[Sussex] A funny thing happened on the way to the Net

[Paul Graydon]

> In this morning's surfing I read an article [1] that puts 
> Debian a strong second and Fedora third as the Linux distros 
> used on Web Hosting systems.  Red Hat was first - no surprise 
> there. But isn't it nice to see that Debian, a community run 
> project with no company behind it, placed so highly?
> 
> What surprised me the most was Gentoo's showing.  Now before 
> you hit the reply button and cause me to put on my asbestos 
> suit (please don't, it's just back from the cleaners after 
> having the last set of burn marks removed) I'm not getting at 
> Gentoo.  Gentoo is a distro that I think as targeted at 
> developers, or people who want access to (or close to) the 
> cutting edge.

Gentoo is far from cutting edge.  Heck, they've only just unmasked GCC
3.4!  Whilst it definitely keeps up to date and the masked packages are
generally bleeding edge, I've found their testing methodology to be
fairly in depth and reliable.  I've yet to have a stable package do
anything but what it says it'll do on the box, nor crash any other
application.
Whilst installing Gentoo is a bit of a slog in comparison to some out of
the box installs (a day or two in my experience compared with about an
hour to do a RHES4 install) I've found its approach to be refreshing.
Emerge is a tool I'd hate to be without, no arseing about with circular
dependancies with RPM files or the hassle of manually downloading the
source for each program and installing it one by one.  Single command
and away it goes.  I'd use Debian and apt-get but I do prefer to be able
to have more up to date hardware in my boxes and not have to jump
through several dozen hoops just to get it to work.
One of the most refreshing things for me about Gentoo is that everything
is exactly where it should be.  No random moving of, say, config files
from their programmer documented locations,  I can go to any *nix HOW-TO
and be about 99% confident that the files it tells me to edit will be
exactly where they're supposed to be.  That's something that can't be
said for RedHat, Suse, or even Slackware (another Distro I like)

To be honest what surprises me most is that Fedora is that high in the
list.  Fedora is way more bleeding edge, and RedHat have stated quite
clearly they don't recommend it for use on important servers, and make
no guarantees about its stability or performance.  Heck, Fedora Core 4
is running GCC 4 which has a lot of quirks about it and is a lot
stricter about proper code writing.  That seems to  require a good
number of people to re-write their source code properly.  *shudder* I
didn't really get on with FC4 to be honest, but maybe that's just me.  I
got fed up of keep runing slocate any time I needed to edit a config
file!

> How does Red Hat see the competition?  Sure it has three 
> times the share of it's closest commercial rival.  But it is 
> Debian that is kicking at Red Hat's heals.  How does SuSE get 
> a bigger slice of the market when the two distros in front of 
> it are free?

OpenSUSE might encourage a little change on this front if things get
marketed well.  The problem is RH, Debian and Co all have a good weight
of experience and reputation behind them, along with being free.  Suse
is liked, but people still don't like that price point.
Novell in shifting all its Netware facilities over to Open Enterprise
Server (Suse with bells on) may succeed in boosting SUSE's popularity,
if nothing else than within the education environment that Novell still
has a good grip on.
 
> So what do the Debian and Fedora placements represent?  Are there 
> organisations that want a web server but don't want to (or 
> can't afford to) spend the extra money on support?  How many 
> of those systems represent organisations that don't think 
> that the services offered by RH, SuSE, and the like are worth 
> the price charged?

RH is a doddle to install.  My co-worker is 100% Microsoft.  Wouldn't
know what to do with a Linux box if it came up and hit him.  He managed
to install RedHat ES4 on a server without even looking at any
documentation.  A quick delve into the docs and he was able to setup the
ftp server, and set it so a user account uploaded via ftp to the apache
directory.  You can pretty much setup a RH box and never touch it again.
If you're brave and prepared to go a little deeper it doesn't take much
to find instructions out there on how to cron up2date to keep the box
automatically updated (personally I wouldn't do that myself).  Its
possibly the easiest install I've ever done.  I had a server up in my
office at 9 o'clock, and by 1 o'clock it was back down in the rack
having had a complete install done, and had all its packages updated.
The update part took longer than setting it up!