NYCPHP Meetup

[Joel De Gan]

On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 22:59, jon baer wrote:
> This is actually RedHat 9 ... not Gentoo which Ive heard is great, but Im
> too chicken to run @ the moment w/ so much work :-\

Now, I know that gentoo users are *known* as being kind of preachy but
there really is a good reason for that.

<gentoo pimping>
It is worth it to learn, in addition you learn a lot about how linux
works and how linux systems are set up and where things are.

If you have ever used BSD, in particular OpenBSD, and need to build
specific installations it is perfect. Also, things like upgrades that
don't clobber your configs is built in, and these things are easily
automated. Everything is basically in portage and updated continuously,
every morning there is something new/updated in there. Some people
complain about the time to install, from a stage 3 (pre built) you can
be in X and working in no time flat.

I have been trying to get work to let me migrate current servers and
also set up a portage "updates" server for our datacenter (so we control
which upgrades go in and don't generate too much outside traffic). As we
could have an easy, and most importantly, automated solution for
handling upgrades on hundreds or thousands of servers vs what they are
doing now. I suspect that netops is against it for obvious reasons (job
sec.) as the current base of redhat servers requires constant
maintenance by a team of people.

Anyway, check it out if you get some time. Most of our core developers
are now using gentoo exclusive these days and I use it on servers to
awesome effect (some people will state for some reason to not use it on
servers?).
i.e. this server runs several domains on apache and handles a 20k+
requests/day + qmail/vpop + mysql + data collection/gathering + a
neuralnet system that is working with news and stock data and runs the
openmosix kernel (latest) and is 'node 1' on a four node cluster:
11:59:18 up 165 days, 22:16,  1 user,  load average: 0.10, 0.10, 0.09

Last time it was rebooted was when I needed to move the box, otherwise
that uptime would be another 200 days more and that box is completely up
to date as of 4am today.

Anyway.. enough gentoo evangelism...
</gentoo pimping>

Cheers..
-- 
joeldg - developer, Intercosmos media group.
http://lucifer.intercosmos.net