Hello Planet Lilug
May 13th, 2007 by Mark
John (sid) Teddy and Ilya (dotCOMmie) Sukhanov took the initiative and created planet.lilug.org which my blog is now syndicated on. Seeing as my blog is now syndicated on a Linux related blog site I will likely start writing about more technical and nerdy things than I did before. Seeing as I didn’t write very much before at all I figure this is an improvement. So, here goes.
Here’s a little background. The company at which I work sells software that filters Internet traffic at K-12 schools as well as provides curricular tools for teachers. We sell this software as a software appliance that is a Linux distribution. This makes all kinds of sense since we provide many other services like routing and firewalling. Also, in order to provide a strong filtering solution, being the gateway of a network really helps.
Now, the Linux distribution that we are using is based on SuSE 7.1 with many many updates that we performed ourselves by packaging software as RPMs. This is less than ideal because it means that we have to maintain all of the software on our own, and it makes it difficult for us to benefit from work that is going on in other communities. So, we’re looking for alternatives.
We originally looked in to rPath, but due to several reasons including cost, package selection, proprietary server-side component, dependence on one company, etc. we decided against it. Since then we have been looking in to Debian. At first glance Debian looks like a great fit. It has a very strong updating and packaging system. It has well defined policies and all kinds of documentation. There really is a lot of documentation - I was really surprised. There are a lot of tools that already exist for Debian which we could use like debtakeover and debian-installer. Oh, and there is a tremendous community, which makes it easier to find help and easier to find experienced employees.
But, there are some open questions about Debian that mostly revolve around the release schedule. We have the need to have access to the latest software. So, if I want to use PHP6, SQLite4, or a driver only available in the 2.6.75 kernel, I need to be able to do that. But, I don’t really want to have to constantly perform major upgrades to our systems that may or may not contain features or bug fixes that I care about. It is for these reasons that I am torn between using Debian Stable or Debian Testing. I then toyed with the idea of using Ubuntu Server. This has many of the benefits of using Debian, and a 6 month release cycle. But I’m really concerned about Ubuntu using update-manager rather than apt to perform updates from one release to another. I haven’t found any information about what update-manager is doing exactly.
Right now I’m leaning towards using Debian Testing. It seems to be stable enough. I have it installed on a machine at work with a package selection that is pretty similar to what we would be shipping and there haven’t been any major updates yet, just a few packages every few days. I did look in to what is in the cue and it seems like there might be a libc update which a whole bunch of other updates are waiting on, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m also a little concerned about the speediness of security fixes for testing. I can understand patches going in to stable first, and then unstable, but I don’t want to wait 10 days for them to hit testing. I’m going to have to look more closely in to backports.org. That should make it more comfortable to use stable, but how comfortable is remotely updating hundreds of machines to the next stable going to be?
Anyway, that’s where things stand. If you have any tips, hints, or suggestions please leave them as comments to this post. Suggestions to use Gentoo can be directed to /dev/null. :-)
