[Novalug] Wikipedia Switches to Ubuntu

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Roger W. Broseus <RogerB at bronord.com> wrote:
> What a phenomenon: the rise of Ubuntu.
>
> According to El Reg, Wikipedia is switching to Ubuntu for its servers and
> that without Canonical support! This says something about usability and
> reliability.

More of a "finishing the move to Ubuntu":  much of the systems have
been Ubuntu for a long time.  So now Wikimedia is finally
transitioning off the last of their Fedora Core 3 boxes.

Primary drivers included (in no particular order):
1) A preference for Debian by most (but not all) of the sysadmins
2) Apt having a long history of working better with private repositories
3) Ubuntu feature releases not being as glacially slow as Debian
(multilib x86_64 being a huge driver which pretty much killed the
prospects of running Debian in the past). This also dings RHEL.
4) A long term support commitment  (security fixes) for packages
(which Fedora does not provide)
5) "Desktop is the same as the server OS", which CentOS/RHEL does not provide.

Other than basic high-level factors like the ones listed here there
wasn't much consideration given to running modern Fedora or other
distributions.

Wikimedia's environment is pretty specialized: The important
productions packages they use (Apache, PHP, Squid, MediaWiki, of
course) are mostly builds that Wikimedia performs rather than distro
provided software. On some systems they run custom Linux kernels as
well.  They make many non-trivial changes to the software they run,
though they are generally pretty good about pushing those changes
upstream.

So I don't know how well their experience would translate to third parties.