If I get a lot of good comments on this I'll make it a little how to on zope.org What *nix is best to use with Zope? 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. What matters then is: - performance - configurability - ease-of-use and lack of hacks - integration with RDBMS - backup possibilities - ZEO (load balancing and caching). Does anybody have any real experience of production deployment with various *nix'es. Which ones are better than other and which ones to avoid. The "ease-of-use and lack of hacks" is important to me since I'm just an experienced *nix user. Far from expert. Thank you, Peter --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.381 / Virus Database: 214 - Release Date: 2002-08-02
On Tuesday 20 August 2002 11:55, Peter Bengtsson wrote:
For dev and desktop I personally prefer Mandrake, A distro of festivals, like pop-music... :-) German SuSE is much better in their german programming accuracy and bug issues.
but what I like becomes irrelevant when it's time to set up a serious server for production use. What matters then is: - performance Quite same if you use the same hardware.
- configurability SuSE: YaST (automatish and the best) MDK: DrakConf (quite poor) RH: LinuxConf (mostly buggy) *BSD / UNIX: /dev/hands :)
- ease-of-use and lack of hacks Here I prefer only SuSE Linux. In BSD, certainly configuration is more simple then in Linux (mail accounts, TCP packets, etc), but it is also more hackerish -- mostly all you should do by hands.
- integration with RDBMS SuSE 7.1 and 7.2 is Oracle certified. :)
- backup possibilities This is software stuff. Actually "cat" command is your friend:
cat /dev/hdd1 > /tmp/backups/my_backup.dat ...then Bzip2 it and "scp" to somwhere.
- ZEO (load balancing and caching). In theory, BSD is better than Linux in some kernel issues, such as memory management. But in fact, since Linux kernel 2.4.x that is not a problem anymore. Actually, we had tried BSD and Linux and Win32 for Zope and some other Python apps. So currently we running on Linux even because it is really fast and has enought of additional software.
-- Regards, Bogdan A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased -- he hates all creative people equally.
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
participants (3)
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Bo M. Maryniuck -
Mike Renfro -
Peter Bengtsson