What flavor of Linux would you run on it? Mainly I'm looking for someone with experience running Linux on this machine but opinions are welcome as well.
I built a simlilar P3-600 last year to do the same sort of thing. Just wanted to point out the obvious, because it didn't hit me until I'd had make and gcc running for a couple of days straight: Don't use Gentoo. I ended up using Ubuntu Server, but there's not much different between it and Debian. In some cases, Debian actually is more up-to-date than Ubuntu with regard to some server-side applications, like the IlohaMail PHP webmail client package. Apparently still is, 8 months later: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ilohamail/+bug/52462 I'd just say go with what you're comfortable with, unless it's mostly compiled from source. -Sean Crago
On 3/12/07, Jeremy Fowler <JFowler@westrope.com> wrote:
Don't use Gentoo.
Why?
Scroll up a bit: "I'd had make and gcc running for a couple of days straight:" It'd be fine to build Gentoo from source if it was a fairly permanent box, and it didn't have to be rolled out any time soon, but I'd rather have: A: (Lord forgive me) a binary, well-tested kernel, given that it's a remote server. B: A distribution where the standard modus operandi was to use binary packages. This affects everything from the docs (rare indeed is the Gentoo doc that doesn't require a source build/astandard USE flags) to the availability of binary packages. I love Gentoo and use it every day at home, but on a lower-end box, and on servers in general, I'd tend to shy away from it. -Sean
Also, want to point out why I went with Canonical's Ubuntu in that particular project: While there were one or two packages that hiccuped when I was testing that box, it was still relatively painless. Decided between LTS Ubuntu and Debian based on Canonical support. New the company wouldn't be around much longer, but didn't know what would happen after the fact/wanted to make sure my successors had access to first-party paid support. -Sean On 3/12/07, cragos@gmail.com <cragos@gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/12/07, Jeremy Fowler <JFowler@westrope.com> wrote:
Don't use Gentoo.
Why?
Scroll up a bit: "I'd had make and gcc running for a couple of days straight:"
It'd be fine to build Gentoo from source if it was a fairly permanent box, and it didn't have to be rolled out any time soon, but I'd rather have: A: (Lord forgive me) a binary, well-tested kernel, given that it's a remote server. B: A distribution where the standard modus operandi was to use binary packages. This affects everything from the docs (rare indeed is the Gentoo doc that doesn't require a source build/astandard USE flags) to the availability of binary packages.
I love Gentoo and use it every day at home, but on a lower-end box, and on servers in general, I'd tend to shy away from it.
-Sean
On Mon, March 12, 2007 14:23, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
Don't use Gentoo.
Why?
The requirement for daily system maintenance and updates would be one good reason. System resources spent rebuilding packages instead of doing what the server is supposed to be doing would be another.
On Mon, March 12, 2007 14:23, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
Don't use Gentoo.
Why?
The requirement for daily system maintenance and updates would be one good reason. System resources spent rebuilding packages instead of doing what the server is supposed to be doing would be another.
Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Mon, March 12, 2007 14:23, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
Don't use Gentoo.
Why?
The requirement for daily system maintenance and updates would be one good reason.
System resources spent rebuilding packages instead of doing what the server is supposed to be doing would be another. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
It depends on how much you know about gentoo. In my opinion, I believe that you can create almost an ideal situation. Given you have one server which is a "BINHOST". You don't "need" install every update that gets pushed into portage. If you're checking the advisories and such you should be able to make a binary and have all your 'child' servers update from the binhost, thus creating a platform which is completely in sync (the children would have a cron to 'emerge world'). The other good thing about running gentoo is that it uses a ports style package management system, like FreeBSD, but just laid out better. So if you're coming from a FreeBSD background, getting into gentoo is not such a huge change. Although, personally, I've ran gentoo on a production server, and didn't care for it. If you're running a single server it doesn't really make a lot of sense unless it's your favorite flavor. I would recommend Redhat enterprise, or an equal to that, but free, is CentOS. Some people that are real 'build from src' junkies would recommend slakware, but i think it's support is way out of date, and the binary packages available are just the same. -SO
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 03:40:40 am Scott Oertel wrote:
Although, personally, I've ran gentoo on a production server, and didn't care for it. If you're running a single server it doesn't really make a lot of sense unless it's your favorite flavor. I would recommend Redhat enterprise, or an equal to that, but free, is CentOS.
