Which Linux for Professional Admins? 934
LazloToth asks: "Short and sweet: with so many distributions of Linux to choose from, and so many of them good to excellent, which Linux delivers the best balance of stability, high-level support options, security, rapid updates, and ease of administration? If an admin wants to standardize on one Linux distribution and have the best of all worlds on everything from file-and-print servers to database boxes, what, in the experience of the Slashdot pros, is that Holy Grail of Linuxes - - the one that does it all while also making upper management feel warm and fuzzy?"
Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)
Flamebait -1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly I would choose slack or debian (different reasons for each) and then boot off network, change one image you change them all... then have box specific apps on the local hard drive etc. BTW: get a lot of ram
doesnt exist (Score:1, Interesting)
Dunno, might be different in non-oracle shops but that's where I live so *shrugs*
Well, SuSE or RedHat, obviously. (Score:5, Interesting)
I say Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
Why bother asking here? (Score:1, Interesting)
I think a better idea for you would to go buy a $50 (after rebate) 120gb hard drive, partition it 10 ways, and then try out 10 different distros.
Sure, it'll take more time than asking
We use SuSE, but (Score:2, Interesting)
best TCO: Debian (IMHO), best commercial: SuSE (Score:1, Interesting)
Debian makes everything work with 15000 packages, or tries its best.
If you have to make your boss happy with "supported" plattforms choose SuSE.
sed -e 's/Oracle/SomeExpensivePiceOfCode/g'
Oracle runs like a charm on Debian, but this plattform is not officially supported by Oracle.
Re:Gentoo (Score:1, Interesting)
Wrong query. (Score:3, Interesting)
Results 1 - 23 of 23 for "which distribution of linux should i use". (0.06 seconds).
There ya go.
Re:Ubuntu (Score:2, Interesting)
Apt is nice and if you want GUI, synaptic works just fine. You pretty much get the standard debian list of packages and in case those don't fit your purpose, you can even use alien on RPMs to get them running.
Best thing with it is that they offer a liveCD -- fire it up, give it a shot, and see if you'll have any HW issues before you commit to it.
My laptop runs mandrake 10CE and because of a long-ago "tragedy" trying to upgrade a RH machine, I've tried to leave the distro alone unless I absolutely have to upgrade. I do the mandrakeupdate thing but since they've moved on to higher versions, it was getting tougher and tougher to find mirrors for patching the older version.
If not for my loyalty to KDE (and the fact that the Warty cds won't boot on my Inspiron 5100) I may have actually gone Ubuntu on that laptop, too.
Making Microsoft Happy (Score:2, Interesting)
We can't even select the right root here. Then subdivide recursively by window manager, application programming model, metadata repository, etc. etc. Could a community be more divided?
It's Unix all over again, people, just with less funding.
Word to the wise: stop starting new desktop "initiatives." Fold your project (and someone elses) into an existing development thread. Suppress your NIBMP (not invented by me personally.)
Do you really want to spend the first decade of the 21st century achieving parity with Windows XP, or do you want to deliver something truly new? Free crap is still crap.
Re:To put it short (Score:5, Interesting)
RHEL or RHEL-clones (Score:3, Interesting)
CentOS Page [caosity.org]
Mandrake (Score:4, Interesting)
Cygwin. (Score:2, Interesting)
P.S. Made you look.
Re:Gentoo of course (Score:5, Interesting)
However...
As an administrator, I'm not particularly intrested in a distribution that will "teach me the inner workings of Linux". Stability and predictability are lots more important for production machines.
The new servers I'm putting on line now are all running Debian, and I'll be switching some old RH9 servers to Debian as I get the time to do that.
Someone earlier emphasized package management as a prime requirement for easy administration. Debian does that very well. Gentoo is also pretty good, except when things break, which does happen. I see Debian as more stable, Gentoo as more configurable. For a desktop, I'd choose Gentoo, but so far I'm leaning to Debian in the server room.
My biggest objection to most of the commercial distributions is that they are far too "versioned". If old versions had security updates forever, that'd be fine, but having to do a disruptive upgrade every few years on running servers just because there are no more security updates on the running version is quite inconvenient. This is one place where Gentoo really shines, being essentially "versionless". Debian makes version shifting relatively simple, so I'm comfortable with the relatively infrequent version bumps I'm likely to see.
