[ale] Server distro help

[Vernard Martin]

>
> I've never worked with any of the "upstream" solutions.  Is it time 
> for this technically middle-of-the-road geek to take one of them on? 
>  If so, what is the overwhelming recommendation?
>

As with many questions, the answer is "it depends".

I have found that I cannot use one distribution for all my needs. I 
support both a stable production enterprise environment and an 
experimental development platform. We tend towards CentOS/RedHat for the 
former and Ubuntu LTS for the latter. Hell, I've even got an Arch linux 
desktop for one developer.

The only real issues I have had with either of them is CentOS 5.X was 
getting long int he tooth regardling libraries and some versions (as it 
was intended). but it was getting harder to compile some of the newer 
tools without having to spend a LOT of time compiling newer library 
pre-reqs.

Ubuntu was fine once I standardized on LTS releases only. I still have 
nightmares because one idiot faculty member did a "apt-get dist-ugprade" 
and then his machine wouldn't successfully reboot. Just got stuck at a 
grub prompt.

in any event, that is the world I live in at the moment. I'm probably 
going to see about moving from Ubuntu to Fedora for my experimental 
devel platform. Its almost as up to date as the Ubuntu family and 
looks/smells more like RedHat for configuration.

A lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin :)

V