Another benefit to Gentoo on servers is that you can more or less entirely omit desktop dependencies like X, ALSA, etc and keep the system at the minimum of what it actually needs.
Luke-Jr wrote:
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 03:40:40 am Scott Oertel wrote:
Although, personally, I've ran gentoo on a production server, and didn't care for it. If you're running a single server it doesn't really make a lot of sense unless it's your favorite flavor. I would recommend Redhat enterprise, or an equal to that, but free, is CentOS.
Another benefit to Gentoo on servers is that you can more or less entirely omit desktop dependencies like X, ALSA, etc and keep the system at the minimum of what it actually needs. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
That also reminds me about gentoo's hardened project, for more hardened security you can enabled that flag in the make.conf, this is beneficial for server environments. -SO
That also reminds me about gentoo's hardened project, for more hardened security you can enabled that flag in the make.conf, this is beneficial for server environments.
Actually, the recommended procedure is to change the make.profile. ln -sf /usr/portage/profiles/hardened/x86/2.6 /etc/make.profile
Jeremy Fowler wrote:
That also reminds me about gentoo's hardened project, for more hardened security you can enabled that flag in the make.conf, this is beneficial for server environments.
Actually, the recommended procedure is to change the make.profile.
ln -sf /usr/portage/profiles/hardened/x86/2.6 /etc/make.profile
Yeah, that's correct actually. I haven't played with it much, but i hear good things. -SO
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 09:13, Scott Oertel wrote:
Jeremy Fowler wrote:
That also reminds me about gentoo's hardened project, for more hardened security you can enabled that flag in the make.conf, this is beneficial for server environments.
Actually, the recommended procedure is to change the make.profile.
ln -sf /usr/portage/profiles/hardened/x86/2.6 /etc/make.profile
Yeah, that's correct actually. I haven't played with it much, but i hear good things.
I hear it doesn't work with 2.6 or some other useful stuff, so I don't use it.
Hardened has had 2.6 support for quite some time (as you can see from the profile path). However, they still don't currently support GCC 4.1. Something to do about the Stack Smashing Protector (SSP) being completely redesigned. They're working on it, but hardened development is quite slow. -----Original Message----- From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Luke -Jr Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 10:35 AM To: kclug@kclug.org Subject: Re: Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server? On Tuesday 13 March 2007 09:13, Scott Oertel wrote:
Jeremy Fowler wrote:
That also reminds me about gentoo's hardened project, for more hardened security you can enabled that flag in the make.conf, this is beneficial for server environments.
Actually, the recommended procedure is to change the make.profile.
ln -sf /usr/portage/profiles/hardened/x86/2.6 /etc/make.profile
Yeah, that's correct actually. I haven't played with it much, but i hear good things.
I hear it doesn't work with 2.6 or some other useful stuff, so I don't use it. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 01:47:18 am Luke-Jr wrote:
Another benefit to Gentoo on servers is that you can more or less entirely omit desktop dependencies like X, ALSA, etc and keep the system at the minimum of what it actually needs.
I've run a number of RPM based servers that didn't have X or ALSA. I've had problems with gentoo wanting to support wacom drawing tablets for almost any application I tried to install - including documentation packages!
On Monday 12 March 2007 10:40:40 pm Scott Oertel wrote:
Given you have one server which is a "BINHOST". You don't "need" install every update that gets pushed into portage. If you're checking the advisories and such you should be able to make a binary and have all your 'child' servers update from the binhost, thus creating a platform which is completely in sync (the children would have a cron to 'emerge world').
So if you have a large enough operation where you are doing daily maintenance anyway, time spent on a daily basis analyzing the advisories and deciding which ones you actually need pays off. In my experience, you will eventually need to install the packages you would ordinarily choose to ignore because future packages will have (sometimes bogus) dependencies on them. The release system assumes that you always install all updates. This is another example of the resources Gentoo requires. A BINHOST server, dedicated to building and distributing packages. Binary distributions, on the other hand, provide that service for you.
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 09:14, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
This is another example of the resources Gentoo requires. A BINHOST server, dedicated to building and distributing packages. Binary distributions, on the other hand, provide that service for you.
