yeah I guess I overlooked that, but consider that CentOS won't have the same level of official support that both RedHat and Ubuntu offer. You could still support yourselves, or call in some third party linux gurus if you have issues, but you won't be able to get support direct from the original coders, or submit bugs or anything like that (AFAIK). I don't think that's very suitable for a project as large as wikipedia..

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

1lus10n has mostly said reasonable things here, especially the part about standardising your platform and managing it with puppet. That is the entire benefit of Wikipedia standardising on one platform instead of an unmanageable mish-mash.

The only unreasonable (but debatable) thing was the association between Ubuntu and "college kids and hipsters". However, I wouldn't necessarily call it flaimbait. This poster makes more sense than many other posters to Slashdot.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[Simetrical]

Starting from reason one "We liked it better" there is nothing objective about this comparison.

Could be, but all that tells you is that the reasons for choosing Ubuntu over other distros weren't objective. If distro selection were dominated by objective reasons, we'd probably have fewer distros. Most people just pick the distros they like and feel comfortable with, based on past experience, and Wikipedia's admins are no exception.

"Unlike Debian stable, and like Fedora, it's updated fairly frequently so we get a decent rate of package updates for infrastructure..." Use RHEL/CentOs.

RHEL and CentOS have much slower update cycles than Ubuntu (even if a bit faster than Debian). With Ubuntu you have an upgrade path that gives you six-month-old software at worst, if you want it. If you stick only to LTS you have software as old as RHEL/CentOS, but nothing obligates you to do that: you can trade off between having to upgrade constantly and having new software easily available, upgrading every six months or every five years as you feel inclined. If you use RHEL/CentOS, you have old packages, period.

Besides Ubuntu updates have their fair share of screw ups too or did we already forget about the OpenSSL fiasco *COUGH* http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/13/1533212 *COUGH* ?

That's not upgrade-related, or at least not meaningfully. The breakage was a year and a half before the fix, and would likely have made it into stable version of even a fairly slow release cycle. That was a case of poor maintenance by Debian, not a case of updating incautiously. Even Debian stable might have been struck if the change had happened to be made a year or two later than it was.

" ...and Canonical actually puts out security updates for a decent amount of time." Have you seen the CentOs roadmap ? http://dag.wieers.com/blog/files/centos-intro-1.3-en.png So that means support until 2014. Thats one year longer then Ubuntu LTS, which goes to 2013 !!

That point was against Fedora, not CentOS. CentOS 1) has release cycles that are too slow, 2) is not the same version of Linux that the admins are using on their desktops. Fedora, on the other hand, 1) is so cutting-edge that it can break, and 2) does not provide long-term support (in the form of security updates, not talking about paid support here). Ubuntu occupies a happy middle ground: you can upgrade quite frequently if you like (although not as frequently as Fedora), or you can upgrade quite infrequently if you like (although not as infrequently as CentOS). It's quite stable (probably as stable as CentOS), but fairly up-to-date (although not as up-to-date as Fedora).

You have, it appears, attempted to interpret points made against Fedora or Debian as being the points made against CentOS and RHEL, which they aren't. I notice you addressed four out of the five points, skipping the one substantive objection to CentOS.

I can't begin to phantom why this post is +5 informative.

Because the mods probably figured out (I'm not sure if you have) that the poster is Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation and the one ultimately responsible for the choice of Ubuntu.

Re:And?

[Ngarrang]

How is this news?

Well they either should have stuck with 7.10 or waited for 8.10.

That's news...

8.04 is a long-term release. In the world of servers, that counts for something. Also, there were changes from 7.10 to 8.04 that were probably things Wikimedia wanted to take advantage of.

Is this really a good idea?

[martinw89]

I love Ubuntu, I've been playing with different distros since early 2000 and when I tried Ubuntu in 2006, I got hooked. I've been using it as my OS ever since. I've switched my parents to Ubuntu because I find it easy to administer and it makes it easy for me to help them. Plus, I can SSH into their box to solve problems remotely. Bottom line, as a desktop distribution I love Ubuntu. It may not work for everyone, but for me it's a perfect fit.

But as a server distro, I'm not so sure. I'm surprised that Wikimedia didn't go with a distribution that's more established for server needs.

Re:Is this really a good idea?

[pak9rabid]

But as a server distro, I'm not so sure. I'm surprised that Wikimedia didn't go with a distribution that's more established for server needs.

