Thread: Gentoo for production DB server?
Hello: At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? Some background: we've been running PostgreSQL on assorted versions of Red Hat for a couple of years. RedHat Enterprise is not an option, so we currently have a mix of Fedora, RH 9, White Box Enterprise (a RedHat clone), and Gentoo, and want to settle on a single distro, with White Box and Gentoo the leading contenders. Hardware is mostly Dell PowerEdge or white-box. I prefer to build PostgreSQL from source anyway, so package management is not as important as stability and ease of maintenance/updates. Most of what I've read says that Gentoo is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or not ready for primetime; in either case, details are sketchy. I would like to hear especially from people who are either running Gentoo in production or have tried and rejected it. Thank you. Christine Desmuke Kansas State Historical Society cdesmuke (at) kshs (dot) org
On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 16:33, Christine Desmuke wrote: > At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the > use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been > a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does > anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? I used Gentoo for a long time on my home systems but I recently quit. It's a "fun" distro as far as the options and all, and it has a great user community for support.. but I got tired of the Gentoo developers (whether intentional or not) pushing out new stuff marked as "stable" when it obviously was not. The price was right and I knew going in I wasn't getting a perfectly stable distro, but nevertheless they left me with a broken machine on several occasions. Having a slightly faster machine isn't worth the headaches to me personally. For stability, db/web server usage and such, I'd go with Debian. For features, desktop systems, etc., I'd go with Suse. 9.1 is impressive. For security, firewall, or router usage, I'd go with *BSD. -- Greg Donald
I've been extremely happy with my gentoo boxes. I switched from Slackware over the past year or so after many years of Slackware zealotry. I have nothing bad to say about using Gentoo other than I personally wouldnt use portage/ebuilds for PostgreSQL. Personally I always have better experiences when I download the source tarball and install things like PostgreSQL the way the developers distribute them. Gavin Greg Donald wrote: >On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 16:33, Christine Desmuke wrote: > > >>At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the >>use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been >>a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does >>anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? >> >> > >I used Gentoo for a long time on my home systems but I recently quit. > >It's a "fun" distro as far as the options and all, and it has a great >user community for support.. but I got tired of the Gentoo developers >(whether intentional or not) pushing out new stuff marked as "stable" >when it obviously was not. The price was right and I knew going in I >wasn't getting a perfectly stable distro, but nevertheless they left me >with a broken machine on several occasions. Having a slightly faster >machine isn't worth the headaches to me personally. > >For stability, db/web server usage and such, I'd go with Debian. >For features, desktop systems, etc., I'd go with Suse. 9.1 is >impressive. >For security, firewall, or router usage, I'd go with *BSD. > > > >
Christine Desmuke wrote: > At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the > use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been > a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does > anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? We were using Gentoo until recently on production servers, and still do on some development machines. I've never had a problem with it, and would recommend it if you know what you're doing; only upgrade packages when you really need to, don't do emerge -u world/system, preferably perform updates on an exact mirror, test well, then switch servers, and sync up. If you treat it kindly, Gentoo will treat you kindly. We've now switched to RHEL3 (management decision - for support!), which IMHO is an admin nightmare (but thats just RPM's for you). We had to download and compile several important packages manually, the supplied PostgreSQL was very out of date, and PHP didn't even have PostgreSQL support builtin. You also don't have to install tons of unused crap, like X11. Provided you don't have management breathing down your neck about operating system support, and you know your way around a Linux system without a mouse, then I'd heartly recommend Gentoo. -- Mark Gibson <gibsonm |AT| cromwell |DOT| co |DOT| uk> Web Developer & Database Admin Cromwell Tools Ltd. Leicester, England.
