Earth Computing

[Alvin]

On Wednesday 27 January 2010 20:17:00 Joe McDonagh wrote:
> Alvin wrote:
> > A lot of questions in the annual user survey concern cloud computing. I
> > administer some small businesses and use Ubuntu in most of them. Maybe my
> > biggest client will one day use a personal cloud, and I applaud the
> > efforts, but I can 't help but notice that other things are left in the
> > cold. [...]

> IDK what's with the 'hey brah' subject line, but you probably shouldn't
> be using an LTS-interim release like karmic or jaunty for the business.
> You will run into more show-stopping bugs. I prefer RHEL for business,
> but whatever.

This is true in a lot of situations, but Hardy is not an option for us. We're 
using the virtual servers to do (a lot) of assembling of .xml files. That's a 
lot of integer calculating and pretty heavy I/O over NFS. I tested Hardy, 
Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic. Karmic has the only version of KVM that does not 
crash while doing those calculations.

RHEL is actually the supported Linux distribution for the software we're using 
(http://www.sdlxysoft.com/en/products/xpp/), and we seriously considered it. 
The main reason we tried Ubuntu, is because I know the Debian way better and 
that's an important consideration. The problems with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and 
libmotif do not exist in RHEL, but we found workarounds for them.
 
> And for the firewall you might want to think about moving to OpenBSD.

OpenBSD is certainly made for that job, but the out-of-the-box solution we're 
using now is doing great for now. (http://www.collax.com/) Besides, they have 
really excellent support.