After having used RHEL/CentOS and Debian in the past (for a binary system, I
really like Debian), I'm at the point where I get frustrated working on a
non-gentoo server.  I had used Gentoo in the past, but in the last 6 months
my place of employment has been deploying more and more gentoo servers.
These started off as mainly development environments, but have since used
them as mailservers, postgres servers, dns servers, ldap servers, and a dhcp
server.  After having used Gentoo at my employment, I converted all 3 of my
personal servers  from CentOS to Gentoo.  While I love the power of portage
on my desktop, it's become absolutely incredible from a server perspective.
It's the flexibility of compiling everything by hand, but far easier
maintenance and ease of use.

As others have said, updates are the biggest drawback.  For the most part, I
stay away from system wide updates.  I update:
- When I need an update
- When there's a security vulnerability fixed in an update

For the security vulnerabilities, setup a glsa-check weekly cron (run after
an emerge sync):
http://gentoo-wiki.com/SECURITY_Getting_GLSAs_by_Email

Also, revdep-rebuild is your friend (in gentoolkit).

When you emerge something, always use emerge -av to see what is goign to be
installed/re-installed.

etc-update can cause you some problems if you're not paying attention.
There have been times where I've merged a change without looking at it,
because I thought I never hand-edited that config file, but in the end I did
and just forgot about it (it was an init script).  It's generally a good
idea to review the changes for all files that it wants to merge.

Some sysadmins worry about having a compiler installed on a production
system, and there are valid reasons to be concerned, but most of those can
be averted with a little extra care.  In the end, I think the worry about a
compiler is sometimes overblown.

Finally, if there isn't a time of day that will be a "down" time of day
traffic-wise, you may be worried about compiling apps will slow down
performance on the server.  Setting up distcc and having portage use that
could be a huge help.

Gentoo's a great potential system for a server.  It's really flexible, and
really customizable.  The power or portage is an absolutely incredible tool,
but it is slightly different than binary based GNU/Linux distros, and may
require a little bit of a learning curve.  As others have said, installed it
in a virtualized environment so you can test things out could be of great
benefit.

----
Derek Bodner
subscribedlists@derekbodner.com

On 11/29/07, Billy Holmes <billy@gonoph.net> wrote:
>
> Quoting Wayn0 <wayn0.ml@gmail.com>:
>
> > Mirror the setup in a virtual machine ;-)
>
> linux virtualization
>
> some links:
>
> http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/
> http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/01/26/xen.html
>
> linux-vserver looks pretty neat, too
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-VServer
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>