As a server distro, it rocks. I've migrated from Gentoo to Ubuntu Server for my home server and I've never looked back. As for enterprise-level distros, I'd have to go with Debian. There's not a whole ton of differences between Debian and Ubuntu Server, but I would trust Debian's 'stable' repositories over Ubuntu's repositories in a mission-critical setting, as the packages in Debian's repositories seem to be more hardened as opposed to Ubuntu's packages, which tend to be more cutting-edge.

Re:Is this really a good idea?

[JeepFanatic]

I'll probably get modded Troll for this but whatever ...

But as a server distro, I'm not so sure. I'm surprised that Wikimedia didn't go with a distribution that's more established for server needs.

If you have an argument to make about the OS's merits as a server then make it based on facts. Tell us why you don't think it's a perfect fit on the server. Don't just say "I'm not so sure" and leave it hanging there. Support your position with something that can be argued.

Re:Is this really a good idea?

[martinw89]

OK, I agree. That was a poor argument. Here's my specific points:

• Bleeding edge packages. For a desktop OS, this is great in my humble opinion. I would be pretty pissed if I was using OpenOffice 2.0 and Firefox 1.5. But for a server, I'd rather use packages that have been around for a little while and have been seen to be stable. More like Debian's policy.
• Ubuntu, being a desktop focused distribution, gets a lot of attention on desktop related problems. That's great, but I'd like a distribution which focuses on enterprise style server problems more than desktop issues. If you check out launchpad, you're going to see tons of bugs related to desktop issues. Community support is also geared towards the desktop.
• Convenience and security are a well known tradeoff. I don't have solid proof on this one, so I apologize if I'm just making stuff up. But I would imagine Ubuntu does some things for convenience that could provide security issues. Then again they might rectify these in the Server edition. Again, correct me if I'm wrong about this point.

Re:Is this really a good idea?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, allow me to be an ass and rephrase. Making the choice at enterprise-level in a mission-critical setting, you would go with what seems to be more hardened? Thanks for contributing.

Re:Is this really a good idea?

[Drew M.]

Just another person who's dealt with Ubuntu in a large enterprise setting. I don't mean for these comments to be flamebait, but it may come off that way. I'd just like to see more attention put toward them.

1. Incomplete automated installer. You can do nearly anything from Redhat's kickstart, but working with d-i doing partitioning, especially more advanced lvm and software raid setup is nearly impossible without some custom scripting hacks outside of d-i. Also, don't even ask what happens when you have a usb disk (or even just a card reader) plugged into the machine at automated install time, guess what gets recognized as /dev/sda... Speaking of which, since Ubuntu has their own installer, they don't support, fix, or use d-i, which means a lot of the time you will run into other random d-i installation bugs.

2. Ldap/krb5 stability. It's quite obvious that Ubuntu doesn't put a priority on testing or stability patching any of this, and in large scale deployments it just falls over on the server and client side.

3. Nobody in the enterprise uses cds or dvds to install, everything is automated from PXE, which means creating a local mirror to install from. Guess how difficult it is to mirror the "pool" directory without also getting the packages from every other version of Ubuntu. Yes you could use a script that parses the Packages file and only downloads the packages you need, but that just leaves more room for errors. Why can't I just have a single directory I can rsync?

4. When doing large scale automated apt-get update; apt-get upgrade tasks, ask what happens to apt-get/dpkg when a postinstall script fails, or there were file conflicts. Yes, the machine never fetches updates again. dpkg --configure -a and dpkg --purge --force-reinstreq and apt-get -f install are your manual cleanup friends. Also don't ask what happens when a user wants to install a local package with dpkg -i. Yes it prints an error, but unknowingly to the user the package actually gets half installed and breaks the automated update jobs. Why isn't there a --force flag to prevent this from happening?

5. When patching packages, there's at least 8 different ways a diff could be included in the sources. Here's a incomplete list of a few different schemes I've found over the years:
- Just drop the patches into patches/
- Just drop the patches into a non-standard patches/ directory
- Drop the patches into patches/ and add it to 00list
- Drop the patches into patches/ and manually patch the source yourself
- Edit the rules file and add in the patches manually

They really needs to adopt a single patching format, rather than quilt, dpatch, dbs, cdbs, and a bunch of other minor ones.

The sad part about this, is nearly all of these issues also exist in upstream Debian. I'd love to see these get fixed. I'd like more choices that I can run in the enterprise.

Re:Is this really a good idea?

[petermgreen]

uess how difficult it is to mirror the "pool" directory without also getting the packages from every other version of Ubuntu.
Not too hard you just have to use the right tool, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Debmirror

Why can't I just have a single directory I can rsync?
IIRC the main reason debian introduce the pool structure is to allow packages to be shared between versions (particularlly testing and unstable) and therefore reduce the archive size.

