[ILUG] Dell Poweredge - best distro

[Aj McKee]

Hi Feagal,

Personally speaking when it comes to installing a box of such I find that
there a few questiosn to ask Whats is the machines purpose. Is it critical,
what apps do you want run, & how long are you remaining in you company / who
will support it.

Personally and professionaly I think Slack is the best distro, everthing is
where it is supposed to be and compiling from source is easy and painless.
However the next sysadmin in you place may have problems if they are less
experienced. Hence I always opt for Red Hat when installing stuff. The only
problem I find with RedHat is the RPM. From a business perspective its a bit
of a bummer when you have to hack something together when the push comes to
a shove to get something working (e.g Apache rpm you have to download the
src rpm and rebuild it if you need to up the amount of connections /clients
you want on it as the default maybe too low for some operations). Reason is
not beacuse it won't work, but because if you leave or if you forget how you
done it you'll spend time fixing the problem etc etc and they hate you
spending your time doning "support issues" (My experience only though). But
that been said very rarely do I have to do that with Red Hat as we just do
web stuff so its a piece of p*** most of the time but itf your upping the
notch on that I can't really say with any proficency.

Business wise I think Red Hat rock, personally give me slack. Plus as well I
think a lot more people in the future will know RedHat (I know you can't
just know one distro) or feel more comfortable with it than the others. Its
also way to easy to install (have 7.2 on a few Dell PEdges myself)

Best of luck and give us a shout if we can help
Aj


Best of luck with it
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fergal Moran" <fergal.moran at wasptech.com>
To: <ilug at linux.ie>
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 8:58 AM
Subject: [ILUG] Dell Poweredge - best distro


> Morning all
>
> I'm sorry for breaking with the prevailing winds and actually posting on
> topic but it's going to be a big day today - I have the office to myself
> and I'm in the mood for a bit of mischief.
>
> I have a Dell Poweredge with an Adaptec AIC-7899 Ultra160/m SCSI card
> and a PERC 3/Di RAID controller (I believe drivers for both of these are
> available on Dells site) which I'm going to cleanse of Windows as our
> linux boxen are straining at the moment and this is only serving up the
> odd word doc here and there.  So I am looking for some advice on the
> best distro for it.  It's a production machine so there is no time for
> fannying about with the awkward distros.    It must be completed today
> so I need something that will go on quickly and painlessly and hopefully
> in such a way that no-one will notice the difference.
>
> I have this anti-redhat leaning which I'm not sure is justified but 7.1
> badly broke one of our own server products and I've never really
> forgiven it.  Is it time to move on and try 7.2?
>
> Cheers
>
> Fergal..
>
> --
> Irish Linux Users' Group: ilug at linux.ie
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug for (un)subscription
information.
> List maintainer: listmaster at linux.ie
>
>