Am 05.08.2013 23:55, schrieb Alan McKinnon: > On 05/08/2013 23:20, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: >> >> ! Pls don't flame me :-) ! >> >> Don't misunderstand ... I happily trust gentoo on most of my customers >> servers. >> >> A customer of mine chose SLES 10 back then to run a VMware-Server >> installation (1.0.x back then) because they had some big >> company-license-pool available. >> >> That server is to be replaced and I asked them if they still want to use >> SLES because of that. Answer: no ... no more licenses available/paid. >> >> So they asked me for alternatives and I told them about gentoo. >> >> My question: >> >> how would you guys compare the 2 choices to report it back to them? >> >> People buy stuff like SLES to get/feel the feeling that all the choice >> and review of changes is done for them .... we didn't need one >> support-call in the last few years. And the gentoo-community is a >> helpful and competent one (yes, thank you!). >> >> So I tend to do the job with gentoo ... better they pay my work than >> some never-used support-contract ;-) >> >> I just plan to use stable gentoo there, be conservative with changes and >> keep the system up-to-date regularly ... as I use ~amd64 on my main >> machines I think I am rather informed about any *bigger* or problematic >> upgrades. >> >> It's gonna be a QEMU/KVM-host .. this and some rather powerful server >> should speed up those smallish and dusty VMs. >> >> Any thoughts? How to professionally deploy gentoo linux as a one-man-show? >> >> ;-) >> >> Best regards, Stefan >> > > > I despise SLES intensely[1]. Even more than Windows. So this may be biased. > > The primary question as I see it is > > Who will maintain this installation? > > If the answer is you and 1|2 guys you train yourself, by all means go > right ahead and use gentoo. You already know it well so the quality of > service you offer a customer is likely to be better than if you went say > Centos. > > If the answer is you plus other guys but you don't know who they are or > how good they are or if you get to train them, then gentoo starts > getting risky. You don't want a gentoo box where the admin is the > "emerge world && reboot" and walk away kind of guy. > > I think you fall in the first class. And our Infrastructure team has > also never had to log a VMware service call. Our managed service team > that faces clients - very different story and not applicable here. > > I find that gentoo does not scale well in corporates where machines are > a mix of everything. It takes too much brain power to update them. It > also doesn't work well if you have to give admin rights to people of > little skill. > > Where gentoo shines is > > - small installs that need something none standard > - large pools of identical hosts that are somehow non-standard so you > get to build what you want once and deploy it many times > - embedded. Your tools let you automate the build end-to-end > > > > [1] A predecessor used SLES 9 & 10 for everything coz he thought it was > awesome. Nothing could ever get updated as it was always manual, > SuSEconfig kept biting us in the teeth hard and it was just awful for > anyone used to working on *nix at any leveol. Fine for Windows admins > moving over though...
Thanks. That's what I wanted to read and fished for ;-) Stefan