Didn't read the article up there, McFly?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's right up there at the top of the page giving the Ubuntu version as 8.04, which is called Hardy Heron, which BTW is an LTS release (Long Term Support).

8.04 is rock-solid stable and has all the stuff in it to be a lean, mean, yet well-equipped server platform right from the base install.

I've been running Hardy Heron since May 2008 without a problem, after switcing from being a long time SuSE/OpenSuSE user.

Not so happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Another one has fallen for the hype about Ubuntu. You have to remember that that popular does not always equal good. But then again, what is good depends on what you see in it. Personally it only caused me headaches because it got bugs and issues that were long resolved in other distros, like utf8 support (yes, it has it now, but it did not by default in 6.x), does not want to support /boot on xfs, did not do 64-bit correctly until recently either, and to add my personal opinion, the defaults suck -- the Xresources database is practically empty, meaning Alt- does not work in xterm/mcedit, and the "less" pager does not automatically use lesspipe meaning displaying a .gz file will get me garbage whereas on fed it will autodecompress (now everything may have its place, but when was the last time you wanted to look at binary .gz output with a pager...)

Re:Not so happy

[Ash-Fox]

So, the majority of the issues you had are no longer a issue.

(now everything may have its place, but when was the last time you wanted to look at binary .gz output with a pager...)

Oh God, say it isn't so, I have to add "gzip -d |" to the command list!

Seriously... You can change the defaults if it really bothers you that much.

Re:Not so happy

[Constantine XVI]

Last I checked, zless handles gzipped text files just fine, and it ships in Ubuntu.

Re:Not so happy

[brion]

Strangely enough, none of the things that bother you are an issue for us. Either they were fixed over two years ago, or they don't affect us.

homogeneity

[Anonymous Coward]

homogeneousness (homogeneity?) is bad, wether its open source or not.

Re:homogeneity

[David Gerard]

Uh, whuh? You've obviously never had to herd a large number of machines. Most stuff running the same OS is the only way to live - jumpstart/kickstart, standard patch clusters, one local package repository server, that sorta thing.

(I do in fact do this for a living. Standardised Solaris 10 servers with Blastwave for the open-source toys, CentOS 4 when we need Linux, local repository servers for both. A few Windows boxes with a locally-served copy of Cygwin on them. May I heartily recommend Cygwin on any Windows servers you may be stuck with - it makes life so much saner.)

Re:homogeneity

[brion]

Overall monoculture is bad; consistent setup and administration in a single buildout is good.

Re:homogeneity

[raddan]

I dunno. Monoculture is only bad when all of the alternatives are also bad. Then when badness hits, it's limited to one particular installation for architectural reasons. Since you deploy large numbers of identical/similar machines, you also know how much easier it is to minimize attack surfaces when your software set is uniform.

Re:And?

[Spatial]

My finger hurts too. You know those bits of skin just above and behind your nails? Part on that the left side of my left index finger has gotten torn a little and now it's like a flap. The problem is, I don't need to alter the aerodynamics of my finger because I can't fly. It's really just painful, instead of useful, like on an aeroplane.

Actually, does anyone know how that happens?

Re:And?

[dslbrian]

...or waited for 8.10.

I would definitely have stuck with an 8.04 LTS. I recently tried kubuntu 8.10, and the dual combination of the new Xorg ditching its config file (uh why?!? just to annoy the hell out of people, that's why), and KDE4 changing everything else just about drove me mad.

The KDE4 change reminded me of when Redhat dumped sawfish for that f-ing atrocity called Metacity (which in turn drove me to KDE). After the 8.10 nightmare, reinstalled 8.04, and now I'm hoping the LTS lasts long enough to make everything else settle out or go away.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are called cuticles :-) Which is a total misnomer because there is nothing cute about them.

Reason why

[Anonymous Coward]

This was because the patch system got really stupid and eventually caused one of the load balancers to die unexpectedly so they standardised all their platforms

Re:And?

[cyphercell]

the cuticle doesn't properly detach itself from the nail as it grows. The nail's growth slowly tears your skin apart.

Re:And?

[EvilRyry]

I'm sure Xorg and KDE4 are high on their priority list for their web servers.

Re:And?

[David Gerard]

You wouldn't believe how much nicer Squid and MySQL look in Compiz.

Re:And?

[dslbrian]

I'm sure Xorg and KDE4 are high on their priority list for their web servers.

The point being 8.10, not being an LTS, they shoveled a whole bunch of radically new stuff in. That's always great fun on a server, yes?

this is a proud day...

