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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!)"
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..
"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,
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 The OS is obsolete.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).
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
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.
ubuntu!=redhat
yum || apt
nothing related to WM look and feel.