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
You can always get hardened gentoo [gentoo.org] if you need that extra level of security...
no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat (Score:2, Interesting)
For all the other critera, everyone will have their arguments. But for this one, I think it's Red Hat, hands down.
I'm not saying it's "the best", for whatever technical defintion of "best" we might choose; but I think we're moving toward a situation of "no one ever got fired for buying Red Hat".
Re:Goodness (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe not. Re-read the question again, and what he's really asking is what makes managers feel warm and fuzzy.
Nothing makes my managers cream in their jeans more than the words "vendor support". That alone is what drives people toward other Operating Systems (Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, Windows).
If my business was just switching to Linux, and they wanted the best, my immediate suggestion would be Redhat. It's been around for years. It's a publically traded company (which says something about it's stability), and it puts together a widely supported and recognized operating system (AS 2.1 and RHEL 3.0). In addition, it's going to run most of the proprietary database software (including Oracle and Sybase), and just about every piece of open source software you might need for running a business is included on the distro CDs.
I've been a Redhat user since 1998. I love RH 7.2, but think every free distribution since then has sucked. Which is why I have begun switching to Gentoo for my desktop. It takes awhile to compile everything, but it seems like it's gotten around dependancy hell.
In general, Redhat for business and critical systems, Gentoo for SA workstations.
RedHat "enterprise" (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want something that doesn't require a subscription, then you may want to use fedora, which is just behind redhat's bug fixes, and a bit more cutting edge with new software.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd give redhat a shot.
Re:Easy.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried SuSE and Red Hat in College, but was not impressed by the limitations that the installation software created. I like booting to a command line, even though my first command is usually "startx".
I have not had the opportunity to try *BSD. While I feel that wiping my computer is a normal thing, I enjoy it much less than I used to. In fact I have been actively trying to learn how to fix problems without resorting to a format.
I want to be able to administer my own machine reliably, but probably will not have privileges on machines I do not own. Where (or what) are good sources of reference to learn from?
I purchased O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell a few months ago and have found it helpful, but assuming too much knowhow from the start. I am no longer a helpdesk employee, so I have limited resources to draw assistance from.
I do not find ANY distro I have used to be KISS, but have had the best success with Slackware. I still have problems with LILO so I haven't upgraded the kernel because the 2.6 kernel will not boot from a floppy.
I require dual boot with Windows because some software I run for work are windows only. Also the support center won't talk to me unless I am in windows.(happily I don't talk to them much) I find that the web applications run better in Konquer spoofing Explorer 5.5 than in Windows running Explorer!
Phil
SLES9 / SUSE9.2 combo (Score:5, Interesting)
We mainly use redhat/fedora here, and I do have to say that all of the things that I've "fought" with redhat to get working properly "just work" right out of the box with SUSE.
Scenario:
I wanted to unify all logins across linux/windows machines on my companies user network.
We were running an NT4 domain controller and using local passwd authentication for all linux servers/workstations.
The natural solution to this was to set up an ldap server, have all the linux machines authenticate off it, and then replace the NT4 domain that would authenticate off the same ldap database. While we're at it, we thought we should enable fine grained access control lists for local filesystems, the samba interface, oh, and they should work over NFS as well. (acl.bestbits.at)
After about 2 months with redhat battling compilation issues, config issues, library issues, and other issues, rpm issues, and a bottle of aprin. I finally managed to get an openldap server up and running, with samba3 authenticating against it in a test environment.
Another month later, I got the ACLs working.
I about kicked myself in the head when, upon evaluating SLES9, I found that during installation it acually gave me an option to use ldap as the main authentication mechanism. Also, it has a built in, YAST controlled CA magement system, replacing all the scripts that I had written to handle ssl certificates.
I recreated my entire test environent in under an hour using SLES9.
On the client end, Suse 9.2 "just works" in every imaginable way. The only things I had to install myself for workstations were enigmail and slocate.
To this day, I still have a few redhat machines that blow up when trying to use ldap/ssl, but everything suse has worked perfectly the first time.
Naturally, it comes with a bunch of databases, a kickass update mechanism (yast), an automated setup tool (autoyast), and now has very nice support from the nice folks over at novell.
On the flip side, I would probably still use redhat for "mission critical" things, as redhats QA proccess is insane. You wont get the nice new extras, but thats because the bleeding edge tends to be unstable.