[hesaigo999ca]

This is a good day for being a penguin and even better day if your colors are orange.
If I had stocks in ubuntu, I would be doing a happy happy joy joy dance

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

BUT WHO WAS DOOR?

Simple is good

[ducomputergeek]

Right now where I work was running 6 different OS's. Right now all the Point-of-sale system are XP-based, the laptops are a mix of Dell's and Apple, the router/firewall runs off Gentoo, and they have a couple OpenSuSE workstations.

On the server side, the webservers were a mix of Debian, the application server and database server were both OpenSuSE. They remote monitor a number of digital signage/interactive kiosks using another Linux package (Debain-based I believe). At the end of the day each system had it's quirks based on the developer who worked on that particular project. Bottom line it was a mess.

It was time for new hardware and the shop is going to OSX for everything in house, Mac Mini's & MBP's, shifting to a customPOS system based on OpenBravoPOS running off a Mac Mini and then all our remotely hosted items are being shifted to all FreeBSD based servers managed by Pair.

End result is that my life becomes much easier and we can shift my attention towards development projects instead of maintaining the system.

Re:Simple is good

[moosesocks]

I need to overwhelmingly emphasize that OS X Server is *barely* suitable for a production environment.

I'm a big fan of Apple, and do appreciate the nice GUIs that they provided with OS X Server. However, it's not particularly stable, tends to break at odd intervals, and ignores many common Unix conventions, making it a huge pain to perform certain tasks, or do things not supported by the GUI.

It's a nice start, but I'd be very cautious about adopting it across your entire server infrastructure. Using it to host certain Apple-y apps might be fine, though I'd rely upon Linux/BSD for serious server tasks, especially if you already have the staff/experience to do so.

Re:Simple is good

[Espen]

Having run infrastructure on MacOS X, Linux with some windows boxes thrown in, in desperation, since MacOS X was MacOS Server and nothing else, my observation would be that there is now not much distance between MacOS X and Linux in terms of stability, and while our MacOS X boxes are painful to upgrade in major upgrades (10.X to 10.X+1), our Linux boxes are more likely to break during minor update. And if you are in any kind of heterogeneous environment, the work that Apple has done for you to make things 'just work' between platforms is nothing short of saving you a life-time of aggravation.

Re:Simple is good

[raddan]

I agree. It is *much* harder to integrate Apple's stuff into a heterogeneous network than Linux, despite all of Apple's claims.

Re:Simple is good

[Anonymous Coward]

But OS X has dtrace... and dtrace is sex when your trying to debug your environment...

I think dho of FreeBSD stopped working on dtrace after his cat died. So the only other major OS I know that has it is (Open)Solaris.

Re:Simple is good

[moosesocks]

I don't want to hate on Apple, because I truly do believe that their hearts are in the right places. However, it's definitely true that they still have a ways to go in terms of their server products. I feel that all too often, Apple products can be described as "Great, revolutionary, and amazing, BUT...." -- This is especially true of their server products.

Similarly, if they *ever* want to be taken seriously, they need to start ironing the bugs out of their directory access implementations. The fact that these would break with security/OS updates, and stay broken for months on end is insane. Microsoft would be burned alive if they let something like that slide.

I love Apple, but God, they seriously need to improve their standing with the IT world. A good first step would be to start working with, rather than against the Unix paradigms that their OS is built on top of.

A large component of Microsoft's success is that they are second-to-none in terms of catering to developers and sysadmins, even though their products themselves are decidedly second-tier. Until Apple catches up, or the Linux world produces a Wikipedia for all things linux (and maintains it at a high degree of quality), Microsoft will continue to dominate the business world.

Re:Simple is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to overwhelmingly emphasize that Windows 2003 Server is *barely* suitable for a production environment.

I'm a big fan of Microsoft, and do appreciate the nice GUIs that they provided with Windows 2003 Server. However, it's not particularly stable, tends to break at odd intervals, and ignores many common Unix conventions, making it a huge pain to perform certain tasks, or do things not supported by the GUI.

It's a nice start, but I'd be very cautious about adopting it across your entire server infrastructure. Using it to host certain Windows-y apps might be fine, though I'd rely upon Linux/BSD for serious server tasks, especially if you already have the staff/experience to do so.

And so... ?

[JulianoR]

The article is very fallacious. So, they had a mess of different versions of RedHat and Fedora... they moved to Ubuntu and the problem is solved.

