best os for DA

I think suhailc's point is you don't need to install new kernels that often. Well you really don't with Linux unless you want to or need to, either. Here's our most recent uptime for the server hosting nobaloney.net:
Code: 
[jlasman@da12 ~]$ uptime
 22:42:35 up 298 days,  9:59,  2 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.10, 0.11
[jlasman@da12 ~]$
Note it got through the big spam attack earlier this week without having to be rebooted :).

I was going for a year, but with the new published kernel hack, even though it's only available internally and even though we have no local users, I'm still going to update the kernel sooner rather than later.

Jeff
 
My first linux webserver had an uptime of over a year; it was back in '95-'96, and it was an early Slackware distribution using Linux kernel version 0.99.

Jeff
 
suhailc said:
I simply cannot believe that there's only one previous vote for FreeBSD!

DA works beautifully on CentOS, but with CentOS you need to keep rebooting your server every month normally for kernel updates and to stop your filesystems locking up eventually.

DA with FreeBSD does require knowledge of FreeBSD to set it up, but once it's set, the server can sit for months on end running beautifully.
Click to expand...

One of my Freebsd's uptime;

la1006# uptime
1:07AM up 453 days, 14:34, 1 user, load averages: 0.12, 0.08, 0.07
:)
 
I wasn't trying to start a contest; just pass on that Linux could have high uptimes matching those of FreeBSD.

As a matter of fact, I had to shut down that server Saturday evening; it's uptime is now less than two days.

(I was moving the server directly under it, and didn't want to risk banging into the two servers around them, so I temporarily shut them down for less than a minute.)

But as long as I'm posting... how many nines is one minute out of 307 days? Anyone? ;)

Jeff
 
pucky said:
One of my Freebsd's uptime;

la1006# uptime
1:07AM up 453 days, 14:34, 1 user, load averages: 0.12, 0.08, 0.07
:)
Click to expand...

Just for reference I have a couple of boxes that have been up a while:

FreeBSD domain.com 4.7-RELEASE-p25 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p25 #0: Tue Mar 2 20:16:17 EST 2004 [email protected],:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/HP i386

2:01PM up 1421 days, 10 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.54, 2.00, 1.75

-and-

FreeBSD domain.com 4.7-RELEASE-p25 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p25 #2: Tue Mar 2 20:23:36 EST 2004 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/HP i386

2:10PM up 1421 days, 9 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.25, 1.40, 1.48

To backup jlasman both Linux and FreeBSD have their places. If you know what you are doing by far you can tune FreeBSD to have far better performance then Linux in many cases. Most people don't want nor need to get to that level of understanding. On vanilla systems you will find that Linux in many cases is faster then vanilla FreeBSD boxes due to it extensive caching. Once you truly know why you would want one distro over another then you won't ask these questions. So for now do what you are comfortable with.
 
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And this from a linux box run by an acquaintance of mine:
Code: 
# uptime
 10:03am  up 1477 days, 15:35,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.08, 0.02
A VA-Linux box running RHL 8.

To be fair, this isn't a webserver; it runs behind a firewall.

Jeff
 
You'd probably be guessing wrong; you might be right if you said that over 90% of DA installs on CentOS 5 are on CentOS 5.1, but for all licenses? I don't think so.

Jeff
 
jlasman said:
You'd probably be guessing wrong; you might be right if you said that over 90% of DA installs on CentOS 5 are on CentOS 5.1, but for all licenses? I don't think so.

Jeff
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

Hope you're doing well!

Okay maybe not CentOS 5.1, or even CentOS 5, but definitely CentOS be it 4 or 5.

If I could put my money on it(not that I would as I don't bet!), I'd say CentOS is the most licensed DA OS, followed by FreeBSD, and then probably by Fedora, and then Debian.

CentOS is basically the most popular free OS being a Red Hat Linux clone.

Why, what would you put your money on?
 
jlasman said:
Of course if you're more familiar with Debian, it may be best to go with it.

However, as I've mentioned before, in other threads easily found by searching these forums for which OS is best ...

DirectAdmin is first written on CentOS; DirectAdmin for every other system is a port.

Jeff
Click to expand...

In fact DA could be os independent (with a bit of work by the user as the installation script cannot be written to support all os) as the only thing needed to be run is the DA application in 2222 port. All of the other services are used for years in all of the unix and linux systems. I wouldnt be surprised to see it running under netbsd :)

I used linux for many years until the DA setup came for my company. A friend of mine suggested freebsd as it's safer than linux.
It's not that difficult as i expected to jump to freebsd and there is one handbook that you can use to build everything.
In general i found 2 things that make be believe that freebsd it's far away from linux capabilities.
The first is kernel secure levels along with the several filesystem file flags and the second the pf firewalling system.
It isnt the best for your home pc but it rules when we are talking for server security.

And as i read in a page : A default FreeBSD installation has yet to be affected by a single CERT security advisory in 2000.

