Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo mail server

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 27 January 2009 22:38:21 Tom Brown wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I've been using gentoo on my desktop for several months now. I works
> great. It cut five minutes off my build time when I build our product
> tree. It went from 20 to 15 minutes.
>
> I setup our email server using Debian. Its been solid as a rock and very
> low maintenance. However, it provides an antiquated environment.
>
> I'm looking at using gentoo for the email so I'll have an up-to-date
> system. Peformance is fine on the Debian system, but hey, faster is
> always better.
>
> I was hoping you guys could give me warm fuzzies about stability and
> maintenance with gentoo when it comes to a production server.

A well administered gentoo box is as stable as a well administered debian box. 
Or a red hat one. Or a FreeBSD one. And maybe even a Solaris one.

By "well administered" I mean "decisions about it made by a sane admin", and 
there are two roles to this:

- building the software. Sane decisions have to be made about what features to 
include, what compiler settings, what patches etc.
- the on-site admin who decides what to deploy and how to run it.

The difference between gentoo (and FreeBSD to a lesser extent) on the one hand 
and binary distros on the other is that with gentoo YOU fill the first role. 
In binary distros it is someone else.

So, if you are confident with this role, go for it and gentoo is for you.
If you are not confident with this role, do not use gentoo. Use debian or red 
hat or centos and you get the warm fuzzy feeling of believing you have 
someone else to blame for problems :-)

There is middle ground of course, but by and large people either can and do 
take this role fully, or can't and don't.

With that out of the way, debian and gentoo mostly use the same upstream 
sources anyway, so there's no reason to assume things will be majorly 
different in the stability department. You can prove me wrong any time by 
installing the latest cvs versions of everything you can get your hands on, 
but that is crazy for a production machine.

> What about major upgrades? If I keep the system updated regularly, is a
> major upgrade necessary?

mu

google it :-)

"upgrade" does not make sense in a gentoo context - it's like asking if whales 
are troubled by pimples on their nose. Gentoo is not versioned and does not 
have releases. What it has is a vast collection of stuff you can build. Most 
of it is recent but you get to pick the versions of packages you want, and 
you do it incrementally. Most folks do an update something between weekly and 
monthly.

A sure recipe for disaster is to let updates slide and try do a whole whack of 
them in on go. Again, it's not the same thing as updating a binary distro 
with a release. It's more like trying to change large amounts of the OS on 
the fly - it tends to be problematic.

Rule of thumb: update often, know what you are doing, keep an eye on the 
machines, and forget you ever heard of a thing called an "update" when 
working on a gentoo box


hth

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com