Also, another thing that needs to be thought about is "googleability." Googleability is a measure of how quickly you can find your problem, then an answer to it, using google. Redhat has much higher googleability that Suse, or any other linux distro for that matter (except perhaps debian), but to be fair, Suse (from my brief experience) tends to have less problems.
In conclusion: Suse for your internal network/workstations/etc. Redhat for your webservers and other things that should have obscene uptimes.
-s
make upper management feel warm and fuzzy? RedHat. (Score:3, Interesting)
RedHat is security certified, and oracle certified. Redhat has something like 75% of the enterprise market for linux. Redhat has a real company behind it. To many in the business world, redhat *is* linux.
so stop updating (Score:2, Interesting)
Changing a production system is a dangerous thing to do, and it is one of the benifits of unix systems that, if left alone, they normally manage to keep on working all by themselves. If you have to touch a system people are relying on, check that you are only doing what is necessary, do it carefully, by hand, one package at a time, and be sure to read the useful stuff at the end of the emerge.
"emerge world" is for people on the cutting edge, "emerge -p <package-i-really-need-to-update>" is for production servers. It's a shame that because both are supported, some people get misled and use the wrong one, in a cron job, without considering if that is really the most suitable thing to do.
I do consider security updates as required, it would be nice to get a list of just the security updates so that they can be carefully applied. This probably exists, I just havn't found it yet.
A happy Gentoo admin, not because it's perfect, but because everything else I tried was that much worse.
Re:Well, SuSE or RedHat, obviously. (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted you may be talking to someone in India who can't speak english to save his/her life, but they will support you.
Re:Well, SuSE or RedHat, obviously. (Score:1, Interesting)
Uncover which distro they will all support/certify. That's the one - so when there's a problem and you've got them all in the room together, you've got them with a prior commitment (real SLA's with $$$ attached) to make it work.
This, of course, has almost nothing to do with the Linux distro, but what the hardware and application vendors are willing to commit to. This could reflect their technical investement or just whatever the current partnership status (marketing $$$) is between them all. Doesn't matter.
(Just for grins, what they publically support may not even be what they use to develop with internally - usually Debian).
Then you can run whatever suits your taste on the desktop and admin from there with whatever you want.
Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm, maybe not... I've re-read your post a couple of times to make sure but you don't seem to have a distro picked out.
SuSE on Big Iron (Score:3, Interesting)
Opinion from a Professional Linux SA (Score:2, Interesting)
First off, every company is different and every company's requirements are
different. Second, every Slashdot user is different and has their favorite (or
least favorite). Third, most of the vocal commentary on Slashdot seems to be
from programmers, who are NOT professional admins. Seriously, this is important
to note and consider.
That said, as a professional Linux system administrator for a very large
corporation, my preference is SuSE.
best balance of stability
SuSE undergoes extensive testing of new packages and ensures that bugs are
patched with solid working code. That can't be said for all the distributions
out there. SuSE is a company that backs and supports their product with
professionals who are paid to fix code. Not hackers in their basement
submitting bugs in the hopes that it gets implemented. This is also true of Red
Hat.
high-level support options
This is vague. If you want a corporate entity that supports the distribution,
SuSE does that. If you want to have easy to use GUI tools, SuSE has that too.
While I prefer to do as much as I can via commandline and
SuSE converted me to ease-of-administration-tools with Yast2. Out of the Linux
distributions I've used (damn near every well known and even some lesser known),
Yast2 is the best administrative tool I've come across so far. I would go as
far to compare it to AIX's smit (or smitty).
security
Security is a major concern for corporations, and SuSE has a plethora of
security options. Honestly though, any Linux distribution can be just as secure
as any other by a competent admin, particular when using common tools such as
SELinux, Firewalls, TCP Wrappers plus monitoring and IDS. SuSE has security
options built into Yast2 that are easy to find (on the main menu), and any
experienced admin can do many things at the command line.
rapid updates
I will assume this is either updates are applied on the system quickly, or
updates from the vendor are released quickly after patches are submitted to code
trees. This is true in both cases for SuSE. Their package reviewers ensure
that security updates are tested thoroughly and released in a timely fashion.
