[ubuntu-uk] Server OS Suggestion

[Dave Walker]

Chris Rowson wrote:
> Hi people,
>
> I've been wrestling with this question for a while now, and although
> product suggestion is probably going to be skewed here, I'm really
> interested in what you have to say.
>
> I need to choose a server operating system to run LAMP intranet web
> services with little maintenance and at high reliability. 
> <SNIP>
>   
I would make the judgment based on what you, or the intended sysadmin is 
more current with.  I would suggest that CentOS, Ubuntu Server LTS and 
Debian would all make excellent choices.  However, in my opinion, there 
are enough niggles on rpm based systems for me to want to stick to a deb 
based one.  The Ubuntu server platform is growing stronger each week, 
that would be my choice.  It's also excellent timing, with Hardy still 
being a recent , but exposed enough now to be tested, release.  With the 
time based release system that Ubuntu uses, you know that the platform 
will have security updates until at least 2013 - which is an obvious bonus.

Furthermore, providing packages are all installed from the official 
repositories.  You know that security and some bug fixes will be easier 
to update.  In my experience with CentOS - many more 
applications/packages need to be installed from third party sources - 
meaning that maintenance is more difficult IMO.  I don't know if it 
exists on Centos (i'm sure it does), but to help make maintenance easier 
- you can use apticron (others exist), for emailing you a list of any 
updates that need to be done and "logwatch" for notifying you of what 
activity (that you should be aware of), has happend that day.  There are 
some other useful little tools, but these two will certainly make 
maintenance easier.

I also really like "do-release-upgrade" for jumping up to the next 
release, this worked perfectly on a lot of remote servers from 
Dapper->Hardy with _no_ issue.

HTH

Kind Regards,
Dave Walker