View Full Version : Distro musings
Background: I have a new rig coming which is going to be my new server (going in the rack when we move). After planning what I want it to do over the next 12 months or so, for now I'm installing Linux onto it.
Now, I used to use Gentoo for my own Linux servers, but having used ubuntu for my general purpose *nix rigs for a while I'd be happy to use that. However, there are a couple of things pulling me towards CentOS - firstly, I have little exposure to RHEL in the enterprise. The vast majority of our clients fall into the SME category, so they only really have a smattering of Red Hat between them, and they obviously require very little looking after from us. Used a few ESX service consoles as well but that's not the same thing really. Having a good opportunity to familiarise myself with CentOS is one driver, and the other is that using a CentOS 4 minimal x86 server install, the memory footprint is <60MB, which is very useful to me, as I want to virtualise at least 1 other box 24x7.
Now, memory is a bit of a commodity these days, so I'm asking the *nix geeks amongst you if I'm over-estimating how much benefit I'm going to get from regular access to my own, essentially production CentOS server, being pretty Linux capable already.
It's always useful to know different distros as you'll always find differences in config file locations, startup scripts and so on. I say go for it.
What are you going to use to virtualise? I'm currently running http://www.xensource.com/products/Pages/XenServer.aspx on my new box but although I've got a Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 R2 machine installed and running like a charm it seems to barf greatly when RHEL5 so I'm going to ditch Xen and use ESX.
Luckily I got a freebie 2 socket copy of ESX from EMC in a recent meeting otherwise I'd have to stick with Xen and find a solution.
Geeky bit - what's the rig you're getting? I've got a shiny new PowerEdge 2900, dual 2.33Ghz quad core, 12Gb RAM, DRAC 5 & 10 x 73Gb 15K SAS discs. Not bad for free :)
Trouble with CentOS, because of the fact it's based heavily on RHEL, is that it's fairly well off the pace as far as shipping up-to-date components is concerned, and if you want newer stuff, then it's 'do it yourself', because they usually backport fixes rather than update. If you can live with that (most people with racked servers don't want bleeding-edge anyway so it's ideal for them, but not necessarily for us geeks) then it's a sound, stable, base. I've used both RHEL and CentOS myself.
I have Gentoo on a rack server, with VMWare on it, happily virtualising stuff. Setting that up remotely without a console was somewhat challenging, but a local *nix box helped.
What are you going to use to virtualise?
Server 2003 x64 as a DC and Exchange box at least, possible another one for SQL or SMS, though they might not be running 24x7. Possible another *nix one too, depends on what I want the host to do really, and how easy it is on a comparatively 'safe' distro to ubuntu.
Luckily I got a freebie 2 socket copy of ESX from EMC in a recent meeting otherwise I'd have to stick with Xen and find a solution.
Bah, I'm jealous of your buying power :p All I've managed to blag recently is copies of Workstation. I'd love my own copy of ESX.
Geeky bit - what's the rig you're getting? I've got a shiny new PowerEdge 2900, dual 2.33Ghz quad core, 12Gb RAM, DRAC 5 & 10 x 73Gb 15K SAS discs. Not bad for free :)
I'd have shot my load if I got something like that for free! Ordering a new SAN in a couple of months so maybe then, but not now (I originally wanted a PE1900 (need to mount it on 2 post not 4), but we're not really buying anything at the moment so it fell on deaf ears). Nay, it's much smaller than that. Just a Core2 with 2GB and a pair of disks in RAID1. Fine for what I'm doing (just need a rig to centralise all the files we have, do some media serving, and act as a download/test box really).
What did you get to house all those disks? A 220S or something?
Trouble with CentOS, because of the fact it's based heavily on RHEL, is that it's fairly well off the pace as far as shipping up-to-date components is concerned, and if you want newer stuff, then it's 'do it yourself', because they usually backport fixes rather than update. If you can live with that (most people with racked servers don't want bleeding-edge anyway so it's ideal for them, but not necessarily for us geeks) then it's a sound, stable, base. I've used both RHEL and CentOS myself.
Oh aye, can defo live with that. I'll still have the main rig dual booting for messing around and doing the arguably more bleeding edge stuff (media encoding, messing around with compiz for example). The server just needs to host either vmware server or Xen, run LAMP and give me access to the common binutils. Not too much to ask of CentOS :)
Bah, I'm jealous of your buying power :p All I've managed to blag recently is copies of Workstation. I'd love my own copy of ESX.
