Re: AW: Re: Selecting OS for High-availability/mission-critical web p ortal

On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 20:13 +0100, Gruber Christoph wrote:
Hi all!

If you want to build up a web server with these requirements, you won`t be
satisfied with any distro.
I think you will need to build up your binaries on your own.
A critical server won`t have any paket manager at all.
And other reqs like a statically linked kernel build for your hardware isn`t
found in an distro.
So, help yourself and build up from source. Maybe LFS will help you.

Best regards.

Tbh, I totally disagree here. LFS is nice to get started when learning
linux, but for a critical servers you need some sort of package
management and well maintained repository. You cannot spend your time
updating and compiling software and fixing patches every time there is
an update whilst the next zlib/ssl exploits are floating around the net.
One thing I do agree with is creating a custom kernel suited for your
hardware.

I think the basis for a mission critical server is its hardware. Make
sure you select hardware wich is well known and widely supported for the
distro you intend to run. Don't choose exotic hardware raid cards just
because they might work good. Choose the one wich has the best drivers.
The same goes for all other hardware offcourse.

Now for the distro to choose there is a wide variety which can be used.
Whatever your needs are, pick a distro with good support. Depending on
what kind of server you need to run choices could be (but are not
limited to) Openbsd for firewalls/security, Solaris for stability and
support, Debian for feature richness or Redhat Enterprise for a large
hardware base and its support.
If pure stability is the only factor in my decision I would go for
Openbsd or Solaris and choose hardware which is 'known-to-be-good' for
those platforms.


I hope this helps a little.

Regards,

Jeroen Simonetti
Network Manager

Denit Internet Services BV

* Murder is contrary to the laws of man and God. -- M-5 Computer, "The
Ultimate Computer", stardate 4731.3 *

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