First of all, thanks to everybody for sharing your experiences, very helpful information indeed, specially now that i need some guidance. <br> For now, the conclusion i can reach is that Gentoo is perfectly adequate to use on a server with the only downside of the need to have special care with updates. <br> Ricardo, i find really encouraging the fact that your lab uses Gentoo for their servers. Nevertheless it would be great if you could tell us a little about your lab's experience with updates, which seems to be the only issue when using Gentoo on a server. <br> Another thing i noticed is that some of you recommend to have a secondary server to perform tests, i totally agree with this. Unfortunately i do not think that having such thing will be possible since the server will be charged to a client and i do not think they will agree to buy a second server (even if its the right thing to do, which i believe so), in such case, would you still recommend Gentoo?. <br><br>Again, thanks to everybody for the information.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">2007/11/29, Billy Holmes <<a href="mailto:billy@gonoph.net">billy@gonoph.net</a>>:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Robert Spahr wrote:<br>> I have been running these gentoo servers since 2003, with very few<br>> problems. Although I am conservative in doing my updates.<br>><br><br>I've run gentoo on several servers from dual intels running dns, squid, <br>routing, to web servers, to quad opterons running as terminal servers.<br><br>The secret to all of that is what Robert said.. update conservatively.<br><br>The update from apache 1.x to 2.x broke some things (good idea to follow <br>the update faqs, or as I did, rebuild the config files by hand), as did<br>when the gentoo apache package managers decided to change the config<br>file layout to better match other distros.<br><br>Also, beware of some of the library updates. They can break other things <br>that revdep-rebuild will have to fix.<br><br>It's a good idea to look up via google or whatever to figure out what's<br>being updated and why (read the changelog).<br><br>It will take a bit to get used to, but after awhile you'll just eyeball <br>it and know which packages are non-issues, and which should be looked<br>closely.<br><br>It's also a good idea to have a staging server where you can test the<br>updates and trash it if you need to (virtualization will help with this <br>a lot).<br><br>Also, some updates don't fully manifest themselves till you restart all<br>the processes or restart the machine. Processes that were running before<br>a library update still have an internal image of the previous version's <br>library.<br>--<br><a href="mailto:gentoo-user@gentoo.org">gentoo-user@gentoo.org</a> mailing list<br><br></blockquote></div><br>