[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Martyn Welch]

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On Tuesday 08 Jun 2004 13:51, Ken Hough wrote:

> >>WRT manual hacking, you will remember at the last LUG meeting, you hand
> >>edited the 'inittab' files on the terminals with very successful
> >>results. All three terminals are running SuSE.
> >
> > I realise that, I just prefer not to do much of this kind of hacking,
> > it's hard to keep track of the changes made and I usually end up loosing
> > them after a reinstall...
>
> You would loose changes after a full reinstallation of any distro. I
> guess you mean an update.
>
> Ken
>

No, reinstall. That's why I don't like to do a lot of hacking about :)

I've tried to start saving changed files into a folder in my home directory to 
remind me, but I usually forget after a while...

> >>I have no problems if [Debian] turns out to be the best choice for the
> >>LUG server, but let's have discussions based on facts. At this stage I
> >>still have reservations, mainly wrt the use of 'old' (Woody)or unproven
> >>(Sarge) distros and to the need to be familier with [Debian] to be able
> >>to manage it. If you or Andy are not around, who else knows [Debian]?
> >>

The thing is, which ever distro we chose someone is going to need to be 
familiar with it and I doubt we will find a distro everyone is familiar with.

> >>I believe it's worth looking at what distros the industrial heavyweights
> >>are going with.
> >
> > Debian is generally concidered to be one of the best distributions for
> > servers, this is primarily what it is aimed at. It's extremely stable
> > when the stable branch is used, testing os often concidered as stable as
> > many of the other distros. Don't forget Debian also has unstable and
> > experiemental distributions as well.
>
>  From what I can find in a quick scan through the ads., a lot of
> professional server boxes are set up with Red Hat. So far I haven't
> discovered any specific mention of Debian. In the 64 bit field SuSE
> figures.
>

Granted, however Redhat Advanced Server has (and requires) a support license 
and this is why most companies use it.

> WRT stability, It seems to me unlikely that IBM, HP, Novell, etc would
> choose other than Debian if it had clear advantages.
>

Debian is a community based distribution, a very stable one. New versions are 
released as and when very high quality checks are passed, however this 
happens in a rather loose time frame and leads to a very stable but low 
feature distribution.

Redhat provide commercial support and as far as I know try to keep reasonably 
up-to-date in terms of software revisions, so as to incorporate as many new 
features as possible in order to stay commercially competitive. This however 
does tend to lower stability a bit.

IBM, HP and Novell need to show off flashy new functionality to get people to 
buy their machines/software and companies buying software/ machines generally 
want big fat support contracts in place.

> Are we to look backwards to an old and dated distro or forward to where
> Linux is going? After all, the Folly server won't be supporting NASA.
>

No it doesn't need to support NASA, however NASA probably have a dedicated 
team working 24-7 (or at least on call 24-7) to maintain their servers.

This server needs to be built and used with minimal change in features and 
minimal maintenance. If woody has the features it's probably by far the most 
stable distribution out there.

To be honest I know only a little indeed about maintaining Debian, I don't use 
it as much as Mandrake, however it is generally regarded as being extremely 
solid. As someone else has pointed out, for a web server security is _the_ 
most important attribute.

Martyn

- -- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey.html
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