Er... How does this solve the problem at all? Moving to Ubuntu will magically prevent further mess of versions? Couldn't they just upgrade the older installations to newer versions? If stability and costs were problems, why didn't they consider CentOS? They would be able to retain the experience already built by using RedHat and Fedora.

This switch looks much more likely to be personal preference than any stability or cost arguments.

Re:And so... ?

[Tango42]

The problem isn't a mess of versions (although that doesn't help), it a mess of operating systems. Once you have everything running on one distro you can just go round upgrading everything at one time (well, not exactly one time, since something has to keep running the site). Trying to keep up-to-date with new releases from lots of different distros is far harder.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Xorg and KDE4 are high on their priority list for their web servers.

The point being 8.10, not being an LTS, they shoveled a whole bunch of radically new stuff in. That's always great fun on a server, yes?

I'm sure that's really relevant to a professional business regarding their production servers, yes?

Re:And?

[Sockatume]

Hey, it worked for Vista.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL with 0 commercial support

[joe_cot]

You'd think that, but consider this:

If you install Redhat, it costs money, because they support it.

If you install CentOS, it's free, but if you need support, there is none. You can get support from third parties, but not Red Hat. To get support from RedHat, they'd need to move from CentOS to RHEL.

If you install Ubuntu, it's free. If you need commercial support, you can pay Canonical. They could, for example, pay Canonical for a year, and, if they can handle it on their own, not renew their support contract. They also can choose later to go back to them. That's a lot more freedom than Red Hat can give, and unlike CentOS, they have someone to fall back on if they need help.

I've heard of offshore hosting,

[SMQ]

but where the heck is Ubuntu?!

Whither OpenSolaris?

[LaminatorX]

OK, now I'm curious. The summary mentions a touch of Open Solaris, but the article doesn't. What did they decide to use it for and, more importantly, why did they make the exception?

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[johnjones]

bet its the DB servers

but also would like to know...

regards

John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[brion]

These are on our new image/media-upload fileservers. We're trying out the wonders of ZFS (snapshotting for consistent backups and "rm -rf oops" protection, potentially filesystem-level replication, etc).

Since they're an isolated service type it's not a *huge* burden to have them be a little funky (eg, we don't randomly have an OpenSolaris box in the middle of the Apache/PHP cluster), though if we could do ZFS on Linux without jumping through scary hoops we'd happily to that instead!

We'll try it out for a while, and if we're happy with it we'll keep using it, if not we'll migrate to something else eventually (the machines should as happily run Ubuntu as they do OpenSolaris)

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS when you run out of diskspace on something something like every three months?

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[eric2hill]

FTR, make sure your ZFS pools don't get above 80-85% full. Our 24T pool went from "pretty good" to "abysmal" when we jumped to 91% capacity. I freed up a bunch of snapshots and got us back to 81% and the performance came back.

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[1lus10n]

You guys might want to look at puppet, it makes dealing with large batches of similar but not quite the "same" systems insanely easier.

(ie unix v linux)

Save that if solaris doesnt work for you then you might want to look at using a real storage device, like a Netapp or 3par system.

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nexenta project provides an Ubuntu userland to opensolaris, including apt/dpkg.

Sounds reasonable

[mrv00t]

400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years

Sounds more like Gentoo though.

Re:And?

[HiVizDiver]

Just tear it off...

Warning: Animated grossness, requires QT/QT equivalent, maybe NWS depending on your work environment, but funny as hell nonetheless. And also COMPLETELY offtopic, I'll see you all in -1, Offtopic HELL!!! ;-)

Re:CentOS is free RHEL with 0 commercial support

[pembo13]

Seriously? How are you on Slashdot? You sound like the typical manager. Are you saying that there are no commercial entities which provide support for Centos for a fee? If you want to make the argument that there is no first party support, fine. But don't say that there is no support for Centos for those who want to pay.

Woot!

[Echelon One]

Your tax (deductible) dollars at work!

automation

[viridari]

I wonder if they're going to take it to the next step and use a tool like cfengine or puppet to manage all of the servers in a consistent fashion. I've found that two sysadmins can effectively manage hundreds of servers using such tools, and without putting in more than a standard 40 hour work week.

Re:automation

[brion]

General mass management tends to be done via a distributed ssh shell wrapper. There's not much mass management that needs to be done, usually, other than "update your PHP source/config files and restart the web/proxy/whatever server" or "go install updated packages".

The fun comes when individual servers are borked in some way and you have to beat them back into shape.

We're looking into puppet, but haven't deployed it yet.

