Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo mail server

[Nick Cunningham <nick@monkeydust.net>]

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2009/1/27 Tom Brown <brown@esteem.com>

> 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.
>
> What about major upgrades? If I keep the system updated regularly, is a
> major upgrade necessary?
>
> Thanks!
> Tom
>
>
>
>
If your planning on running a stable server then managing a gentoo server is
probably a bit more time intensive, but will pay of in terms of having it
configured how *you* want and with the services *you* want running, not what
someone else thinks you should have.

As a rule of thumb dont run ~ARCH unless you absolutely need a certain
package (and even then, stick to keyword specific versions rather than
blindly keywording everything). Dont feel that you need to sync and update
every day, but *do* use tools like glsa-check (i think thats the right one
but im not in my gentoo isntall to check atm) to ensure you update programs
where security bugs are known.

Also its worth keeping an eye on things like the forums, and planet as often
when updates to packages are likely to break things, or they need some
manual intervention when updating, you see some signs of this in advance
(although if you see a major update in your emerge list you *should* be
stopping and going off to read up on it before blindly emerging).

Of course, all these things wont stop you causing breakages, but if you work
cautiously and have some idea of what your doing then gentoo does work very
well as a server.

- Nick

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