That's the difference between an OS/distribution and a meta-OS, which Gentoo is. Just don't think of Gentoo as an OS, but rather an OS builder.
Also, you don't HAVE to compile everything from scratch during installs. Gentoo has had Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP) Packages available for quite some time now. They are a snapshot of prebuilt packages people can use during install rather than build their own. The only downside is that the packages aren't maintained and are only created during every release. Which is about twice a year. So you would have to keep up on the security issues and build new packages as they come out. However, you don't have to emerge the entire world. `glsa-check -p affected` from app-portage/gentoolkit will emerge those packages with known security holes. If you do come across some dependence issues or broken packages, say a package is linked to a specific library version. `revdep-rebuild -av`, also from app-portage/gentoolkit, scans all your binaries for missing libraries, figures out which package the binary belongs, and reemerge those ebuilds. No more broken packages... I would have to agree that on a slower server, building from source is less than ideal. However, you can always do it during off-peak hours. If you kill the emerge process, you can always start it back up where it left off with the `emerge --resume`. Also, you can use ccache, which is a compiler cache utility. http://gentoo-wiki.com/Ccache "It uses the GCC -E switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. The effect is that packages frequently compile 5-10 times faster than they would otherwise. The first time that you emerge a package after setting up ccache, there will be a very slight increase in its compilation time, but thereafter (when the compilation is cached), you will notice significant reductions." Gentoo "Best Practices" http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Maintain_Gentoo_-_%22Best_Practices%22
"less than ideal" is an understatement. I tried to install Gentoo on a PIII-500 and it took a week of evenings to keep checing on it and approving different items and setting USE flags, etc. I wanted to say I'd done it, so I did and I hated it. I have no fond memories of looking back on it or anything other than it was a complete waste of time and electricity. Tons of reading, tons of little tweaker custom command lines to get things to work. In the end, no faster or no more useable than a Debian server install or any other distro that took only one evening. On 3/13/07, Jeremy Fowler <> wrote:
<snip>
I would have to agree that on a slower server, building from source is less than ideal. However, you can always do it during off-peak hours. If you kill the emerge process, you can always start it back up where it left off with the `emerge --resume`. <snip>
Gentoo "Best Practices" http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Maintain_Gentoo_-_%22Best_Practices%22
Well, I can understand that. I would hate to compile everything from scratch under that environment and if that were my only experience I could understand how that would make you sour to Gentoo. I would recommend using the x86 GRP packages on older hardware. However, on today's newer systems compile time is greatly reduced and you know your utilizing the full potential of your system whenever you ebuild. Besides, once you get your system setup with X, you can have your ebuild run in the background in a terminal window while you go about your business. Large ebuilds can be done at night while your sleeping. Reading and tweaking? Custom Command lines? What Linux OS doesn't require any of those? ________________________________ From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Brian Kelsay Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 10:01 AM To: kclug@kclug.org Subject: Re: Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server? "less than ideal" is an understatement. I tried to install Gentoo on a PIII-500 and it took a week of evenings to keep checing on it and approving different items and setting USE flags, etc. I wanted to say I'd done it, so I did and I hated it. I have no fond memories of looking back on it or anything other than it was a complete waste of time and electricity. Tons of reading, tons of little tweaker custom command lines to get things to work. In the end, no faster or no more useable than a Debian server install or any other distro that took only one evening.
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 09:50, Jeremy Fowler wrote:
Also, you can use ccache, which is a compiler cache utility. http://gentoo-wiki.com/Ccache
ccache is really intended for developers. How many times do you expect to recompile the same exact code?
Your right, if you use the GRP then ccache is practically useless. However, if you do decide to ebuild all your own then ccache can greatly speed up glsa-check and revdep-rebuild. Since you would have cache copies of those packages and would only need to compile the diffs... -----Original Message----- From: kclug-bounces@kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] On Behalf Of Luke -Jr Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 10:41 AM To: kclug@kclug.org Subject: Re: Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server? ccache is really intended for developers. How many times do you expect to recompile the same exact code?
participants (7)
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Brian Kelsay -
cragos＠gmail.com -
Jeremy Fowler -
Jonathan Hutchins -
Luke -Jr -
Luke-Jr
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Scott Oertel