They also don't trickle out package update releases like Red Hat. The minor
bugfixes are bundled up and released together, so end users don't have to
continually update systems and potentially cause outages. We have been very
pleased with the package update schedule SuSE uses. It is far better than that
which Red Hat follows.
and ease of administration?
I think this is addressed above. I'd like to reiterate that SuSE is very easy
to manage. As an example for my server at home, I had a brand new SuSE install
up and running with mysql, apache, samba file shares, cups network printing all
set up and serving my network in less than an hour.
If an admin wants to standardize on one Linux distribution and have the best of
all worlds on everything from file-and-print servers to database boxes...
or Enterprise Server on the servers. At least, in this admin's opinion.
Other distributions also have a lot to offer. It really depends on what the company's requirements are. Personally, I would eschew the others in favor of our Green Lizard Overlords.
Professional Admin - A Reasonable Response (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the answer you are looking for is RedHat Enterprise Server. There are many software vendors out there that only certify and QA their product on RedHat ES. It is one of the more popularly required distributions out there. I might add that while you might want to become proficient in RHES you should expose yourself to many other distributions of GNU/Linux. You or your client/company won't always want to purchase a license from RedHat for an internal application test server, or other 'non-critical' servers that won't be running software with a vendor requirement.
If you reach such a point you really do have a lot of control as to what you end up running (unless your supervisor happens to have an opinion). I can tell you that speed matters. With many other projects or items you might be working on, you won't have days to research that new distro that just came off the block and why it won't work with your RAID card - and you certainly won't have time to compile the software you will need for your entire system. You will need to depoly something you know how to run, you can trust, and goes up quickly.
In this situation I suggest learning systems that many other distros tend to base their designs off of. Debian is a good example. Learn Debian and you have learned the basics you will need to pick up many other distributions.
Learning many distributions gives you the ability to adapt quickly when a new vendor comes in with a different requirement (like SuSE for example) - or your shop changes it's preferred platform. I really enjoy running Debian/Knoppix for many of my personal projects - but you might find Gentoo or some other distro fits your style more.
It really comes down to cozying up to something and starting to learn all the aspects and quirks behind it. You might find that once you become very skilled in two or three distributions you will be able to pick up new ones with little trouble. At that stage you begin to understand what kind of knowledge it takes to be considered an expert. It might take you several years after that to achieve your personal ideal of what a professional should know (or the rest of your career).
In closing I might say that the best advice I could give to the aspiring Linux Sys Admin is simply to start. Grab the nearest iso you've got, install it, then grab a different one and install that. Dive in there and start learning as much as you can - you will never learn it all, but the pursuit of higher knowledge will result in your reaching a plateau that tends to provide enough income to scratch out a descent living.
Also, do not forget the many other skills you will need as a professional. Working with others in a team, treating customers with respect at all times, and maintaining a positive attitude even in stressful situations are all very important aspects of being a professional. Mastering these elements will get you farther in a career than memorizing the structure of a file descriptor or all the switches to rpm (which might be good to know any way, but won't necessarily help you keep your job).
The right tools for the right job (Score:2, Interesting)
I personally think-as I wrote in my title-that the right tool should be used for the right job.
I will not do a my distro is better than your distro response, but rather give my opinions on a series of distros that I have come across.
Debian: Most likely the best system for hardcore admins out there. The packages and software are stable, and even the "unstable versions" of programs have been available for a great deal of time. The only issue is that finding software and getting support for newer hardware can be a bit of an issue since Debian is so stable that many packages are outdated.
Gentoo: Best server package if you intend on staying on the bleeding edge in terms of software and hardware support, and a very simple package installation system with stability kept in mind. Great support because many people in the forums are available to answer questions related to software and hardware issues, and just for general how-to-solve-this-problem type of issues. The bad thing about Gentoo is that in some cases there are issues with package maintainence, support, and the compile times for source are an issue.
Redhat: Wonderful out of the box system with simple setup. The horrible part about Redhat though is that it's terribly inefficient and the packages are old sometimes and deprecated. This is wonderful for stable systems, so maybe in fact this is the ideal system for a beginning admin and for a group of people who need support from a third party (in this case Redhat), since that is ultimately your only option for support really other than user groups, etc. Many server makers such as Dell and IBM provide server support through Redhat as well because they provide (IMO) the best enterprise support for people without admins. It's package system is RPMs though, which is notorious for having dependency and installation issues due to the way it's setup.
