I'll second support for use of Debian. We use it in a lot of production tasks on a bunch of servers and for development workstations. That said, with some of our new boxes, we are using Debian, but compiling from source RedHat enterprise kernels (easier than patching stock kernel) to get better hardware monitoring, and more importantly, to get the O2 scheduler, which does have some crude CPU affinity support. I believe this is one area where Linux has been a bit behind some other Unix varieties. Though we haven't used it yet, as I understand it, CPU affinity is important to Python performance on SMP machines. I expect that we will write or find a simple user-space utility utilizing the new system calls to bind a group of processes to a single CPU. I think, in theory, this will allow us to successfully run two Zope instances on an inexpensive 2CPU machine, each instance bound to a respective CPU. Sean -----Original Message----- From: Mike Renfro [mailto:renfro@tntech.edu] Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 8:19 AM To: Peter Bengtsson Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Linux vs. UNIX vs. BSD On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 10:55:14AM +0100, Peter Bengtsson wrote:

For dev and desktop I personally prefer Mandrake, but what I like becomes irrelevant when it's time to set up a serious server for production use.

I'm compelled to put in my two cents for Debian GNU/Linux now: - performance should be identical to any other Linux distribution on the same hardware. - configurability should also be identical, or exceeding other distributions. There's no overarching GUI configurator, but a combination between good policy on how packages are organized and tools never overriding your own settings without substantial warnings and chances to back out is nice. - not sure what you mean by "ease of use" and "lack of hacks". Most all common tasks (adding/deleting users, etc. ) already have scripts to handle them. Debian doesn't do much GUI integration, so this may count against your ease of use. On the other hand, I can administer a Debian server with a modem-enabled Palm. - RDBMS integration is there: packages already built for the usual Unix SQL servers. - Backup should be comparable to any other Unix. There's tar, dump, cpio, and afio for low-level tools (don't just use cat /dev/hdwhatever, please). There's tob, taper, afbackup, amanda and others for high-level tools. You can of course always pay for BRU, Veritas, or whatever normally runs on Linux. - ZEO should be a non-issue, as well. If you can get it running anywhere, you shouldn't have any extra difficulties. Downsides include the historically slow release cycle (Zope went from 2.1.6 to 2.5.1 during the last Debian stable release), which can be somewhat mitigated by building your own packages, or doing what lots of people do: building it from source in /usr/local. One could always install something other than the "stable" release of Debian on a server, but I'd not recommend it for the inexperienced (it'll be similar to running some other Linux distribution's normal releases). Debian's stable releases are very, very stable, and if your server hardware is supported, they're about trivially maintainable. -- Mike Renfro / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research, 931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )