sir_max Posted April 30, 2004 Report Share Posted April 30, 2004 Hi everyone... for quite some time i have been thinking about this... why almost always people recommend debian or red-hat as excellent server distribution.. i i always have said, why ???? all distros have similar software (differs on versions numbers mostly) you can create scripts in all of them... at home i have mdk functioning as a web server and i never have had any problems... well.. that was it... P.S.: perhaps this should be in off-topic, but i put it here ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted April 30, 2004 Report Share Posted April 30, 2004 Its a good question.... and its got lots of answers .. sometimes its plain support. For a professional organisation they might want RH support. I find debian stable a good server distro becuase its so stable. Hopefully MDK 10 official might meet this but up to now mandrake has been too bleeding edge for real servers in companies. Other reasons are the config tools... Redhat has lots of good tools for server admins One thing Mandrake has done is step away from this direction.... for a home user the drakwizards might be aqdequate but they are nowhere near whats needed for a professional server. (just an example is the way it implements firewalling etc which is based round a home user) The big problem I see (and why Id never use MDK for a server) is these tools are not well documented, if at all and tend to make non-standard stuff ... that prevents or conflicts with standard tools like Webmin or Linuxconf If you are admining a multi-nix environment like at work here webmin can do the same job on SGI/IBM/SUN and Intel/AMD platforms. thats really important in a business. Mandrake like Redhat tend to jimmy about with the location of config files, arguably making them more logical BUT again this is only useful if you only use one distro. Suse messes about even more which is why Ive never tried it. Some really good server stuff will never run on Suse (legally) becuase it is licensed as such that the files must be installed where the software author says. QMail is an example. Another question is stability. Linux is not particualrly stable. Compared to Windows its in a different ball park but it cant compete with Solaris or BSD. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html here are the top 50 sites in the 4-5year uptime category, all BSD. Not that its important but linux will only show 497 days according to netcrafts measurement method. Anyway - like I say its a question of HOW stable. Some people I know turn their PC off at night. In this case they never notice stability problems in linux and like I said, compared to winBlows its way way ahead. Anyway, I dont find mandrake that stable ..... its possible to start and replace packages with stable versions, recompile a more conservative but slower kernel but why bother. Its easier to start with one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Technonoid Posted April 30, 2004 Report Share Posted April 30, 2004 Gowator, that was a very informative reply... Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted April 30, 2004 Report Share Posted April 30, 2004 It occured to me after that I now use Debian for my main machine MAINLY so its the same as my server distro. :srewy: so im also doing a 180 ???? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sir_max Posted April 30, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 30, 2004 Thanks Gowator that was very illustrative and i have a better idea on what to do if i get that question again... and i have never been argued like that before :D thanks again Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
youngmug Posted May 1, 2004 Report Share Posted May 1, 2004 I think it mainly comes down to support, really. Some of the commercial packages that run on Linux will only be supported by that company if they run on an approved Linux distribution. RedHat is usually one of these, if not the only one. A good example is WebCT, which is a popular courseware package. WebCT, Inc will only support its software on a supported distribution (and the license keys they generate are also locked like this). I can also think up FDFMerge as another example. While other distros (Slackware, Debian, etc...) might be as good, if not better, the company will gravitate to the most popular supported distribution - RedHat. After all, if all these companies are supporting their products under it, it must be good, they think. This leads to a positive spiral where the use of RedHat makes companies support their products on it which leads to companies adopting the distro, which leads to more RedHat users, which makes companies support it since it is so popular, and so on. The only way to put another distribution in a positive spiral is to make it so popular that companies will support it, and then those forces will feed each other just like the current RedHat trend. As a side note, the company I am with is currently on BSD and we are looking at migrating some services to Linux. The selected distribution seems to be SuSE - mostly because the boss doesn't like the tactics RedHat pulls (backporting, that whole CVS tree thing they did with KDE, etc). For the boss, Mandrake, Slackware, etc just don't have the corporate backing SuSE has (Novell). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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