[NTLUG:Discuss] Which Server Distro?

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 11:32:22AM -0600, Chris Cox wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 08:10 -0600, Michael Barnes wrote:
> > I need to build up a couple of basic servers, primarily for ftp use, a
> > few small web pages and a handful of small bash and perl scripts. No
> > DNS, DHCP, SMTP, Samba or other complicated stuff.  These are no
> > budget enterprise machines, the ftp boxes see around 3 GB of transfer
> > daily.
> > 
> > I was thinking of using either Ubuntu or CentOS, possibly OpenSUSE.  I
> > haven't fooled with CentOS for a while, but I'm using Ubuntu (or
> > Kbuntu) on several desktops now with good results.  I need something
> > that is going to be viable for a couple years at least.  That was a
> > real problem with my SUSE machines.  Every time I turned around, a new
> > version came out and I had to fiddle with my apps to get them running
> > again, or just stay with the original install.  Hence, I have a bunch
> > of SUSE 9.? and 10.2 machines I can't get updates to.
> 
> openSUSE and Ubuntu (even LTS to an extent) are consumer
> based distros and do not provide very long term support.
> 
> CentOS "claims" long term support, but really they just tap
> into the long term support arm of Red Hat, swipe the code
> and compile it.  So, every CentOS is a dollar less going
> to Red Hat, yet Red Hat is basically the support arm for
> CentOS.
> 
> So... to be fair, I'd consider only Red Hat RHEL or Novell's SLES
> for long term support.  Both are free, but you have to pay
> for updates and support.
> 
> Red Hat has an advantage in that they are supported by
> the plethora of closed source enterprise hardware and software
> solutions out there.  SLES has an advantage in stability, speed
> and integration with Windows and has the better mainframe
> platform.  SLES has some of the same closed source hw/sw
> advantage, but not as much as Red Hat.  SLES is also cheaper
> than Red Hat and tends not to put abitrary limits on things.
> 

To be fair, the limits are not so much arbitrary.  On the engineering side
at least (not sure on the sales/marketing side), we only list support for
what we know to be working and can QA.  If we ship something, we support
it.  That means that sometimes features have to be disabled because we
either cannot do the appropriate QA for one reason or another, or in some
cases we know there to be issues.  You might even find a feature that works
98% of the time in your favorite free distro, and never saw any issues.
Though 2% of the time that feature can fail leading to data corruption.
Even though it is only 2% of the time, we would rather fix or disable the
feature than ship it as is.

Justin