Than my question is this? Now that I have switchtowerized and migrate
enabled my app I can start down a new path if need be on a different
OS as the base of the system. We have already tried CentOS and found
it to have more issues than those mentioned about fedora and through
it away faster than one could shake a stick at. Here are our
requirements for a stage/dev box and production:
Stage/Dev:
SVN 1.3
Rails
ImageMagick/RMagick
Apache 2 (have two apps one requires us to use apache to serve it
don’t ask)
Lighttp (for the other app)
FastCGI
MySQL 5
Production Web/App (combined for now)
Rails
Apache 2
Lighttp
FastCGI
Production DB
MySQL
My quesiton is what is everyones flavor of linux for production?
Personally I would prefer an Xserver but my boss is an admitted cheep
bastard. And since he is a cheep bastard linux is the route we are
going down.
On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 10:00:24PM -0500, Andrew F. wrote:
[…]
My quesiton is what is everyones flavor of linux for production?
Personally I would prefer an Xserver but my boss is an admitted cheep
bastard. And since he is a cheep bastard linux is the route we are
going down.
I don’t run anything other than gentoo these days, if I have any say
in the matter.
The learning curve is high, in terms of installation and maintenance,
but the documentation is really good, and going through the install
process will make you a better sysadmin.
Pound for pound, it’s not only the best performing linux flavor I’ve
used but also easiest to admin if you know what you’re doing.
–
- Adam
** Expert Technical Project and Business Management
**** System Performance Analysis and Architecture
****** [ http://www.everylastounce.com ]
Maybe it’s just me and CentOS but we could not get openssh to
configure correctly for ruby no mater what we tried ruby would ignore
configuring its binding to it. There were several other people that i
noticed had that problem on google, and no one had a resolution.
After sepending a day with it we finally decided that it was not
worth the time.
I guess my original problem is sounding more and more like it is just
me, but why would a core feature of rails not work on my staging box
but work as advertised on development, both windows and mac? I am
refering to my issue where acts_as_tree does not act as it should.
If you are referring to ruby that comes with CentOS, it is the one
provided from upstream provider (RHEL) and that is version 1.81 which
isn’t going to work with rails at all so I am confused as to which
version of ruby you were using and that probably is key to the
confusion.
Also, I have no clue what the connection between openssh and ruby you
might be referring to.
I installed ruby from source, and I meant openssl my bad misstyped
there. I need openssl for several things to work and no matter what
we tried we could not get ruby to configure to add in the openssl
support.
Not having installed ruby from source and lacking the source code and
the will to go down the path, I don’t know the compile options but if it
does have the option to link to the openssl library at compile time, it
would likely just be just /usr
That wouldn’t seem too difficult.
The easier option is to install ruby packages from dev.centos.org and
that is where I went to get ruby suitable for rails but I haven’t tried
to use openssl from within ruby/rails so I wouldn’t know if things would
work for you or not.
I am always trying out new distros, but I allways come back to SuSE. The
last I tried was Ubuntu/Kubuntu(both), but I always find myself
configuring things that are default in SuSE.
Install OpenSuSE 10, then immediately install apt4rpm. This gives you a
really up to date system where every package i can think of is
downloadable with APT.
Steep learning curve: I am a 100% linux user since 1998. The learning
curve stays steep, because under linux every new app has to be learned.
I don’t want to spend days learning how to compile and configure some
pre-beta app or library, I just want it installed as fast as possible.
If that’s not enough, I can still compile it from source.
Like apt, pretty much everything you need is downloadable with
portage, except that it compiles from source for your specific
system. Need ssl support? ruby support? You tell it. All of this is
accomplished through the very rich USE environment variable, and all
new compilations automatically pick up the dependencies you need.
Here’s the current list:
If you change the list, you can also dynamically recompile everything
on your system to update the dependencies (or selectively just the
things that are affected).
Yes, compiling takes a long time (sometimes a long long time), but
there are ways to distribute it if you have multiple machines, and
hopefully, you don’t actually need to do this very often. Also, you
can usually just let it run - it doesn’t need constant attention.
Once you get everything set up, installing new software is as simple
as:
$ sudo emerge rails
which will find rails, analyze the dependencies, fetch all of the
source packages, and build it for you. Don’t have ruby installed? No
problem - it’ll get and install that automatically because rails
depends on it. There are plenty of other options as well.
–
- Adam
** Expert Technical Project and Business Management
**** System Performance Analysis and Architecture
****** [ http://www.everylastounce.com ]
I use Debian Sarge/Stable branch on all my computers. 1 server, 2
workstations and 1 laptop. Its stability make it good for production
IMHO. Also the .deb packaging system with apt-get and synaptic make it
easy to install/uninstall packages, of which there are 15,000 or so at
the last count, as easy as a gem.
I also use Gentoo for production stuff where I can. In terms of
admin-hours-required-to-manage-ongoing, it’s the best in my
experience.
Although it might be tough to get up to speed on the admin side
initially, Gentoo has one big advantage over most distros - it’s hard
to get “locked in” from a dependency perspective to the point where
you have to go outside the normal upgrade process to resolve it.
Although Debian is also very very good, a few times I got to the
position (running stable) where I’d have to bring in large numbers of
dependency apps in order to update to version of app X that I wanted
to run. Although I was notionally running “stable”, in reality I
quickly got to the point where I was running a mix of “stable”,
“testing” and “unstable” apps due to these cross dependency issues.
