# Gentoo on commercial server

## Kulik

I am planning to put Gentoo on a commercial server (2x AMD64 Opteron). Is Gentoo ready for that? Is it the right choose? I like Gentoo, but I am wondering about updates, thats gonna kill the whole server for some time. I guess I should shedule emerge sync && emerge -u world to lets say 00:00 midnight. How much time does it take to update apache2, mysqld, postgres, bind, mod_php, php, python, perl, postfix, sshd, and so on server stuff. Will it help if I am gonna put NICEST into the make.conf (I am not sure about parameter name)?

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## robet

I don't run Gentoo on a server, and can't really over advice on that, but I can answer your other questions.

1) You will never have to update all of that stuff at once, you'll only ever have a few (at most) packages to update.

2) Portage_niceness="" is what you use to set the CPU usage for Portage.

3) Try doing an emerge -uD world, the D for "deep."

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## barrct

Well, I'm running an 8 way Sun Enterprise 4500 with lots of software RAIDing going on for my production server and I'm perfectly happy with everything about Gentoo.

Lets see...

Stable

Installed Great on the non-standard hardware

friggin fast

nothing funny or unusual happening at all

I have most everything server related installed. Lets see what yea ole world has to say.

 *Quote:*   

> app-admin/procinfo
> 
> app-dicts/aspell-en
> 
> app-editors/vi
> ...

 

My product is a web based content management system written in JAVA and interfaces with PostgreSQL and we're running perfectly happy here.

Any updates that I need to do, I just stay up lat and run around midnight and everything gets updated fairly quick because of the connection and the 8 chips so I don't really worry about software update times.

So here's one company that says it's completely ready for a production environment.

If you are wondering why I originally installed Gentoo on the server it's because I was not going to pay the 8CPU license for Solaris and no other Linux installed nearly as well.

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## SilverOne

Just a quick advice on system stability:

DO NOT SCHEDULE `emerge -uD world` commands.

It does happen that sometimes updates mangle an existing configuration, or that manual operations (checking config files) is needed.

And if there is a problem you won't be logged in or using the system to find out about it, potentially leaving a bug or unavailable system running for hours or longer.

Plus it is a good habit to do the updates after checking the packages manually to get a good feel of the state of the system.

What I do:  schedule an `emerge sync`  `eupdatedb`  `emerge -uDp world` every night (forget what time), and mail the result to myself.  Then when I read my mail I get a nice overview of available updates.  Depending on the package list (and I'm also subscribed to the Gentoo Announce maillinglist) I will or will not do an immediate update.

I tend to wait a few days (up to a month) to update a package if there is no serious flaw or functionality problem.  This helps stability.

I run a AMD 2500+ server and update times are not really problematic.  Especially since updates are sandboxed, so existing operation is not in danger until the last steps, and these are taken quickly.

My home firewall (P 166MMX) does take a long time to compile some stuff though.  glibc takes more than a day!   :Smile:   (bonus: I can test new packages and updates on this system and check wether anything breaks)

Note: I only install packages from the stable tree.

p.s. to determine if a package has the same update for a month I check my mail log.  Does anyone have an easier way to see a history of version releases?

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## fatalglitch

I run a similar setup to above. I have a nice crontab setup which emerge sync's every sunday night, updatedb every morning, and emerge -ufDp world every Sunday night as well. Monday morning I come in and check the updates, and then use package.* to determine which to update. Sometimes I just script the update, depends on what it is. Never had a problem, you just have to be wary, unsupervised updates CAN break a system, though it is rare.

A good thing to remember, prod servers are usually built to be stable. Don't go overboard with a crazy GUI install and other random crap you don't need. The less the better. I install the bare essentials for operation, and some monitoring stuff, and that's it. No graphics, no gui, no fluff.

-Tom

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## WildChild

I administrate a Gentoo server with two PII 266 processors for a friend and I and I'm really happy with this distro. Compiling is not a problem and doesn't slow down the server. Usually, only one processor is used for compiling and the other one is ready to answer to requests  :Wink: . This isn't a great server but it's enough for our needs. 

What I would suggest to you is to check for important updates manually, the sync process can be automated to gain time. After, you can compile packages using the -B switch to only create the binary packages and then install them manually later to make sure they break nothing! The install process is often important because you have to check for configuration file updates carefully. 

