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Ask HN: Your use of Linux for Server Infrastructure?

11 points by blantonl ↗ HN
My organization runs and manages a mature Web property that has standardized on CentOS 5.x for all our infrastructure. We host most of our servers on EC2 but also use 1000Tb.com and ServerBeach.

My question to the community is this: what Linux distributions are you running on and why did you chose that distribution? Is it ability to maintain? skills? bugs? performance? other?

For us, the critical applications we run on CentOS include:

* haproxy

* Apache bundled with CentOS

* MySQL bundled with CentOS

* MongoDB (via their yum repositories)

* PHP 5.3 via http://www.webtatic.com/packages/php53

* Icecast (mp3 broadcast streaming server)

The reason why I ask this is, well, I'd love to hear some lessons learned from folks in the HN community that have had to make this decision. We settled on CentOS about 7 years ago due to my background in the enterprise space (IBM).

Anyways, I would love to hear what distribution your organization is running for your Linux infrastructure, and why.

Thanks!

5 comments

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latch
When I started to host real stuff on my own servers, I picked ubuntu largely because I knew that if I ran into problems, I'd easily be able to google and find useful resources.

I've stuck with it since then largely because of comfort and, really, why switch?

nuclearsandwich
I use [Archlinux][Arch] everywhere on production servers at work and at home. [Arch]:http://archlinux.org At work we use Arch for the following reasons * It's simple. Using Arch is dead easy compared to Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware (my old favorite). * It's vanilla. Arch doesn't mess with upstream code, it contributes to upstream. * It's current. Arch has the freshest packages. Partly because of it's vanilla policy. As a startup using the latest tech it's quite foolish to use a distro that bundles old (Admittedly proven) versions of our tools. * It's stable (enough). This one is the most disputed but if you pay attention when you `pacman -Syu` it's pretty tough to break a system. I'm running the testing repo on my home workstation and laptop because core is too boring.

__Some reasons not to use Arch__ * You have to pay attention. You can't just forget about it for long periods of time. * It is currently susceptible to (theoretical) man-in-the-middle attacks on mirror sites. To get around this you could use the Arch Build System (Like Gentoo or ports) and build everything you need from source then use that machine as a local mirror. So if total security is a must just use Gentoo. * It moves fast. Don't expect to be running Postgresql 8.4 on here it or anything that isn't the latest release. Major upgrades are announced so everyone sees them but there's no support cycle for old releases. Upgrading individual packages rather than the whole system for long periods of time is haphazard and not sustainable. * They're already using Py3k as `/usr/bin/python`. This is part of moving fast but I put it here because it's exceptionally important and upset a lot of Python folks.

Sometime in the coming months I am actually preparing a longer form version of this for my blog. I'll naturally post that to HN.

nuclearsandwich
self reply. Did HN ever parse markdown or am I delusional?
migrantgeek
I prefer Red Hat/CentOS in production because it's a standard. Solid certifications exist and it's easy to find employees with experience.

It's also slower moving than say Ubuntu but I prefer longer release cycles and have more confidence in an OS upgrade from Red Hat than I do any other distro.

That's just a preference though. I know of many prod environments running other distributions.

My advice is to stick with just one distro and keep it updated and centrally managed (Puppet, Chef, etc) because consistency is much more important than allegiance to a distro.

indrora
Depends on the target and project. (independent IT dude hat on)

- Debian for IPSec - Arch for Build Servers. - RedHat/Fedora for "Dumb User Boxes" (That is, things that HAVE TO BE SECURE OR THEY DIE.)

Other than that, its Winserver08/10 because We's A MS Hauze.