On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 17:50, Dave Oxley wrote: > My company is buying a new Dell server (2x2.4GHz P4 Xeon, 2Gb RAM, 73Gb > RAID 1 SCSI) for our production customer facing web site and I have been > trying to decide on which Linux distribution to use. It needs to run > Apache, tomcat, sendmail, mysql, php and bind and have minimum downtime. > We normally have about 25Gb of HTTP traffic a month, but is likely to > double over the next 12 months. I am not fussed about having paid for > support (that's my job!) > > I was going to choose RH9 (after deciding against Debian), but I just > found out about Fedora. Is Core 1 suitable for this type of environment? > Or would you recommend I go with RH9 or Debian. > > Cheers. Unlike other replies, I would recommend Fedora Core 1 for servers. I recently upgraded 10(4 dns, 1 web, 1 mail, 1 backup, 1 monitoring, 1 misc, 1 dns/web/mail/backup/monitoring) servers from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 1. Did I have problems? Of course. Could it be a little better? Yes. Did it have bugs similar to those seen with a Red Hat 8.0 to Red Hat 9 upgrade? Very much so. Is it stable after you get the details worked out? Yes. Are there quite a few important package upgrades? Yes. Overall it didn't go as well as I would have liked, but better than I expected. My only concern so far is how much of a mess are updates going to become. Between security updates currently sitting in testing, potential messy forced package upgrades, and less than a guarantee from Red Hat that they will make updated packages available for Fedora Core in a timely fashion, I am a little worried. My analysis of distributions that leaves me with Fedora Core: Debian: stable - too old, testing - some packages too old, unstable - rawhide and still some packages too old SuSE: Pay for box set, no isos, ftp install a few months after release, and hence a No Go. Mandrake: Too buggy, seems like complete lack of QA(Sadly RH9 and FC1 are a little closer to Mandrake than RH7.3 than I would like) Gentoo: Shows great promise, install process needs a lot of work, compiling Everything from source isn't what it is cracked up to be, and still needs a little more security infrastructure. Red Hat 9: Pretty good, but now out of date and updates going away soon Red Hat Enterprise 3: Too expensive, too restrictive of a license, and will in the not too distant future be too out of date.
