Rebuilding

[matt galster]

Thanks, Mark.

I'd noticed that the SuSE version was put up without support because SuSE
people wanted one for themselves.  I guess that settles SuSE.  I guess now
I'll need to decide about gentoo as well.  Anyone have a feel for the
maturity of that dist?  It isn't like RH or SuSE with a pedigree, AFAIK.

MEG

> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-admin at blu.org [mailto:discuss-admin at blu.org]On Behalf Of
> Mark J. Dulcey
> Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2003 10:50 PM
> To: mattg at theworld.com
> Cc: discuss at blu.org
> Subject: Re: Rebuilding
>
>
> 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.
>
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