Server Distributions

[Steven Hildreth]

> Gentoo is nice, but either you let it get behind or you risk upgrades that
> will break things.  The etc-update system does not adequately discriminate
> between files that are normally customized for the local installation and
> files that are not usually changed by end users, leading to a lot of work
> sorting out configurations every time you update.  Gentoo also has wierd,
> non-standard configuration issues - like the DHCP client over-writing the NTP
> configuration by default.

I use Gentoo on all my servers (and several workstations) and once the
Portage system (and its new /etc/portage configuration) is properly
understood and put into place the management of the _cfg files is very
logical and effecient.

I agree that Gentoo does do some strange things (like the named
package using /etc/bind and then having /etc/init.d/named (versus
/etc/init.d/bind which seems more logical to me)) but I think its
positives outway its issues. Positivies (in my opinion) like;
forums.gentoo.org, very active support mailing list, very active IRC
channel, the portage tree is updated daily, package management as a
whole works very well, excellent collection of install and configure
docs.

I think it becomes the 'do what you know' scenario, my meaning is that
if both you and your client are familiar with Redhat - stick with that
and use Fedora.

Regards,
Steve