As a result, every now and then I’d go to upgrade, hit some dependency
problem that apt couldn’t resolve and I’d have to deal with it
manually. OK for a personal workstation, not so great for a
production server…
Don’t get me wrong - Debian is still an excellent server OS, and has
large numbers of people constantly improving it. It’s just that
sometimes small things fall through the cracks, and may take a little
while to get resolved. Support from the Debian developers is
first-class though.
With Gentoo, I’ve never had a need to ask for support - I’ve always
been able to ‘emerge’ successfully. The only gotcha I’ve found is
that a full blown ‘emerge -u --deep world’ will regularly download new
kernel source; if you don’t install it, some packages will barf when
they try to recompile against the latest kernel source (which you
aren’t running yet). Nothing actually breaks; you just find that
you’re stuck on older package versions until you ‘genkernel’ to
compile the new kernel source - you don’t actually need to boot with
the new kernel, just compile it, for these issues to go away.
Overall I’d rate Gentoo #1, Debian a close #2, and daylight to the
rest. I’ve run Ubuntu server and RHE, but they required significantly
more of my time to manage it than either Gentoo or Debian.
My quesiton is what is everyones flavor of linux for production?
Personally I would prefer an Xserver but my boss is an admitted
cheep bastard. And since he is a cheep bastard linux is the route
we are going down.
Thanks
Andrew-
I heavily prefer debian as a rails server OS. It has served me
nicely in 20+ rails servers I have built. I even have a tutorial that
helps go through a debian install with everything on your list
except6 apache, here:
The other servers I have run rails on are OSX Tiger xserves and
FreeBSD boxes. All three of these are great options for rails/ruby
and friends. For linux though I like the fact that you can start a
debian install with a 100MB net install iso and only build the
packages you really wanty instead of coming in a 700MB install all
preconfigured with the kitchen sink. It takes more time to strip a
distro like fedora into a slim secure linux/rails server then it does
to build up a debian box from net-install.
Of course I am probably heavily biased by my own personal
experiences. But overall I run the majority of rails work I do on
debian boxes with lighttpd and apache only if needed for older php
sites and things like that. Take it all with a grain of salt.
I agree with you pretty much about Gentoo becuase several friends of
mine use it and we’ve had many talks on it in our WncLug (Westrn North
Carolina LUG in Asheville). Because I already had so much time into
Debian I didn’t see a need to swith all my machines. If there was some
compelling reason to switch, believe me that it will be Gentoo
The only thing about Debian I would recommend is NOT to MIX Stable,
Testing, Unstable packages. This concept is misunderstood by many that
the labels refer to the stability or the lack there of, of the OS
itself. Unstable merely means that the packages will change a lot
compared to Stable. It took me some time to realize this and not until
I heard a talk about it at DebConf. They should have called the
branches frozen, liquid and gas …or some such thing
So if one needs packages from the other branches I’d recommend to dist
upgrade to that branch. I have NEVER been bitten by following this.
On a seperate thread I recall someone saying that they could count the
number of times OS-X crashing on one hand or some such thing…and I
thought to myself…that’s too many times!! For me the number of times
Debian has locked up on me…is exaclty ZERO on 4 different
machines…including this old clunker of a Gateway Solo 9150 with a
Pentium-II and 384MB of memory and 20GB HD…all the way back from
1997! The greatest thing about this laptop is that I can swap out the
primary HD in about 15 seconds! No screws! So I have about several HDs
with different OSes (Windows 95, Windows 2000 Pro, etc) I still don’t
see the reason to buy a newer laptop. Most things run fast enough for
me. The only thing which might make me buy a newer laptop is mr_guid
debugger (or any Ruby debugger for that matter). I can feel the
difference in speed between my laptop and the AMD64 workstations.
Btw, you don’t need to install PCRE manually, and you don’t need g++
either, because lighttpd is written in C. And I would recommend Courier
instead of Postfix as a mailserver, it’s configured for SMTP-Auth and
SSL by default.
Amen to everything you’ve said…and thanks for that tutrial online. I
have printed it out and put it in my Debin Recipes folder I meant
to send you a thank you note for quite a while now. This is as good a
time as any. Also love you site for all the rails stuff there.
I too use Net Install and love it. I also feel that I KNOW my
machines. There’s ONLY what I want on them. It gets ridiculous when
you install from the Debian 2-DVD distro with 15,000 packages!
The other servers I have run rails on are OSX Tiger xserves and
debian boxes with lighttpd and apache only if needed for older php
sites and things like that. Take it all with a grain of salt.
not that it matters but there are minimal install options for Fedora,
RHEL & CentOS and CentOS has carried it to another step where they
created a single CD server install.
But the only thing that really matters is that it is something you can
be comfortable with since the only real differences between the various
Linux distributions is the packaging methods and the update methods and
all handle these things in their own, mostly successful way.
If you would prefer to use an Xserve but can’t, you may consider
looking into FreeBSD. OS X is built on BSD, so you might be a bit
more familiar with the layout - though admittedly if you’re
comfortable in BSD, you’re comfortable in linux, imo.
Similar to Debian, you can start off with a minimal install and build
in only the things you want. I set up www.flpr.org to get started
using Rails on FreeBSD. I use PostgreSQL for the database, but MySQL
is easy enough to install. The ports system is absolutely beautiful.
I think there’s a bit more of a learning curve with FreeBSD than
Debian, but it’s really not all that bad. Once you have a good feel
for things, you’ll be able to admin the box very quickly…but you
won’t even need to do that much admin work anyway In my
experience, once you have your box all configured you can just leave
it alone for a looooong time.
Best of luck choosing a platform - as long as you’re using Rails, you
can’t go wrong anyway
In my