John put forth on 12/1/2009 9:51 AM: > I took a quick look at Debian, but as it was very similar to Ubuntu > (which I know is based on Debian) it looked to have the same problems > from our perspective. An example, from the Postfix setup was the > replacement of the LMTP process binary with a symlink to the SMTP > binary. This may not be a real problem, perhaps the two binaries are the > same, and Debian/Ubuntu are being smart, but as I could not find a > rational for the change I have to wonder if this may be a problem in the > future. Other examples are the strange reconfiguration of the Amavisd > config files, changes to SASL setup, all make us a little nervous.
Did you bother to read the docs, which would likely explain those changes? Debian has some fantastic online documentation--a distro kinda has to, when it fully supports 11 production CPU architectures, with 5 more archs being readied in the wings: http://www.debian.org/ports/ Oh, not to mention two production ports of Debian userland atop two *BSD kernels. I've been using Debian as a headless server OS since 2000--every install done via boot floppies and net install from the web mirrors, never a CD or DVD. I used/supported SLED10 and SLES9/10 (SLES only as VMware ESX guests) for a year. For a plethora of reasons, I still prefer Debian over any Linux distro when it comes to server use. Apt/aptitude is the most robust, flexible, and easiest to use package management tool ever developed. There are a gazillion pre-compiled stable packages available. They lag the bleeding edge package revisions, but they're rock solid. If you need/want a newer kernel than shipped with stable, you can easily download the source from kernel.org, compile and install it, the Debian way, very easily. In fact, I've always compiled my own Debian kernels, either from Deb source or kernel.org source. I'm currently running kernel.org 2.6.31.1 under Lenny/Debian 5.0.3, Debian stable uses 2.6.26. You can also get some newer stable packages via backports if need be. -- Stan
