Advice for a debian server

[Johan Sjöberg]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-
> bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of John Hodrien
> Sent: den 7 september 2010 13:42
> To: linux-poweredge at dell.com
> Subject: RE: Advice for a debian server
> 
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2010, Johan Sjöberg wrote:
> 
> > Well, that's a nice flamebait if I ever saw one...
> 
> Quite, but that doesn't mean you need to rise to it.
> 
> > These "enterprise" distros are generally very bloated. Who wants
> Bluetooth
> > support and a desktop environment on a server?
> 
> A single kickstart for what you like and you get what you want with the
> minimum of fuss.  Anyway, why does RHEL have to be for servers.  I use the
> same base OS for servers, desktops, and appliance type devices.  It's all
> good.
> 
> > You need to do a lot af deselecting when installing RHEL/CentOS to get a
> > reasonably slim installation.
> 
> Yes, it's not as good as some distros if you want a really tight install, but
> you can get /reasonably/ small, /reasonably/ easily.
> 
> > And you are also "forced" to use LVM, which is quite unneccesary when
> you
> > use hardware RAID.
> 
> No you're not.  LVM is the default, but a couple of clicks during the install
> and you can ignore it entirely.  Also, if you think hardware RAID negates all
> the benefits of LVM then you really don't understand LVM.
> 
> > Debian is really lightweight and reliable (yes it is).
> 
> Sure.  But that doesn't make RHEL unreliable.  They're both much more
> reliable
> than IRIX ;)
> 
> > The fact a product is commercial doesn't make it more reliable. Sure, it's
> > nice to have commercial support, if you need it. Correct me if I'm wrong,
> > but it's not like RedHat codes all their packages themselves. The "hobby
> > developer's" code goes into RHEL as well.
> 
> Absolutely.  And to throw the inverse into the mix, it's not like Debian
> doesn't benefit from the work done by Redhat or other commercial linux
> vendors.
> 
> jh

Of course, I'm no Debian fanatic or so, but the statement that RHEL is superior was quite provoking. We use RHEL and CentOS on a number of machines. Mostly Dell servers, since the Debian support from Dell is near to non-existent, and we need OMSA for monitoring the hardware. On HP we generally use Debian, since they provide Debian packages of system management applications and drivers.

/Johan