>> On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 16:33, Christine Desmuke wrote: >> > At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the >> > use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been >> > a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does >> > anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? >> >> Gentoo makes a great platform for production linux systems (Postgresql and otherwise), if: a) You have at least one machine dedicated to testing and validating updates b) You restrict non-urgent/security updates to once/quarter Gentoo has alot of features, is amazingly customizeable, and can significantly reduce long term systems maintenance costs -- but it isn't a silver bullet. You have to take over some QA tasks that redhat/etc would otherwise be doing. We currently have about 100 gentoo servers here, and wouldn't think about switching to any other distro. But just because the gentoo developers release a new ebuild, doesn't mean that we deploy it w/o testing. Regards, Matt -- Matthew Marlowe - DeployLinux Consulting Architecture and Implementation for Linux Powered E-Business http://www.deploylinux.com/ Office: 805-277-1882 / Cell: 805-857-9144 Fax: 805-277-9721 / matt@deploylinux.net
On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 08:46, Matthew Marlowe wrote: > Gentoo has alot of features, is amazingly customizeable, and can significantly > reduce long term systems maintenance costs -- but it isn't a silver bullet. You have > to take over some QA tasks that redhat/etc would otherwise be doing. > > We currently have about 100 gentoo servers here, and wouldn't think about switching > to any other distro. But just because the gentoo developers release a new ebuild, doesn't > mean that we deploy it w/o testing. That's exactly my point. They provide a way for you to add unstable packages using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86". I never used the command because I never _wanted_ unstable packages. Seems I got them anyway. -- Greg Donald
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Hi,
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Mark Gibson wrote:
> We've now switched to RHEL3 (management decision - for support!),
> which IMHO is an admin nightmare (but thats just RPM's for you).
> We had to download and compile several important packages manually,
> the supplied PostgreSQL was very out of date, and PHP didn't even
> have PostgreSQL support builtin.
RPMS for RHEL 3 is available on PostgreSQL FTP mirrors...
Also, if you want PostgreSQL support in PHP, you should install php-pgsql
rpm, provided in the CDs.
> You also don't have to install tons of unused crap, like X11.
Agreed :(
Regards,
- --
Devrim GUNDUZ
devrim~gunduz.org devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr
http://www.tdmsoft.com
http://www.gunduz.org
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On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 05:01:42PM -0500, Greg Donald wrote: > On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 16:33, Christine Desmuke wrote: > > At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the > > use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been > > a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does > > anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? > > I used Gentoo for a long time on my home systems but I recently quit. > > It's a "fun" distro as far as the options and all, and it has a great > user community for support.. but I got tired of the Gentoo developers > (whether intentional or not) pushing out new stuff marked as "stable" > when it obviously was not. The price was right and I knew going in I Agreed. > For stability, db/web server usage and such, I'd go with Debian. > For features, desktop systems, etc., I'd go with Suse. 9.1 is > impressive. > For security, firewall, or router usage, I'd go with *BSD. Actually, FreeBSD is an outstanding platform for stability as well. They offer -current, -stable, and security branches depending on how much instability you can tolerate. -- Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant decibel@decibel.org Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Windows: "Where do you want to go today?" Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"
On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 15:01, Greg Donald wrote: > when it obviously was not. The price was right and I knew going in I > wasn't getting a perfectly stable distro, but nevertheless they left me > with a broken machine on several occasions. Having a slightly faster > machine isn't worth the headaches to me personally. I too fiddled with it at home for a while. I saw a few benchmarks showing Gentoo was actually slower than Redhat and Mandrake - then I really wasn't sure why I was compiling for days. :) Yes, I know you don't have to compile everything. Yes, I realize those benchmarks weren't the most scientific. We use Redhat in production. When it came to decision time, the only real contenders were Redhat and Suse, because we wanted someone else to QA our operating system (not our business focus - that would cost us more than the OS) and we needed the best hardware vendor support. We picked Redhat over Suse primarily because everyone in our organization had Redhat experience (and on their desktops) but no Suse experience - otherwise I probably would've gone with Suse. I'm really tired of poor file system diversity on Redhat.
