When 'Free' Isn't. Help me choose a distro!

Lori and I run a lot of servers out of the house, and we're replacing one that has served us well but is nearing the end of its useful life. Since this particular server is publicly exposed, it gets Linux by default. That's our policy, and it works for us.

Last night I finally had the server completely working, and went to install the OS. We have licensed copies of most Linux distros, but they're all getting a little aged. It's been years since I researched and installed a free Linux distro, so I had gone surfing and settled on giving Fedora a try. It's close to RedHat, which I have used a lot in my career.

I've never been one to bash OSS just because people are giving their time, and I'm getting it for free. I'm willing to do a little extra work in that regard rather than just bad-mouth it when things go wrong. I hit my limit last night.

The first install failed because Fedora assumes it will be doing the RAIDing of your disks. So even though we had a RAID card in and configured, it RAIDed over top of the logical volume. Needless to say, at boot time it was rather confused. No big deal, I don't mind letting software do the RAID, even though it's less efficient. So I turned off RAID in the hardware and reinstalled.

Upon reboot after the reinstall, the system was spewing error messages that effectively locked me out of the console on the machine. Every local console was receiving messages at the rate of several a second, interfering with typing any commands.

I managed to get in via SSH from another machine, and then when I was certain I could do something, I went out and searched the web for my message. Now I downloaded this distro last week, and I discovered that this particular bug has been patched since May. So why is the official Fedora site still distributing it with the error?

Anyway, I updated the system, a process that takes about three times as long as the install, and rebooted. At this point, it was early morning and I had to work today. When the reboot came up, the routing tables were wiped. I tried to update them, but route wouldn't accept the commands.

At this point, I gave up in disgust and went to bed. I'm done with Fedora, the days that I was willing to invest weeks in making a distro run are gone. I have other things to do.

So, here's the deal. I need a new server-quality distro. I figure we've built a community 20,000 strong out here, you all can help me pick one.

My requirements are

(1) easy to install - Assume I'm capable of tweaking my kernel and building from sources (I have), and that I have more important things to do with my time (I do).

(2) Server quality - When all is said and done, this will be an app server. It needs to support LAMP and more - including SAMBA. It will sit behind a BIG-IP, but that shouldn't matter at all. Even if the X stuff is in the distro, I won't install it - this is a server.

Remember, no Windows suggestions - I'm all about "right tool for the job". For this job, Windows isn't it (though we do use it for some things).

So drop a comment - what do you think I should be using? I've installed about all of them but Ubuntu, and I've helped my daughter install Ubuntu, so I've toyed with all of them at least a little bit. If no one drops a suggestion, I'll find one myself, just thought this would be a fun discussion to have.

Until you comment,

Don.

Reading: Nothing, see above.

Imbibing: Coffee, Vault, and RedBull (see above)

Published Sep 27, 2007

Version 1.0

linux

5 Comments

Colin_Walker_12
Historic F5 Account
Sep 27, 2007
Ubuntu!

Oh, wait, reasoning first. I've been a long time linux user and advocate, and have been through many of the distros I'm sure you've used, ranging from Redhatv..something (god...4?) to Fedora Core2, Debian, SuSE, blackhat, slackware...I'm sure I'm forgetting some. I also used to be a pretty hardcore FreeBSD guy, but that's another story. ;)

When it came time for me to build my last Linux system to date (a desktop, mind you) I went out and did some research. I wanted something that was simple to install, worked well out of the box but was customizable, was relatively secure, very reliable, good package management and a strong community.

After researching online and talking to many friends who are also similarly involved *nix geeks, I settled on giving Ubuntu a whirl. Boy am I glad I did!

I've been using it for over two years now, and I've never looked back. I can confidently say I've never used another Linux distribution that is as well put together in all of the above regards as Ubuntu is.

It's based off of debian, so it uses the wonderful apt-get package management system, it has a huge, thriving community that is a huge plus, and meets or exceeds all of my other requirements, listed above or otherwise.

They have since come out with a server edition that I've heard great things about, but haven't personally used. If it's anything like the desktop version (which let's face it, they're probably 90% the same with different packages installed by default and a few kernel options) then I wouldn't think twice about recommending it to anyone.

I am currently in the process of putting together a 1U webserver for personal use, to replace the decrepit one I have now. There is no doubt in my mind what OS is being installed when it comes time. :)

Anwyay...there's your first comment, now let's see what everyone else has to say.

123-OSwargogogo!!!

Colin
JRahm
Admin
Sep 28, 2007
I am a big fan of Ubuntu for desktop processing, but I usually use a bsd flavor (open for firewalls and proxies, free for web & app servers) for public facing deployments.

That said, I installed a UbuntuLAMP server last week for a demo and it took less than an hour from installation to turning over the system to the user. I was very impressed with the speed to get apache/mysql/php up and playing nicely with each other.
Colin_Walker_12
Historic F5 Account
Sep 28, 2007
Jason makes a good point. I've been a fan of FreeBSD for all of my web/MySQL/file server needs for a while now. The question posed was which Linux Distro to use, or that's how I read it at least.

While I'd still stand by my Ubuntu recommendation, I'd have to at least throw FreeBSD into the hat as an option if you're not stuck on Linux breeds only. ;)

Colin
Don_MacVittie_1
Historic F5 Account
Sep 28, 2007
Indeed, there is a piece of commercial software going on there that is designed for Linux and I'm not at all certain it will run on BSD. Never having tried it, I don't want to install the OS, get it running, and then discover that this app won't run on it and no amount of symlinking will fix it ;-).

So Linux it is.

Don.
Don_MacVittie_1
Historic F5 Account
Oct 05, 2007
Mike,

I used to use SuSE for everything, moved away from it a few years back over some issues with wireless cards that I grew tired of having to fix with each laptop install.

But for this it might work just peachy... Though I did find drivers for the chipset that's causing problems on the motherboard. After going through three reseller levels, I found the OEM and they have RedHat and SuSE drivers, so I'm going to try out RedHat this weekend since it's already downloaded.

I toyed with Gentoo - never been a big fan but was hoping the granularity of the install would help me troubleshoot it. It failed also - looks like the same problem as Ubuntu had. Not real surprising, I suppose.

Thanks!

Don.