Best Small Business Server Distro?

arty

arty

arty

Soldato
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Hiya, I'd like to set up a new server for my IT development company in order to serve Rails apps, probably using Apache + Passenger and Postgres. The server will be internal-only so doesn't need to be super-secure, but I do need to make sure that it's reasonably solid.

I have been using Gentoo for years and have dabbled with CentOS and one or two other distros. I was just going to whack Gentoo on this new server as well, but as I run maybe 2-3 Gentoo VMs already and find them quite high maintenance in terms of updates, I was wondering if there was maybe a better choice? :)

The hardware will be very comfortably up to whatever we need to run on it, so I don't believe that that will be a concern. It needs to run headless and be fully usable over SSH so I'm really not needing anything excessively 'friendly' like Ubuntu, unless it's a good choice for web server duties. I am looking for low maintenance, good performance but with only a few clients connected at once, and a decent package manager (I really like Portage, despite the very frequent updates).

We'll be using bleeding-edge Rails (3.0 and 3.1 RC) so I'm not looking for an excessively conservative distro. What are people's thoughts?

Thanks for any replies as always :)

arty
 
FreeBSD! [uses ports, not as efficient as portage, i.e. no meta-packages] (gentoo user myself), running headless FreeBSD, will do exactly what you described and it's designed as a server OS.

If you want to stick to Linux, Debian stable is the way to go!
 
Thanks for the thoughts so far. Support absolutely won't be needed as this will not be business-critical or production-oriented in any way. I'm thinking of looking at CentOS given the suggestions and the (small!) amount of experience I have with it so far. The only thing that puts me off slightly is that I recall that trying to install even vaguely recent application versions on the last CentOS server I needed to work on required me to faff around quite a lot with Yum. I vaguely remember that the 'official' (?) repositories all had very stable (=old) versions in it :)

arty
 
As a professional, with my hands in /many/ servers, for me it's debian F-T-W. I've use debian for years, and contrary to the other distros, debian doesn't 'rot' and doesn't need a full reinstall very years or so.
I got debian servers installed that are still working, perfectly clean and up to date since 2002, with uptimes of up to 600 days (where I sometime upgrade the kernel!) and with "to the minute" security patches available. Some have been converted from hardware to VM, and back again, still /exactly/ the same install.
 
BusError said:
As a professional, with my hands in /many/ servers, for me it's debian F-T-W. I've use debian for years, and contrary to the other distros, debian doesn't 'rot' and doesn't need a full reinstall very years or so.
I got debian servers installed that are still working, perfectly clean and up to date since 2002, with uptimes of up to 600 days (where I sometime upgrade the kernel!) and with "to the minute" security patches available. Some have been converted from hardware to VM, and back again, still /exactly/ the same install.
Click to expand...

As a professional I would comment that we have many, many systems which have been running for long periods and I haven't seen any form of "rot" on any of them ... oh and none of them run any form of Debian and in fact that distribution, along with others like Ubuntu, are not permitted operating systems on any of our commercial systems.

It's easy to have long uptimes ... but personally I prefer to be up to date with my security patches including those for the kernel.
 
slylittlefox said:
Debian is used everywhere in enterprise, as is CentOS. PUT DOWN THE HANDBAGS.
Click to expand...

No handbags at all ... I have nothing against Debian, or Ubuntu, as OSes and have run them both in the past 15 years myself, (along with various other Linux flavours). My as a professional was a dig at the comment I was responding too (although I have worked with Linux and Unix for many years).

What I do object to is the insistence in some quarters that Debian is some how infinitely better than anything else and should be used for everything and to use any other Linux flavour is somehow wrong (along with the mis-information on rot given in the original post).
 
It's not misinformation, it's personal experience. I've been in "rpm hell" often enough to know better; but there you go, no religious war either from my side...
 
arty said:
Hiya, I'd like to set up a new server for my IT development company in order to serve Rails apps, probably using Apache + Passenger and Postgres. The server will be internal-only so doesn't need to be super-secure, but I do need to make sure that it's reasonably solid.

I have been using Gentoo for years and have dabbled with CentOS and one or two other distros. I was just going to whack Gentoo on this new server as well, but as I run maybe 2-3 Gentoo VMs already and find them quite high maintenance in terms of updates, I was wondering if there was maybe a better choice? :)

<SNIP>

We'll be using bleeding-edge Rails (3.0 and 3.1 RC) so I'm not looking for an excessively conservative distro. What are people's thoughts?

Thanks for any replies as always :)

arty
Click to expand...

I would say two things;

1> Since RoR is non distribution dependent use what your comfortable with if it's solely non production and non-internet facing.

2> Use what your team is most comfortable supporting so other people can pick up the support of the machine (in case you get a better job offer ;))
 
Centos/Debian or FreeBSD imo, with debian being my first choice (i don't object to centos, i just dont get along so well with it, sometimes it just flat out frustrates me)
 
Thanks for all the thoughts guys, much appreciated. I will probably have a go with CentOS to gain some more experience in a new distro. Debian and BSD are both of interest too so they'll probably be second-runners if I don't get on with CentOS.

Cheers :)

arty
 
CentOS all the way, used it for 6 years on hundreds of servers, never had a single issue and CentOS 6 should be out 2 days ago (anytime now).

Its also easy, there is no such thing as not getting on with it.
 
BusError said:
It's not misinformation, it's personal experience. I've been in "rpm hell" often enough to know better; but there you go, no religious war either from my side...
Click to expand...

Actually if it is not "misinformation" then the term "RPM hell" is certainly outdated.

RPM hell used to happen when you were installing RPM files directly, using the rpm command, where you have to specify any dependency files for installation as well.

Now, in a properly configured environment, you have YUM repositories and install software via YUM, instead of RPM directly, which handles dependencies automatically by pulling any required ones from the available repositories.
 
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