Re: AW: Wanted: Gentoo Enterprise Server success stories

A preface first:

Lots of love for Gentoo, it seems :-)

I'm now positive in pushing a full-fledged Gentoo infrastructure in my
office (complete with Gentoo maintenance support VMs)

And, as I promised, I'll publish your stories in my blog (currently
undergoing migration from b2evo to TikiWiki).

> On 10/12/11 14:52, Zemke, Kai wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > Currently every server we run in our datacenter is gentoo driven.
> > From our Bind nameservers ( one of the has a uptime of 897 days by now )
to several mysql database servers, xen cluster with livemigration, ietd
iscsi targets, apache webserver, radius, postfix mailservers with pop3 and
imap postboxes for several hundred  clients and syslog server.

On Oct 17, 2011 6:44 PM, "Norman Rieß" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
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> Hello,
>
> sorry to interrupt this thread, but this probably means, you did not
> perform any kernel updates on that machine for over two years and
> therefore the system is vulnarable to some kernel bugs which where
> discovered during this time. On a DNS machine a privilege escalation bug
> is even more severe. I strongly recommend to secure this machine.

That depends on what Kai meant with "uptime". Maybe he meant the VMs (he's
using Xen, after all) never needs a restart, but the BIND service still gets
regular update and the consequent service-restart.

> > Everyone single one of them is running in mission critical under
enterprise circumstances. A lot is virtualized with xen and its pure joy
being able to livemigrate several virtual hosts from A to B without any
service disturbance.

Xen or XenServer? Well, they're both Xen, anyways :-)

In my office I use XenServer, and Gentoo VMs on Xen(Server) truly are the
epitomes of stability. I had had 2 'U' servers froze after restart, 1 'A'
server went wacky after installing a package, and a 'D' server consuming CPU
for reasons unknown.

(Well, one Gentoo server indeed consumed CPU, too, but not surprising since
it's the gateway/firewall handling 5 (five!) WAN connections)

>> Maintaining these server is pure fun. Im just convinced that Gentoo is
made for datacenters ;) Well of course managing all these portage trees and
keeping software up to date can keep you busy for some time but I assume
that this is not different to any other distri.
> >

Indeed! It's a battle trying to get other distro's to have a local support
infra.

> > Especially the fact that I was able to turn off 5 physical servers
because their tasks are now managed on the xen cluster was impressive.
> > I'm also using Gentoo on my companies workstation. I just feel that I
can't work as nearly as effective with windows as I do with Gentoo Linux.
> >

How I wish I can do that :-(

Currently I'm forced to use Windows on the workstation because there are
some custom-made apps that can run only on Windows... *sigh*