On 29 Jan 2004 21:19:49 -0800, usenet@linuxnuts.net (J) wrote:

>I personally prefer to utilize /usr/local for all packages I build. I
>also like all my configuration data to be stored under
>/etc/${package_name}.

FreeBSD is organized this way. Every add-on package goes into
/usr/local - except that they put _everything_ into /usr/local. So
all of the configuration goes into /usr/local/etc.

>One thing I can't stand however is the immense amount
>of time I have to spend rebuilding [...] new OpenSSL packages since RH *never* has a
>current release of OSSL for slightly older releases.

One nit: RH has always maintained that a backported security fix is
better than upgrading to the latest version. Personally, I don't like
it either.

>I don't mind using a package management system to install basic
>binaries, libraries that I don't need to upgrade to meet dependancies
>(libpng, libgd, libssl, libz, libsasl, etc. I also don't mind using
>pre-packaged daemons that either a) don't listen to any ports, or b)
>are either disabled like telnet and finger or are severely restricted
>with TCP wrappers like tftp. Other than that I usually roll my own
>from source. I would prefer that any package management system I use
>in the future has enough smarts to know that just because I didn't
>install a pre-packaged copy of OpenSSL doesn't mean that it's not
>built from source. ie, it would be nice if the package management
>system was able to actually check dependancies, not look into its DB
>to see if the canned version was installed. Make sense?

Except that is the whole idea of packaging. I frequently roll my own
from source RPMs; that is much easier and can be rolled out to
multiple servers using apt-get or yum.

Personally, I believe in RPM quite a bit: most major distros use it:
Conectiva, SUSE, Mandrake, and Red Hat. But Debian's packaging is
quite good too.

Whichever you like, use apt-get!

>Whatever distro I use it has to be stable. Most of my servers are in
>server farms for companies that contract me for admin services. I
>don't have keys to their buildings or server farms. The other servers
>are my own servers co-loed for me by some of these same providers.

I would recommend any of the following for corporate production
servers:

* Debian Stable
* SUSE Enterprise Linux ($$)
* FreeBSD
* OpenBSD
* NetBSD

It seems to me that the BSD kernel takes up less space than the
standard Linux kernel, but that may be different for you.

For lesser known distros, I would recommend:

* Gentoo
* ROCK Linux

In particular, I think you would like either one of those
particularly. RockLinux builds everything from source, basically.

Also, go to http://www.distrowatch.com and check out all of the
different distros.

ROCK Linux is at http://www.rocklinux.org

>I haven't ever used Gentoo or Suse. I once saw a really old
>installation of Debian on a really old box.

Try Knoppix and wander around in it. It's CDROM-based Debian and
doesn't affect the system its running on. Likewise, there is a SUSE
Live Eval CDROM. Gentoo also has a CD-based release; I think it's a
gaming release.

>Any suggestions would be gladly welcomed. I'm ready to put in the
>time to dump RH with a vengence. I'm asking here in the admin group
>because, well, ya'll have probably been in my boat before from an
>admin's perspective. What distro are you using?

In our corporate setting, despite everything, we're still Red Hat.
We're using Red Hat Advanced Server for Oracle support, and other
internal systems are switching mostly to CentOS 3 - a build from
scratch of Red Hat's open-source bits of RHAS 3.

CentOS is part of the cAos project at http://www.caosity.org . They
just released (today!) CentOS 3rc1 build 5.

We also have one SUSE distro (good and stable) and a Debian distro
running. The Debian system is running on an HP-9000 PARISC box; well
done distro.

I'm surprised that RH 9 put you on the look for a new distro; most
complaints seem to come from RH dropping their retail Red Hat Linux
product.

David Douthitt (david@douthitt.net)
UNIX System Administrator
HP-UX, Unixware, Linux
Linux+, LPIC-1