Our server is always up and up to date and I only had one problem with a glibc update. A server reboot resolved the problem. Since I administrate the server from another location (200 km away) and "screen" is my best friend  :Wink: .

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## hanj

 *Quote:*   

> p.s. to determine if a package has the same update for a month I check my mail log. Does anyone have an easier way to see a history of version releases?

 

I'm very interested in this too. I do the same thing to determine update dates.

hanji

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## kashani

I'll throw out some numbers here

2 x 1.4Ghz PIII

2GB RAM

5 x 18GB 10k SCSI hardware RAID 5

times to compile on the above system when it's sitting there doing nothing.

perl 5.8.5 - 8 minutes

mysql 4.0.22 w/innodb - 12 minutes

postges 7.4.5 - 9 minutes

postfix, pcre, mailbase - 3 minutes

Assuming you're not doing everything at once, that's less that 15 minutes of service degradation for your largest service. I generally do upgrades in off hours and it hasn't been worth the bother to renice things. 

One thing that might be interesting is looking at MAKEOPTS= in your /etc/make.conf. Smaller number is less threads and should generally keep your second CPU free for system stuff.

kashani

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## [dmnd]

 *Kulik wrote:*   

> I am planning to put Gentoo on a commercial server (2x AMD64 Opteron). Is Gentoo ready for that? Is it the right choose? I like Gentoo, but I am wondering about updates, thats gonna kill the whole server for some time. I guess I should shedule emerge sync && emerge -u world to lets say 00:00 midnight. How much time does it take to update apache2, mysqld, postgres, bind, mod_php, php, python, perl, postfix, sshd, and so on server stuff. Will it help if I am gonna put NICEST into the make.conf (I am not sure about parameter name)?

 

We are running gentoo on several production servers, we migrated from debian. And i must say that i am happy with it!

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## defkewl

I wouldn't use Gentoo on a commercial server if I were you, I would use Debian instead.

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## j-m

 *defkewl wrote:*   

> I wouldn't use Gentoo on a commercial server if I were you, I would use Debian instead.

 

And I would not use Debian... so what?  :Laughing: 

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## starachna

gentoo on a commercial server rocks, it's as stable as anything i've evr seen. i try to use gentoo on every machine i can get my hands on from, servers at rackspace to co-locate boxes  :Smile:  i have never used debian, i hear it's cool, but i'm just so happy with gentoo, that i find it difficult to try anything elese :p

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## salac

I am using gentoo on 10+ commercial servers (mail-gateways & mail servers, web & web-app, proxy and samba servers, rsync backup servers, nids boxes, almost all of them are using some form of raid) switching it from slackware and debian. Gentoo is the best distribution I've seen for maintenance of great number of servers, very stable and extremely fast.

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## NewBlackDak

I'm running Gentoo on my email server.

It's a 700MHz eMac.  Cheap, runs cool, uses little power, and more than powerful enough to serve our 4 domains.  

Everynight one of my cron scripts copy all the important stuff to an external firewire HDD

Every Saturday night it syncs, then sends me emails me the output of "emerge -Ufpd world"

Every Sunday morning the entire / is backed up across the network to the tape number 8 in the autoloader on the backup server

I have the mail facility from syslog-ng logging to a table in the mysql server, so it's cleaned of anything more than 30 days old every night

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## Kirktis

I just finally stumbled across this thread today, and can say I'm overjoyed to find I'm not the only one who finds gentoo more then appropriate for commercial implementations. I have been running gentoo on 5 corporate servers as well as 2 servers for my 'on-the-side' hosting company, the latter for over 3 years now. I'm just now gaining the confidence to begin training techs in a very large NPO I work with in gentoo, and with any luck will begin using it world-wide soon.

If anything, unfortunately, I still am very unsatisfied with the current level of practicality of linux (not just gentoo, but including it) on the desktop.  :Sad: 

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## thoffmeyer

I have gentoo running as a server here, no problems, I wouldent run it as a production server though

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## nobspangle

I've been running gentoo on a dual PIII xeon Dell server for over two years, the server is currently approaching 700 days of continous up time. It hosted our work Intranet (apache, mysql, php) and a citrix web interface (tomcat with mod_jk2) and I've never had a single issue, the only reboots have been due to power cuts.

