Well, I finally caved. After the past three years of running OS X at
home, I have need for a file server again. I tend to run SuSE in
production, as many of my customers like the administrative interface
of YaST, but after using Fink (apt-get) on the Mac, I have been very
curious to try a Debian distro. Ubuntu is the top of many peoples'
lists these days, and it's won several recent awards, so I thought I
would give it a shot. The short and long of it: Ubuntu as a server
rocks.
I use that qualification because I only used it briefly as a desktop
OS, running the LiveCD on my 17" PowerBook for a night. A most
enjoyable experience... if only there was support for the Broadcom
builtin wireless :-(
As a server, it is phenomenal. This is due not so much to Ubuntu, but
rather as a result of it being a Debian distro. Getting servers
installed, locked down, and running the network applications I need is
my top priority when selecting a platform these days. My second
priority is time: all of that has to happen within 1-3 hours of
beginning the process. I'm not a sysadmin anymore, and I can't spend my
time on that when it is better spent on development and R&D.
We'll have to see how SuSE fares at Novell over the next year (due to
recent changes in the SuSE team and the Novell layoffs, I'm watching
closely). If things start looking bad -- or if Ubuntu gets a set of
killer admin UI apps -- future server upgrades may experience a distro
switch.
Oh, and as a side note: LVM is phenomenal. I'm running it on the file
server, and am just amazed at the progress that has been made in the
last 4 years. I see no reason to use Veritas Volume Manager anymore
(for any of my needs or any of my customers' current needs). If you've
got a ton of drives laying around, not pulling their weight, dump them
in a box and put them to dynamic use with LVM.
Jon Brion - Monday (Sunday, 3:34pm MST)
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