Re:automation

[ToasterMonkey]

I always thought the point of mass management tools is to minimize the chances of individual servers from becoming borked in some way. The idea is to do things consistently across the board so you don't end up with a bunch of one-off servers that eventually become a nightmare to maintain.

Also, I think if you had better tools you'd see there's a lot more you could do with them, not necessarily changing things, but querying for instance.
In the name of consistency, say you want to know which servers have broken sendmail.cf files with no smart relay set or something like that. x 100+ servers, now that starts to suck. Verifying and fixing things like that are not uncommon when you're trying to maintain a large consistent environment. .. and you SHOULD try to maintain consistency in large environments if you know what's good for you :)

Simple SSH shell wrappers are pretty rough tools to do that kind of work with :\

Re:And?

[Matt Perry]

8.04 is a long-term release. In the world of servers, that counts for something.

According to their web site, it's only supported for five years. You must have some bizzaro-world definition of "long term."

Re: Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu

[nick graham]

[citation needed]

Re:And?

[aztracker1]

Regarding software, 5 years is a *VERY* long term.

whoa.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to play timestamps, my first recorded edit was December 2002

BIG, big fan of your work. Your edits are bar-none, the most fappable out there. When do you plan on adding more pics to your profile?

Re:And?

[AmberBlackCat]

A nail clipper works better to remove the "flaps". And applying cocoa butter or shea butter to the area afterwards, as well as the area between the nail and the finger.

Wow, not Debian?

[TheDarkener]

I'm actually pretty surprised. I know Ubuntu == Debian in a lot of aspects, but... To go to a distro that is *mainly* geared toward the desktop market (I know they have a server version, blah) for something as huge as Wikimedia, I'd think they'd rather go to Debian since it's considered more stable (although maybe more outdated as well). I have been a Debian zealot since the mid 90's and moved my DESKTOP to Ubuntu later on - but still think Debian is a best fit for servers.

Of course, there's always the whole "Ubuntu offers real support contracts" thing. That, in itself, is enough for any larger company to make the choice, right there.

Re:Wow, not Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, Ubuntu is maintained by a for-profit company that sells contracts for support... aimed at the server version. To say that Ubuntu is 'aimed at the desktop' isn't an accurate statement.

Re:Wow, not Debian?

[TheDarkener]

Actually, Canonical is a "sponsor" of Ubuntu, and sells contracts for both server and desktop versions - Ubuntu is maintained by the community as well as them.

Re:And?

[ZarathustraDK]

Seriously, every "Off-topic"-modded post I've seen is only -1.

Perhaps it's for the best, as a -5 offtopc-mod would surely catch the attention of everyone. Oh look at this (_(_) (_|_) (_)_) Da Buttdance!

NO! NOOO! DON'T MOD ME -5 OFF-TOPIC!

Disclaimer: Been drinking too much Chimay tonight.

One exploit to rule them

[mi]

For such a large effort, it seems wild they had so many different distros running in their environment.

Yeah, much better now, that all of their servers can be taken over at once through a single exploit...

Re:CentOS is free RHEL with 0 commercial support

[joe_cot]

Please, offer some suggestions for commercial support for CentOS -- because the companies that I see when I google for centos commercial support are small and extremely shady (including the overused stock photo of a smiling female support tech). I wouldn't be convinced any of those companies could manage servers for an operation as big as Wikipedia.

Not so.

[el americano]

You have the only seniority that matters here:

12369 < 662363

Re:Not so.

[Tango42]

And 662363 799629, so how dare you interrupt?! ;)

Re:Not so.

[Tango42]

What kind of site strips angle brackets from a plain text post?

Re:Not so.

[jacquesm]

this one. I fell for it too a couple of days ago. Quite easy to fix too... wonder why nobody cares.

Re:Not so.

[badpazzword]

The easy fix is under your Options button, "Comment Post Mode" combobox.

Re:And?

[Matt Perry]

Regarding software, 5 years is a *VERY* long term.

For home computer users, yes. Not for businesses.

Re:And?

[Randle_Revar]

It is a lot longer than 1 year

Re:And?

[Randle_Revar]

They did the same thing in 8.04, which is part of why it kind of sucks as a LTS release.

Re:And?

[Randle_Revar]

>new Xorg ditching its config file

You can run xorg without a config file now, but you don't have to (I believe that was also true in xorg 7.3). And every version recently has been making more of the old config file redundant or unneeded. Instead it relies more on autodetection and sane defaults, which is a good thing. But you can still use the config file to override, if needed.

Re:And?

[petermgreen]

Well it's much longer than for the regular ubuntu releases though I agree it's still not really long enough. Redhat's is a couple of years longer but then redhat is a much bigger company than canonical.