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## quickshiftin

i worked for a local company doing content management for schools k-12, they have >5% of the market in this industry.  they are running all gentoo and free-bsd in production no problem; that includes gentoo pcs for the development boys.  throw in a few windows clients for the buisiness guys and a couple of hard core dedicated units like a barraccuda and viola, youre saving money and killing performance.

however, you better know your stuff if you plan on throwing anything into production, no matter what it is.  im working with gentoo, and one day will go into production with it, when i have enough confidence in my skillset.

ps.

debian sounds a lot more rpm a lot less ports, you make the call...

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## Danathan

 *Kulik wrote:*   

> I am planning to put Gentoo on a commercial server (2x AMD64 Opteron). Is Gentoo ready for that? Is it the right choose? I like Gentoo, but I am wondering about updates, thats gonna kill the whole server for some time. I guess I should shedule emerge sync && emerge -u world to lets say 00:00 midnight. How much time does it take to update apache2, mysqld, postgres, bind, mod_php, php, python, perl, postfix, sshd, and so on server stuff. Will it help if I am gonna put NICEST into the make.conf (I am not sure about parameter name)?

 

You've got a couple of different questions here... In order:

(1) Is Gentoo Ready For Production?  Sure. I use Gentoo in several production servers; I use it because it's flexible, and those servers have non-standard configurations.  I'm confident that I can do anything that I need to on those boxes while staying on distro.  I've never broken these boxes through upgrading, and they routinely boast uptimes of over 250 days, needing to be rebooted only when a kernel update requires it.

(2) How Should You Keep It Up To Date? I use the following script on all my servers, run daily:

```

#!/bin/sh

echo "Updating Portage Tree..."

/usr/bin/emerge sync > /dev/null

/usr/bin/emerge -fqDu world > /dev/null 2>&1

/usr/bin/emerge -pvDu world

```

...update at your own pace, when you have time.  Make sure to use rcs backups of your /etc files (through dispatch-conf).

(3) Are Compile Times Going to Kill Performance?  Nope.  They'll be niced... and your box is crazy fast and nothing is going to take more than 10 minutes to compile (assuming you avoid a full KDE/GNOME install).

I recently deployed Debian etch on 5 Sun Fire X2100s, and it's definitely easier than Gentoo.  Given that all I'm doing there is running a LAMP stack, it's perfect.  If your question is Gentoo vs. Debian, I think the question is whether or not you're satisfied with Debian's package versions and fairly plain setups.  If so, I'd use that.  If you need to do crazy/experimental stuff, I'd go with Gentoo.  If you're not familiar with Debian, give it a shot on a spare box you've got lying around.

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## quickshiftin

 *Danathan wrote:*   

>  If you're not familiar with Debian, give it a shot on a spare box you've got lying around.

 

yeah, that sounds like a good idea  :Razz: 

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## Danathan

 *quickshiftin wrote:*   

>  *Danathan wrote:*    If you're not familiar with Debian, give it a shot on a spare box you've got lying around. 
> 
> yeah, that sounds like a good idea 

 

Yeah... The easiest way to b0rk your server, or to make it insecure, is to run a distro that you know nothing about.

And if you're a server admin, you're almost undoubtedly awash in old PIIs and PIIIs that provide a great learning experience.

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## Prompty

As far sa servers go:

Debian : don't really know anything about it so .. no comment 

Gentoo : I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't know the system inside-out. Why ? You can easilly break your services. Of course of gave backup and such, but you have to know "what and where" of your system.

Currently I'm running 2 gentoo servers. One is for corporate use and other serves as gateway, mail, radius. I migrated some servers to ... {drums} ... Fedora. Why ? Maintaning this distribution is a piece of cake and a timesaver . Problems with preformance? What problems? 

OpenBSD : I can't belive noone mentioned this as a corporate server :]

As far as uptime goes... it is NOT a measure of stablity (well not directly)

```

[root@d root]# uptime

  4:15pm  up 356 days,  2:53,  1 user,  load average: 0.11, 0.04, 0.01

[root@d root]# cat /etc/issue

Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche)

```

BTW I despise redhat ... hate the damn thing (dunno why)

P.S. 

That's my 0xFF post ;]

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