blueshiftoverwatch
March 6th, 2010, 02:48 PM
Why is it that it seems like the overwhelming majority of Unix-like web servers are hosted on RedHat, Suse, Fedora, or CentOS and it's very rare to hear of a distro being hosted on Debian or a Debian based distro like Ubuntu. Out of all of those, while Suse does use RPM it's the only one that's not based on RedHat. Does this have something to do with RedHat based distros being generally more stable, with the RPM package format, or something unrelated? If they're after stability, it doesn't get much more stable than Debian.
When a company that develops Linux (like RedHat or Novell) says "we provide good support", what exactly does that mean? Generally anything you want to know about an open source project can be found for free online. If your too paranoid to trust a howto guide that some anonymous person posted on their blog, I'm sure you could find the same information in a book. Or is it because if they want to know how to do something they want to be able to get ahold of a professional paid service representative through email or the phone right_now and not have to dig around help websites or leave work to run to a book store to get the latest edition of whatever book is relevant to their problem?
Even if RedHat or Novell released something as open source, within a short period of time it would make it's way into a free alternative like CentOS, Fedora, or OpenSuse. So, why do people host their web servers on commercial distros like RedHat or SLES? Is it because they want the new stuff (like security patches) as soon as they're available and don't want to wait around for them to be implemented into the free versions?
Also, what about the various BSD's? You rarely hear anything about them despite that they're supposed to be even more stable and secure than Linux, for example OpenBSD.
Which also makes me wonder why Canonical is focusing so much on providing good server support when people who want to run a server on a non-RPM based distro are probably just going to use Debian instead because of it's stability. Ubuntu might be easier to use but I doubt that hardened network admins are going to care about it's ease of use. They're probably tech savvy enough that they could setup, configure, and use a Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch system without the GUI and have no problems.
When a company that develops Linux (like RedHat or Novell) says "we provide good support", what exactly does that mean? Generally anything you want to know about an open source project can be found for free online. If your too paranoid to trust a howto guide that some anonymous person posted on their blog, I'm sure you could find the same information in a book. Or is it because if they want to know how to do something they want to be able to get ahold of a professional paid service representative through email or the phone right_now and not have to dig around help websites or leave work to run to a book store to get the latest edition of whatever book is relevant to their problem?
Even if RedHat or Novell released something as open source, within a short period of time it would make it's way into a free alternative like CentOS, Fedora, or OpenSuse. So, why do people host their web servers on commercial distros like RedHat or SLES? Is it because they want the new stuff (like security patches) as soon as they're available and don't want to wait around for them to be implemented into the free versions?
Also, what about the various BSD's? You rarely hear anything about them despite that they're supposed to be even more stable and secure than Linux, for example OpenBSD.
Which also makes me wonder why Canonical is focusing so much on providing good server support when people who want to run a server on a non-RPM based distro are probably just going to use Debian instead because of it's stability. Ubuntu might be easier to use but I doubt that hardened network admins are going to care about it's ease of use. They're probably tech savvy enough that they could setup, configure, and use a Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch system without the GUI and have no problems.