[geeks] This damn question again...

[Mark Benson]

On 12 Jun 2009, at 02:23, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

>> Services required are:
>>
>> Rails
>> MySQL
>> Apache/PHP
>> Samba
>> Possibly mail

> I would say OpenSolaris, however you may need more handholding to  
> set up
> all that stuff, since it is unlikely you already have experience with
> every single item.

I missed DNS off that list, which I have outline knowledge off and got  
to work okay on a test machine earlier in the year, but don't know  
that well apart from that.

I have experience with all those except Mail. of those I know Apache/ 
PHP intimately, Rails well enough to run a production-level app and  
Samba well enough to get by. Mail was hence labelled as a 'possibly',  
it depends how hardcore it is to get working.

I have the O'Reilly TCP/IP admin book too to fall back on in the event  
of a total crisis in the Networking department.

I don't know the internal of Solaris (and thus OSol) all that well  
though. I had a stab at using 2008.11 on a test machine and found it  
fairly tough going but it worked in the end. My 'NiX exerience is all  
Linux for the best part. I've goofed about with Solaris 10 on Suns but  
only goofed about. What stuff in OSol (Apache/PHP/MySQL config files  
and structure) that works like Linux I can cope with, it's the rest  
like services admin and stuff like that.

> Thus I recommend CentOS (RHEL clone) or RHEL.  Lots of easy ways to  
> set
> things up, and you can google your way out of most issues you will  
> come
> across.

CentOS certainly has plenty going for it. It's a direct relative of  
RHEL, which IBM like, and it's Linux, which I guess I could get used  
to. I guess the only hurdles are getting used to RPM (after not having  
used it for about 8 years) and the difference in system architecture  
between RH and Debian-esque distros. Totally doable.

NetBSD I also know well fro goofing about with my Cobalt Qube2 and the  
68k Mac version. Never really used it in anger but I do like it, apart  
from pkgsrc, I find it a bit of a bind and NetBSD's instructions on  
the topic are not the clearest in the universe. I seem to remember  
there was an either/or about keeping the pkgsrc archive locally or  
loading packages from the web or something that got me fouled up last  
time.

OpenSolaris is very attractive from the POV that it's Solaris and it's  
got ZFS, but the structure is pretty alien to me and although I know  
the stacks I'm gonna be running in it, I don't know the OS intimately.  
I guess I can learn that though, any resources aside from running OSol  
and playing?

All stuff to be considered.

-- 
Mark Benson

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