Rebuilding

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

matt galster wrote:
> I'm looking at rebuilding my home server.  Initially installed as RH7.0 on
> Alpha (milo, not SRM), and patched like crazy.  Patching new vulnerabilities
> has become a PITA as RH isn't providing patches any more.
> 
> Choices  - it looks like it comes down to Debian or SuSE.  With SuSE you can
> dl part of it for a CD, but I get the impression you gotta finish by
> downloading as it goes along.  With Debian you can dl the whole thing & burn
> to CDs.
> 
> Any comments?  I'm not looking for the religious war, I'd like practical
> advice.

SuSE stopped supporting Alpha a while ago. The last official release was 
7.1, although they did put an unsupported build of 8.1 on their FTP 
site. So if you're planning to stay on the Alpha box, SuSE isn't a good 
choice. The only two distros I know of that are actively supporting the 
Alpha architecture at this point are Debian and Gentoo. The Alpha 
support on Gentoo is a bit behind the current release, but it's being 
worked on.

With Debian, you can download full CD images and install from them, 
either with standard FTP or with a utility called jigdo. SuSE doesn't 
offer CD images for download, but you can get a friend to make them for 
you. (SuSE does not permit commercial distributors to sell their distro, 
but non-commercial copying is allowed.) Or you can install the 
distribution via FTP, getting the files one at a time while they are 
being installed.

On the other hand, the various security updates probably aren't quite as 
critical on an Alpha as they are on an x86 box. Nobody is likely to 
actually be trying to use Alpha binaries to crack your system, so the 
worst consequence of vulnerabilities like buffer overflows will be 
system crashes, not security breaches. Still a pain, but a lesser pain.