That's why you dont have to restart :)
 
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I forgot to mentioned that : One day i made a mistake in my server, i added a mailing list with a mail (forwarder) as a member which pointed to that mailing list. The result was that a circle in mails (by the time i stopped it there were 200000 mails in exims queue and over 150000 mails in the other users mailboxes).
The server load as you can see reached 120. I did login and i fix it remotely. None of the services was dead and exim was keeping on to deliver emails. I 've seen linux with a load of 40-60 that needed single user mode to correct the problem (couldnt login via ssh).

That day i've stopped to use linux :)
 

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tsiou said:
I 've seen linux with a load of 40-60 that needed single user mode to correct the problem (couldnt login via ssh).
Click to expand...
And I've seen linux boxes with loads of several hundreds, still running, and still actively accepting shell logins so you could control it. I don't understand your point at all, since to get into single user mode you'd have to reboot the server, and once you did that you'd have a server load close to zero certainly long enough to log in and fix any problem.

Jeff
 
As for me, I recommend CentOS for servers - because it is server operating system, forf of commercially-maintained redhat.
About LA, We had a server with almost same problem - one script made an infinite cycle, so over 1.5 million messages had to be delivered!
Load average was nearly 900 (I've never seen that before), but I logged in server and stopped exim.
Also, in our local network we have a server running redhat9 with uptime more than 1500 days, with kernel 2.4.20-8 :)
We are not updating it for historical reasons ;)

In CentOS there are many centralized management aplications - chkconfig, /sbin/service and other. In FreeBSD I don't see any order of config files and binaries.

Also, FreeBSD has no normal kernel-level virualization.
 
proHSP said:
In CentOS there are many centralized management aplications - chkconfig, /sbin/service and other. In FreeBSD I don't see any order of config files and binaries.

Also, FreeBSD has no normal kernel-level virualization.
Click to expand...

I got easily from linux (slackware is still my favorite for almost 10 years) to Freebsd just because of that. All start up scripts reside to one rc.d directory, all of the config files under an etc folder and the ports system is something like the rpm manager. you want to install apache? cd /usr/ports/www/apache && make install. it will download the latest source, compile it for your system and install it along with it's dependencies if you wish. The difference (and advantage) is that freebsd dont use pre-compiled packages but downloads that time the latest source from the program's webpage and compiles it. Something like that for an upgrade.
So you can see that you can manage your server like a redhat, debian etc server.
There are jails if you wish to chroot services, or to give to users a sub system that can fully admin, safe for the primary system, installed in minutes.

As for security, *bsd community is focusing on security and that is its primary goal. On the other hand, linux splits its energy on other things too like portability and making users/admins life better.

I'm not willing to start a flame war between linux and freebsd, i still use linux at many servers, that's my opinion after using linux for 10 years and freebsd for 3 :)
 
Two questions as a newbie, please comment on both:
1.) I have no kwonledge on linux yet (Managing windows servers and linux based hardware-firewall), and I was going to choose centos, but my ISP recommended me Debian, so we installed debian. Do I have any incompatiblity, securtiy or stability issues with anything when using it with DA for a hosting company? Is it good choose to start from scrath or do I still consider choosing Centos? I googled around and everybody says something different. But generally speaking Debian seems to be a better choise from the results that I read. Because this is my first linux server, my other servers also will be linux so first choise is important to me.

2.) Centos life is till 2012 but what will happen then to all those users especially web host companies? Will they have to switch to an other OS that has a longer life?

Thanks for the comments.
 
ozgurerdogan said:
Two questions as a newbie, please comment on both:
1.) I have no kwonledge on linux yet (Managing windows servers and linux based hardware-firewall), and I was going to choose centos, but my ISP recommended me Debian, so we installed debian. Do I have any incompatiblity, securtiy or stability issues with anything when using it with DA for a hosting company? Is it good choose to start from scrath or do I still consider choosing Centos? I googled around and everybody says something different. But generally speaking Debian seems to be a better choise from the results that I read. Because this is my first linux server, my other servers also will be linux so first choise is important to me.

2.) Centos life is till 2012 but what will happen then to all those users especially web host companies? Will they have to switch to an other OS that has a longer life?

Thanks for the comments.
Click to expand...

CentOS 5 Full Updates run until: March 31st, 2011
CentOS 5 Maintanence Updates run until: March 31st, 2014

So you just earned two more years.
That's nearly 6 years from today.
While I'm sure there are folks who are running servers for 5-6 years on the same old systems with no problems, and even though hardware is now more stable and works longer than before, 5 years is a very long time.
There are always planned changes in architecture of OS or other softwares (PHP6 in the coming future) and every so often you will hear that "to maximize performance you should have...".
So 5 years from today, the available hardware will be dramatically different from what we have today.
So the timeline is really not the issue.

As for choosing Debian or a linux flavor, that is really a personal choice.
It is a matter of what you feel comfortable with.
I started out with Linux RH for my SSH access in 1997 and bought RH 6.0 book.
Ever since, I stuck with RH distro, then moved to WhiteBox and from there moved onto CentOS.
My WhiteBox 3.0 is running great since 2004, but the hardware is 'tired' so regardless of its operativity, I will have to retire the box soon.
Thats why I'm not really concerned with the Timeline of EOL.
My hardware will die first :))).

Just my $0.02.

-Alon.
 
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