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

[Philipp Kempgen]

Matt Riddell wrote:

> 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.

> 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.

Exactly. I had some difficulties on Fedora as well (can't remember
what kind of problem it was - something about zaptel I think) while
it "just worked" for me on Debian or CentOS.
(@Steve: So Fedora sucks and Debian is the best ;-)

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

While I'm curious if there is a "best OS" for Asterisk it probably
boils down to the simple rule: Use whatever OS you are familiar with
and stick to it.
If you're used to Debian then CentOS is "a bit different" too.
Unless someone can prove <whatever OS> is best for Asterisk I'd
recommend to use a mainstream distribution.
Although I have compiled Asterisk on MacOSX myself this wouldn't be
my first choice for a production server - mainly because the whole file
system layout is so different and there isn't really an integrated
package management.

> 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.

Right. But once you need a more complex set of software tools it's a
great timesaver to know what the packages are called on a system and
what's in there.

A word on SuSE: To my impression YaST is an essential part of it.
On the one hand I like it but on the other - well, you can shoot
yourself in the foot.
It tries to be smart and parse all kinds of /etc/* files and doesn't
always do a good job. Setting up a DHCP server with some classes and
pools for example is almost a piece of cake on Debian. On SuSE it's
more like this: Um, I could edit /etc/dhcpd.conf directly but then
the next time someone edits the settings with YaST they'd really mess
things up - without even knowing.

I'm so glad nobody in this thread has argued for using Windows. ;)
(It doesn't even come with an ssh client! You really feel like
your hands are tied.)

Regards,
  Philipp Kempgen

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