I was quite surprised when they gave it to me as I made it clear I wasn't going to be looking at buying anything from them until April 2008 at the earliest. They've invited me to their offices in Ireland to have a look at their new SAN stuff so I'll most likely have a bit of a jolly out there.
I'd have shot my load if I got something like that for free! Ordering a new SAN in a couple of months so maybe then, but not now (I originally wanted a PE1900 (need to mount it on 2 post not 4), but we're not really buying anything at the moment so it fell on deaf ears). Nay, it's much smaller than that. Just a Core2 with 2GB and a pair of disks in RAID1. Fine for what I'm doing (just need a rig to centralise all the files we have, do some media serving, and act as a download/test box really).
What did you get to house all those disks? A 220S or something?
I was putting a £200k order their way plus I was doing my account manager a favour and doing the order on finance as it got him a €5k travel voucher which he's going to use to buy flights to Oz.
My original idea was to buy some bits, a rack case and make a box up myself but this large Dell order came up at the right time so it was a good opportunity to get something with a warranty.
The 2900 chassis will take 10 discs if you take an option whereby you get a small assembly that fits into the DVD drive area and takes 2 discs.
It's a heavy bastard though, I can just about rack mount it on my own if I take out the discs and power supplies!
Blimeh! I just about managed to rack a 2900 on my own, but it only had 2 disks in it and it wasn't going in the rack very high :D The other 3 that were going in the top I drafted a minion.
Anyway, cheers guys, think I'll start with CentOS (probably 5) :)
Nay, it's much smaller than that. Just a Core2 with 2GB and a pair of disks in RAID1.
PE860? If it's one of them, they're reliable little buggers. Had six months uptime on mine and I'm sure I'd have had six more months had I not needed to change a BIOS setting to get VMWare Server to work. :)
Nay, though we do have a couple of those and you're right, safe as houses :)
Hmm, possible change of plan. With CentOS 5 (x86_64), the smallest install has a larger memory footprint than Ubuntu 7.04 (x86_64). Could just fall back on CentOS 4, but that limits me to apache 2.0 and php4 unless I use the backports.
You don't *have* to use the CentOS implementations of Apache and PHP. Rolling your own, in either case, isn't difficult, though it does of course mean you're on your own when it comes to updates.
Also worth taking a look at lighttpd if you don't need all the heavyweight features of Apache.
I was trying to remain as close to the official repositories as possible to keep it as Red Hat like as possible.
Hmm
Sounds like a sensible idea to me Daz.
I've used custom PHP/Apache on top of RHEL before. The trouble with using a pre-compiled PHP in particular is that if you do anything remotely fancy you may well discover the distro hasn't compiled the extension you want, and then you're on your own anyway.
I wouldn't use Gentoo on any live server. I like the distro but the cost / benefits are negligible at best. The software is scarily bleeding edge no matter what stability testing they've done. When it comes down to it though, its very hard to come up with any decent argument for it. Stupid things like having to alter useflags and recompile half your OS just to add 'small' additional functions never struck me as a good design feature.
We tend to favour Ubuntu here, for reasons I still don't entirely grasp given canonicals interesting definition of 'support'. Big advantage is the wealth of packages in the repositories which we prefer to use rather than rolling our own even though we've got numerous staff capable of doing so. We like to keep our extensive customisations down to stuff like config files and modules so that upgrading and patching is as easy as possible. Being able to "apt-get upgrade" helps a lot from a patching perspective!
I use Gentoo for much the same reasons (big repository etc.). OK, so it takes a little longer to update, but I just SSH in, fire up a 'screen' session so it doesn't disconnect, set off an update, and leave it to get on with it. 9 times out of 10, I come back to no problems except patching up config files. I am only two non-critical servers though - I fully understand the need for change control on a business server (unlike a certain ISP I could name).
Preaching to the choir on the ubuntu front, I like it, and will continue to use it, I'm just wondering if - from a work point of view - having some proper mess around time with CentOS/Red Hat would be useful :)
Stick it in a VM and have a play. I can't think of any easier way to find out tbh. :)
Oh aye, but I need to maintain one that's actually doing something to properly get a feel for it. Things like that I bang in a VM tend to get a quick poke and then aren't touched again :D
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