[TriLUG] debian in production

[Ryan Leathers]

apt; only the frills you want; latest greatest packages 

although you can get the benefits of apt just about anywhere, one of the
things I really appreciate about debian is that its so simple to get all
of the things you need and none of the junk you don't need.  If you were
to run apt with SuSE, which is perfectly fine, you would probably have
more "stuff" than you actually use and need.  This is not a knock on
SuSE - I like it a lot for its polish/completeness/strategy/... but I
also appreciate the streamlined elegance of debian when I know exactly
what I want and don't need extra "stuff" no matter how slick or well
thought out it is.  lastly, I appreciate the subtle difference in the
way these distributions are made available.  while its true that I can
likely get the latest tarball from project xyz to run in either place,
there are benefits to a distro like SuSE where there is a firm stake in
the ground for compatibility sake.  in the case of debian, the goal of
compatibility is still achieved, but with a less austere attitude toward
the adjusting of "stakes in ground" if you are willing to venture beyond
stable.         

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 12:02 -0400, Scott Lundgren wrote:
> Can someone give me +/-'s of running Debian stable in production? Most 
> of my administrative experience comes from RH, Fedora, and smidgen of 
> SuSE.
> 
> I'm tasked with providing an *AMP environment to expand our web hosting 
> services to the university community my department serves. The caveat 
> is that I'm only allowed to have repurposed sparc solaris servers. 
> Since there is no web hosting control panel software that runs on 
> Solaris, in lieu of providing fewer services with more administrative 
> burden, I'd like to propose to my management that Solaris be removed 
> and install Debian Sparc so I can enable private sector levels of 
> hosting via a restricted configuration of cpanel for our users.
> 
> Hopefully providing this scenario illuminates what issues I should be 
> aware of for this proposal.
> 
> Thanks,
> SL
> 
>