[TriLUG] ubuntu as a server distro?

[David W. Aquilina]

I think what a lot of people (or at least enterprises) look for in a distribution to put on servers is a slightly different form of stability, and longevity. 

I don't mean stability as in "it won't crash" (though that's always a plus!), rather that a security update won't break other parts of the system or change the system's behavior in certain ways. This is one of the main points for enterprise distributions such as RHEL. In theory, significant behhaviors of the system won't change. See also http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html.

Most enterprises are also concerned about a particular release's longevity - how long will security updates be available for that particular version? This is why I generally recommend against using Fedora as a server - the software itself will work fine, but Fedora has generally a 6 month lifecycle. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to be performing potentially distruptive upgrades eevery 6 months on a system that I want to be as highly available as possible. 

I'm not sure how Ubuntu rates on those points, or even if they're important points for you. Food for thought, anyways. 

(Personally, I use RHEL 4 on my server. Not just because it's stable and will get security updates for the next seven years, but because it's what I'm most familiar with as well)

-- 
David Aquilina
david at starkindler.us