Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server?

[Scott Oertel]

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.
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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slakware, but i think it's support is way out of date, and the binary 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