Linux On Servers

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

John Westcott IV wrote:
> What distro of Linux are people running on their production servers?
> Does anyone run open distros (like OpenSuSE or Fedora) on production
> servers?

I'm running Fedora on a few.

> I am looking at a new HP server and wondering if the support of a
> commercial distro is worth it.

As always, it depends.  The thing to worry about with Fedora is quick (6-month)
release cycle.  As a general rule, RedHat (and I'm sure the others have the
same policy) will not make incompatible upgrades of packages within a release.
 What that means is that if version X of Redhat shipped with Apache 1.x, there
will never be an "update" to version X that includes Apache 2.x.  You'd have to
wait for Redhat version Y.

So Fedora (and Ubuntu, OpenSuse, etc) is great for fast-evolving software like
the desktop applications.  It's also great if you want the latest feature in
Apache, etc.

The flip side of that coin is that if you have say, a web application in php,
you're going to have to port it to a new release of apache and php more often
(supposing there are major version bumps in apache and php).

Bottom line: it's mostly an issue of admin time.  Fedora and other fast-release
distros will cost a lot more in admin time, since you're "forced" to upgrade
more often.

Matt