Barry S wrote: > In article <s12b6e1f.099@mothra.kshs.org>, "Christine Desmuke" wrote: > >>Hello: >> >>At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the >>use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been >>a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does >>anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? >> > > <snip> > > I'm an ex-Gentoo admin, not because gentoo isn't fun, just that you need > to really really like to constantly fiddle with it to keep it happy. > > The worst thing is to have not done an 'emerge world' in 2 months, only > to discover that there are now 99 pending updates. Do you was obliged to catch them ? Gaetano
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jeremiah Elliott wrote: | Gaetano Mendola wrote: | |> Barry S wrote: |> |>> In article <s12b6e1f.099@mothra.kshs.org>, "Christine Desmuke" wrote: |>> |>>> Hello: |>>> |>>> At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the |>>> use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been |>>> a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does |>>> anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? |>>> |>> |>> <snip> |>> |>> I'm an ex-Gentoo admin, not because gentoo isn't fun, just that you need |>> to really really like to constantly fiddle with it to keep it happy. |>> |>> The worst thing is to have not done an 'emerge world' in 2 months, only |>> to discover that there are now 99 pending updates. |> |> |> |> Do you was obliged to catch them ? |> |> Gaetano | I use gentoo and RHEL. My biggest beef with redhat is that their rpm of | postgres is of a rather old version, so I end up downloading the source | tar and compiling it my self. Also I would really like to be running XFS | on all my databases servers, but the only fs I can run on the redhat | servers is ext3. | -jeremiah And how RH can delivery a Postgres upgrade if it require an initdb ? The reason as already discussed is a leak of pg_upgrade that can permit the upgrade without perform a cicle of: dump-install-initdb-crossedfingers-reload and even if the pg_upgrade was existing for sure I'll not trust my data to an automatic upgrade. Regards Gaetano Mendola -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFBPidp7UpzwH2SGd4RAtaEAKDSVWqGJyu0QW2XIjPyaLZaQCSpcQCdHOOO ZMkeVbecaZEslFsnNslMAfE= =B1ns -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
In article <s12b6e1f.099@mothra.kshs.org>, "Christine Desmuke" wrote: > Hello: > > At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the > use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been > a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does > anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? > <snip> I'm an ex-Gentoo admin, not because gentoo isn't fun, just that you need to really really like to constantly fiddle with it to keep it happy. The worst thing is to have not done an 'emerge world' in 2 months, only to discover that there are now 99 pending updates. The biggest problem is not the technology of Gentoo (the ebuild system / portage is cool), but its the maintainers. It's very much of a bleeding-edge atmosphere... These days all my servers are either RHES or Debian-stable. All in all, debian is one of the best server platforms out there in the 'free' world, IMHO. I've been exceedingly pleased with it. I love the attention to detail and security, and yet they still let you have plenty of customization power. -Barry
In article <413839B2.6080208@bigfoot.com>, Gaetano Mendola wrote: > Barry S wrote: > >> In article <s12b6e1f.099@mothra.kshs.org>, "Christine Desmuke" wrote: >> >>>Hello: >>> >>>At the risk of starting a flame-war, I'd like some more details on the >>>use of Gentoo Linux for a production PostgreSQL server. There have been >>>a couple of comments lately that it is not such a great idea; does >>>anyone have specific experience they'd be willing to share? >>> >> >> <snip> >> >> I'm an ex-Gentoo admin, not because gentoo isn't fun, just that you need >> to really really like to constantly fiddle with it to keep it happy. >> >> The worst thing is to have not done an 'emerge world' in 2 months, only >> to discover that there are now 99 pending updates. > > Do you was obliged to catch them ? > > Gaetano > Well, in a sense, yes. You see the entire reason I was updating was because of a security patch for sshd. The chain of dependencies in this case (eg. sshd -> glibc -> gcc), mandated that I wound up needing to do a fairly substantial emerge. Don't get me wrong, I like Gentoo as a technology, I just personally think its not ready for use in production servers. -Barry