[Novalug] Advantages of server based on CentOS/Ubuntu, etc?

[DonJr]

On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 16:39 -0500, Nick Danger wrote:
> James (Jim) Darlack wrote:
> 
> >   Is there any advantages of one lnux server over the others?
> 
> Yes. Many. The question is, which ones apply to you? :-)
> 

Agreed

> The only real advice I can give is to chose something with a long
> support cycle. If you go with Ubuntu, chose one the LTS (long term
> support) ones. Personally I use RedHat and CentOS. A while back someone
> tried to get us to change to Fedora and now I have some lovely Fedora 3
> servers with no patches/support, while my CentOS boxes of the same era
> are still getting security updates.
> 
> Lesson? Chose something with a long turn around and not something that
> is a forklift upgrade in 6 months. And this applies for any distro, any
> OS. Its more a server admin rule then a "which linux do I need" rule.
> 
> After that, you start to get into the nitty gritty of what you like vs
> what others like.
> 
> Nick

One major difference with Debian based distro(s) such as Ubuntu.
I have never HAD to reinstall to "upgrade" from one release version to
the next level {even jumping two or more release levels in one go}.

I had an older version of Ubuntu (5.10} still running (updates where
still being released) a while back and didn't want to reinstall from
scratch, even though the "upgrade script" refused to still function when
I finally got around to UPGRADING. All I did was:
  edit by hand "/etc/apt/sources" to point to a later version
  Then do: apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
  Then used Synaptic to clean out any unnessary libs and no longer
supported packages.
  Then did a "dist-upgrade" to the then latest version.

(I even once in the past "upgraded" Debian-stable to "Ubuntu" without
reinstalling.)

In all the time that I ran RedHat in the {:distant:} past I never once
even successfully upgraded in place from one version to the next.


--  
-- 
 Don E. Groves, Jr. 

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