Slackware: Great for minimalist servers that need as many services as possible without the bloat that Redhat and-sometimes-Debian have. Supposedly the install system has improved since I last used Slackware (a package management tool called slapt-get, similar to apt-get, was made), but support is sometimes limited and many of the packages that aren't available on the CD or via slapt-get need to be compiled/installed manually.
Standardize! (Score:3, Interesting)
If possible, use the same distro everywhere. RedHat is probably the best if you need/want "official" support. A mix of RHEL and WhiteBox Linux would qualify in my book as "consistent" since they are basically the same thing.
Debian is probably the best non-commercial distro.
Gentoo is a newcomer. Some swear by it, others are put off by the 3-days of compile time and the requirement to "get down and dirty" with your Linux install.
Suse in Europe is probably about like RedHat in the US. Now with Novell in on the picture, we'll see how things fare in the US.
As a RedHat user for years (since 5.1) I'm not eager to switch unless Novell makes a GOOD case. I came real close to jumping ship when RedHat changed their business plans - whitebox (and CentOS) have stopped me from leaving RedHat altogether.
So, pick your poison, and then get real familiar with your distro of choice. And, do everything possible to unify your technology base. Keep them all the !@#@ same because even within a distro, you run into issues. Like RH 6.2 supported source routing by default, making a mockery of carefully crafted firewall rules. Like RedHat 6.x uses ipchains, RedHat 7.x emulates ipchains with iptables (with a few differences) and RedHat 9 and above uses iptables.
These little differences can eat up time and make administration a pain. You should focus on the effect of administration, not the means, and unifying your install base means that when an issue is identified anywhere, you can quickly propogate your fix everywhere.
With this methodology, I've boiled patching and reviewing some 20+ systems down to a day or two every month! As soon as RHEL (Whitebox) 4.x comes out, I'm doing a major upgrade cycle, upgrading everything I can.
Slackware (Score:3, Interesting)
Short Answer / Long Answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Long Answer: It depends.
We use a very large amount of Linux at my work, and we're big users of all opensource software.
We've been trying very hard to standardize on a single linux distro, but so far this has been virtually impossible.
We've "done the Redhat thing", we used virtually every version of Redhat from 3.0.3 through to 9, but decided to stop when the Fedora project started (personally I've not liked any version of Redhat since 7.3).
However redhat just 'will not go away' we run several large Oracle databases & until very recently this has meant Redhat Advanced Server, so we've now got a site license for this too.
Debian: I have to admit to only being a recent convert to debian, however it has always been the prefered platform for some of our admins. Since RH9 went off the support matrix we've been planning to migrate our desktop solution to Debian, this is now underway with prototype systems in the field. As for support on Debian, well there isn't any - although we now know that a couple of very large companies will support debian, just not "officially". That coupled with the fact that we've got 3 debian developers on the staff gives us the "warm fuzzy feeling" we need
The story doesn't end there, with the introduction of the Altix (SGI) platform we hit another support matrix: SGI's version of Redhat or SuSE Enterprise server. Again Oracle rears it's ugly head - what do they support, the key word here is support. Well of those two it's only SuSE.
Oh and we also use FreeBSD...
If its in a corperate environment .... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also whatever distribution you use must be supported as a platform by the application vendor, e.g. Oracle
Personally I would run either SuSE or Redhat Enterprise editions, (leaning more towards SuSE as I run the Pro version at home so am used to YaST etc).
Also you want to decrease the number of support companies you use
At the end of the day you are looking for a stable, supportable system not a l33t one.
t
Debian scales well... (Score:2, Interesting)
I chose Debian [debian.org], because it is usable both on server and workstation (and I wanted to provide help on both).
It is best to have the same distribution in whole institution, so I have unstable on workstations and stable on servers. I can have the same local packages with custom debianized [debian.org] software for both environments.
And automatic package management facilities are most advanced... (Think apt-get 0.6.25 w/crypto package verification, auto-apt [debian.org] or dlocate [debian.org].)
And if debian is not for you - you can always choose debian-based distro [cornell.edu].
To make PHBs warm and fuzzy... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to be warm and fuzzy, go for debian.
Debian 3.1 should be out in this quarter (an estimate based on release-critical bugs in testing), and will be supported until 2010 or so...