Sadly linux's fast evoloution makes it pretty expensive for a distributor to provide good support for a release for a long time.

Re:And?

[mweather]

It is when a new license costs $0.00. Other than deployment costs, there's no reason not to upgrade frequently.

Re: Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu

[kesuki]

nice, but you forgot the big one.

"the neutrality of this article has been disputed"

Re:CentOS is free RHEL with 0 commercial support

[TheBig1]

If you install CentOS, it's free, but if you need support, there is none. You can get support from third parties, but not Red Hat. To get support from RedHat, they'd need to move from CentOS to RHEL.

Ummm... I don't think he's saying there are no commercial entities which support CentOS; he's saying that RedHat does not support it. Which is a very valid thing to point out, may I add...

Cheers

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

The range is -1 to +5

There is no -5 Off topic, but I've heard there is such a thing as the mythical +5 Troll

Re:And?

[linuxpyro]

Jeez, I hate it when that happens.

Re:And?

[RiotingPacifist]

erm breaking wikipedia.

Re:And?

[dslbrian]

But you can still use the config file to override, if needed.

Thanks for that info. All I remember is that when I tried it, the default xorg.conf file was nearly empty, with some ambiguous line that said "whatever you set here is ignored or set elsewhere via autodetect" (or something to that effect). On my config autodetect just doesn't cut it, and I really doubt that it would autodetect some things (such as the need to have backingstore turned on for some of my apps). I tried to find some documentation on Xorg 7.4, but I don't think the docs are updated yet (and at the same time I didn't have a previous xorg.conf to try so I didn't go down that rather obvious route).

Re:And?

[Matt Perry]

It is when a new license costs $0.00. Other than deployment costs, there's no reason not to upgrade frequently.

There is always risk involved when upgrading or deploying systems. Businesses don't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. They will weigh the risks against the benefits and proceed if there is a clear advantage to upgrading. Like the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The cost of licenses can be minuscule compared to deployment costs, so much so that many licenses might as well be $0.00. Deployment costs can be some of your largest costs. How many people will it take to upgrade? What is their cost per hour to the business? Multiply that by the number of people involved. Have you deployed on an identical test system and tested your software to ensure that it will continue to function as required on the new production system? Do you have test scripts so that you can validate that it performs as required? Will you have to make changes to software or hardware to accommodate the upgrade? Will you need to update your documentation? What is your contingency plan should the upgrade fail? What will be the cost to the business if the system is unavailable outside of the deployment window?

Some systems, like SAP, may take years to be deployed throughout an organization. Your favorite distro might reach the end of support before deployment even completes. For other systems, your time line for product upgrades and support may not be entirely within your control. What if your system is part of a product that needs approval from the FDA? With five years of support you may have eaten up three years of that during product development and FDA approval, leaving only two years of support for the OS on your products. That could leave you with a short product lifecycle or mean that you have to perform significant upgrades in the field.

Other operating systems, such as Solaris, Windows, AIX, and HP-UX are supported for 10 and sometimes 12 years. The only saving grace for these enterprise Linux distros is that the source is available. But when the five years are up, then what? Will you still be able to pay Red Hat or Canonical to support your end-of-life Linux distro? What if they have made a business decision not to support end-of-life distros no matter what? If they will support it, it's safe to assume that your support contract will cost more than it did during the previous five years. And if you go somewhere else and hire some linux experts to support your distro, they won't have access to the information that the distro creators have. They won't have the documentation about why certain patches were applied, or specific changes were made, or other internal decisions. You better hope that your new support company is very careful and thorough.

So then, would it have been a better investment to pay for Solaris and 10 years of support, pay for 10 years of Linux support, or pay to upgrade your systems every three to five years? I don't know. It depends on your goals. Clearly Wikipedia likes to move faster than the average business. They seem to be continually upgrading their wiki software and like staying on the leading edge. From reading about their server setup, they appear to have a lot of redundancy and can reduce their risk when upgrading. Three to five years of support for their operating systems is probably sufficient for their needs. But don't let that lull you into thinking that five years is long term.

Look at the *whole* picture.

[mnslinky]

A lot of folks seem to fail to realize that Linux has distributions. The kernel is the core of every linux system. From there, various organizations, Canonical being one of them, package the userland, a package manger, and an update service together, and call it their own. It's how Linux has worked for many years.

That being said, what you're really shopping for when seeking a Linux distribution is all the stuff around the Linux kernel. That is where Wikimedia found the benefit. Regardless the timeline, Canonical offered them a pro-bono support contract, there is evidence of long-term update availability, and an overall 'good' package set.

