[asterisk-users] which OS would be fine for asterisk

[Matt Riddell]

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Steve Totaro wrote:
> I am bringing up several Fedora Core 7 boxen into production now. 
> 
> Besides a knee jerk reaction that "Fedora Sucks", can someone give a 
> real argument as to why I should or should not use it for production?  
> (besides the several MB of yum updates daily, which to me is a good thing).
> 
> Besides naming a flavor and saying "It is the best", can someone add a 
> few statements as to why, which will obviously have to compare the other 
> flavors.

Hi Steve,

I've run most operating systems on various boxes.

- From early RedHats through to Fedora Core, Gentoo, Debian, Mandriva,
Suse, CentOS, Ubuntu etc etc.

Initially I was quite fond of Redhat stuff, but then they went
commercial and I didn't want to pay for support.

So I moved to Fedora Core.  Unfortunately some of the old Fedora Core
installations are now unsupported and even the "old" yum repositories
have stopped providing updates.

At the end of the day, the problem I see with Fedora is that they do
things slightly differently from other OSes in the placement of files
etc, which can cause headaches you wouldn't see on others.

However, there are so many people using Fedora/CentOS/Redhat Enterprise
that a quick search of Google will normally reveal the result.

Recently I've been installing Mandriva on boxes (simply because it was
on the cover of a magazine when I urgently needed a copy of Linux), and
have found that once over the initial learning curve it has proven to be
stable.

I'm also running Debian and Ubuntu on a few boxes, and find them to be
stable and standard.

They're all pretty much the same with the exception of Gentoo and
FreeBSD, which tend to be for the "ricers".

I won't argue about the fact that you would definitely get more
performance out of FreeBSD or Gentoo, but for me the amount of extra
work setting up these systems outweighs the performance benefits later on.

A lot of the differences between distros comes from their choice of
package management systems.

Once you've used urpmi, yum, up2date, apt-get etc a few times it doesn't
really make too much difference which one you're using.

One thing that bit me with Mandriva though was that they asked me how
secure I wanted the box to be at the start.  Normally I set up boxes
with maximum security and the absolute least amount of software
possible, then add what I need.  So, I chose the most restrictive
security level.

Unfortunately (for me) this meant that it would run cron jobs to change
the contents of files and ownerships and disallowed most network
communications.  Once I fixed that it was fine.

The other one that has bitten me a couple of times is SELinux on Fedora,
which has resulted in some incredibly strange errors that took rather a
long time to find.

If I have a problem on a Fedora system that doesn't seem to have a
logical answer, I'll quite often disable SELinux for a moment to see if
that fixes it. Obviously when that is the problem, you can turn SELinux
back on and create rules to allow it to function as you expected.

So, is there a best distro? Not really, it depends on what you want out
of a system, how much work you are willing to put into each machine, and
how much time you want to spend doing maintenance.

Here's my opinions:

Fastest: Gentoo/FreeBSD
Easiest: Fedora/Redhat EL/CentOS
Most Stable (for me): Debian/Ubuntu/Mandriva

- --
Kind Regards,

Matt Riddell
Director
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