Re: questions about the right system...

On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 10:54 +0100, Mark Asbach wrote:
> > or distribution of an OS doesn't make allot of sense to me.  The point
> > of the OS is to facilitate the system to run the application.
> we've got the same problem here. And we run an outdated OGo version on  
> an outdated distro because of this.
> It's not about attidute. It's about running more than one service on  
> more than one machine at an institution.
> Our example: we're a university chair. About 20 users, that have  
> access to the groupware, about 60 users in total. We're running a  
> number of desktop machines and a cluster with a big number of CPUs for  
> scientific calculations. The services that we have to provide to our  
> users currently are NIS, NFS, SMB, we run a content manangement  
> system, a wiki, IBM TSM backup and archiving, cluster and overall  
> resource monitoring (with cacti and ganglia), SVN and the groupware.
> All machines are updated just by centrally modifying a package list  
> and pushing it with pkgsync.
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/de/hardy/pkgsync
> Cou can imagine that it's not suitable to run a different distro for  
> every purpose. In the contrary, we're busy enough to run x86 and AMD64  
> versions of Ubuntu in the same network. Just because it's not easy to  
> keep the working environment homogenous.

I do understand that it is a nightmare to host multiple services on
hosts;  as a department of three we manage the servers and networks for
13 companies and ~450 employees.   Back when we had this model every
upgrade was an all night affair with frustrating testing of 3 ... 7
different services.  Ugh!   I'd never want to be there again,  but it
made sense when hardware was expensive and there wasn't a way subdivide
a machine's resources [virtualization].  Of course many general-purpose
services (Samba, DHCP, DNS, etc...) don't care about distributions since
they are part of the distribution itself.

> Now, since installing OGo on Ubuntu is not that straight forward as  
> typing 'aptitude install', we run a single machine with a different

Unless we have a volunteer to maintain or publish Ubuntu packages I
don't know if/when that will happen.  I'd like to say I'll get around to
Ubuntu but barring any need or customer request it probably won't happen
[by me].   (The openSUSE build service does support Ubuntu, someone just
has to write and test the package specs).  It would take me a long time
since I'd have to learn the SPEC format/language for Debian packages.   

Tobias said he was going to look at the Deb specs but I haven't heard
anything from him about it.

> distro just for the groupware. This is not our choice and we don't  
> like it; keeping a single distro up-to-date would be a lot less  
> hassle, less error-prone, more secure [think security updates]. Also,  
> we're glad that all other services we offer don't require their own  
> distro ... which would require more server machines.
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