Also, for the record, Canonical does offer a server-edition of Ubuntu. See their website for more information.

Re:And?

[MikeBabcock]

tbh, mine never tear. They're all nice and even and smooth. Always have been. I have good cuticles ... obviously a more evolved fingernail grower :-)

Re:And?

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Regarding software, 5 years is a *VERY* long term.

For home computer users, yes. Not for businesses.

Compared to microsoft? Server 2003: EOL 2010.

Besides which, you're forgetting this is linux we're talking about. Support runs out? You can open the hood and support it yourself (or pay someone else to do so). It's not like ubuntu would turn down paid support beyond the 5 year lifecycle of an LTS release.

The best distro is Debian

[wikinerd]

Debian GNU/Linux is the distro for real men. That's what I use for desktops and laptops (lenny/testing with a bit of sid/unstable and custom things) and servers (etch/stable with some custom things) and it works extremely well. Debian-based distros are not the real thing. Debian is the real thing and that's what real admins use. It's a shame that Wikipedia overlooked Debian. Some people may think that other distros have "predistable releases" but that's a myth, because you can always get some new stuff from the testing and unstable branches, which contrary to their name are working very well. When all other distros and all other OSes die, Debian will be alive and totally ready to run all PCs and servers with extreme stability and security. I think that they chose another distro just because they didn't researched Debian's advantages well enough. See also this interesting bit here. We, Debian people, should help them understand why Debian is the best distro out there and why it should run their servers.

ZFS runs on FreeBSD too

[cpghost]

though if we could do ZFS on Linux without jumping through scary hoops we'd happily to that instead!

How about test-driving the early ZFS support in FreeBSD 7? It's already there and can only get better with time and exposure, esp. from Wikipedia! Plus managing a bunch of FreeBSD ZFS hosts is (IMHO) way easier than managing OpenSolaris servers, esp. for people with a Linux admin background.

Wikipedia dumps

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we going to finally get English Wikipedia dumps now??!

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

You METROSEXUALS leave our cuticules alone!!

Re:And?

[alien9]

ubuntu!=redhat
yum || apt

nothing related to WM look and feel.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

is there a reasonably effective way the common person might prevent that?

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot the professional...

Re:And?

[jabuzz]

I would point out that RedHat now offer seven years support on their OS, for at least RHEL5 if not RHEL4 as well.

I would also point out that *any* computer hardware that is over seven years old is on it's last legs. Many of the components within will be well beyond their design life, and the whole thing could go tits up at any moment.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL with 0 commercial support

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, offer some suggestions for commercial support for CentOS -- because the companies that I see when I google for centos commercial support are small and extremely shady (including the overused stock photo of a smiling female support tech). I wouldn't be convinced any of those companies could manage servers for an operation as big as Wikipedia.

As has already been pointed out by others, the bulk of your machines run CentOS, then you buy a minimal amount of RHEL licenses.

That wasn't hard, now was it?

Believe it or not, there actually are a lot of organizations that do just that, so quit being a hardheaded twit calling people who don't agree with you names while you demonstrate your ignorance: support companies don't "manage servers".

Re:And?

[Bert64]

I have several systems like that too, for instance if i connect a computer to my TV it thinks it can only do 1080i, but you can force it to do 1080p with the xorg.conf file, i cant get windows or osx to do 1080p on that screen.

Re:And?

[setagllib]

Enterprise-class server hardware tends to be built to last longer, and is maintained and monitored constantly to ensure it's still working within acceptable bounds. And if it's not, it can be field serviced for much less than the cost of upgrading a distro version.

Nail clipping howto

[cyphercell]

1. gentlemen will want to keep their nails trimmed short, approx. 1/8th - 1/16th of inch below the tip of the finger.
2. ladies will generally not need this howto and will not be addressed specifically.
3. file the sharp corners on your nails to a smooth edge.
4. use the edge of the nail file to press the cuticle away from the tip of your finger
5. if the cuticle will not separate. File the cuticle down to the surface of the nail.
6. If you still have problems with torn cuticles you may want to try using moisturizer. this will help to elasticize the cuticle, making it more likely to stretch and less likely to tear.

If all else fails you can a)get a girlfriend to take care of your nails (she will also likely want to pluck your eyebrows) b) ask your mom (awkward, might hurt her feelings that you don't already know also) c) get a pedicure and pay close attention, ask questions, treat it like going to the dentist.

Re:And?

[No Xplode]

Most businesses go bankrupt in 3 years time, so...