I have a question for the group regarding server distributions. For sometime in forums, in blogs, comments, emails, and even at work I constantly here sys admins/ engineers say that they would never use Ubuntu's server edition, especially in "mission critical" situations. When asked why, the only thing that I here is "Its buggy, its unstable". When pressed I cannot get any specific, logical reasons backing their claim. Which leads me to believe that the primary reason is not based on personal experience with Ubuntu's server edition, but a predisposition to bias based on what they already know. Which to me is not a valid reason at all.

If there is a reason even if that reason is that it is "buggy" is there anyone who can explain "what" specifically is buggy or unstable about it. I ask this not as troll bait or out of a desire to start a flame war. This is a legitimate question asked of those who have experience with both Ubuntu servers and RHEL based servers. I have used CentOS and Ubuntu server editions to build web servers, NAS, Samba, file servers. I have used both to manage RAID 1, 5, & 10 arrays using mdadm. I have used Debian, and Ubuntu to run Proxmox and manage vm's.

I have heard the argument that Unity is not complete or less feature rich than other DE's. This to me is not an answer as most of the servers I run are headless and accessed through ssh, sftp, http(s), and drush, curl, etc.. So what is it, kernel features?, They way the kernel is patched?, Is it the way Apache, MySQL, or PHP is implemented.

Maybe I am wrong but isn't Amazon's "amazon Linux" EC2 instance based on Ubuntu server? Vagrant's official default base box is a Precise 32 server install. OpenStack's most implemented distro is Ubuntu Server. So why would these entities spend millions of dollars in DevOps utilizing Ubuntu server if is just buggy and unstable and not useable in mission critical projects.

I develop web applications on Vagrant instances using CentOS 6.5 web servers only because we are running RHEL in production and it is a best practice to develop in an environment as close to the production environment as possible.

So what are specific legitimate reasons for not using Ubuntu Server in mission critical roles that can be substantiated.

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 1:15 AM, der.hans <PLUGd@lufthans.com> wrote:

Am 26. Jul, 2014 schwätzte Paul Mooring so:

moin moin Paul,

I'm curious as to what prompted the migration to Ubuntu. I've historically
used gentoo and CentOS for servers and Fedora on my desktop, but I've moved
towards Ubuntu across the board purely because of industry adoptance.

debian is my preferred distribution. It was the first distro I found to
have solid package and dependency management. That was many, many years
ago :). I like how the debian community works, so it has stayed my
preferred distro all these years.

Many years ago I created my own debian fork. The technical design of my
fork intentionally made it easy to stay based on debian snapshots and
difficult to completely break away. Ubuntu had that same dependency,
though in a different way. Ubuntu was also often ahead of debian on some
features. I started running a mixed environment with both debian and
Ubuntu in place :).

Recently some Ubuntu moves have frustrated me, so I have been moving some
systems back to straight debian.

What's strange to me is although Ubuntu is a fine distro (especially for
desktop Linux users), the last 2 Ubuntu shops I've worked at haven't had a
single sys-admin who would choose it as their top choice yet it's still
been the primary distro we all use.

At the last place we were all debian sysadmins running CentOS. The company
had settled on CentOS before any of us joined the company. There was no
business justification to move off a perfectly adequate distro, so we
stayed with CentOS and complained about yum :). I know complaints go the
other way around as well.

For business the LTS model is a good setup. That and backports provide a
solid, reliable base with an option for latest, greatest if we need it. We
can get similar features with other distros, but Ubuntu's is easiest to
explain to management.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've run lots of distros over the years. I used
to switch every couple of months just to try out new distros. I also ran a
dual-boot laptop with two different distros and a shared home directory.
I would alternate updates, so I always had a fall back in case an update
hosed something.

For work, especially teaching, I've used several distributions as well.
The main thing for work is that servers should not require GUI packages.
I've created architectures that require multiple distributions or even BSD
in addition to GNU/Linux in order to have a heterogenous environment to
limit exposure to certain classes of bugs.

ciao,

der.hans
--
# http://www.LuftHans.com/ http://www.LuftHans.com/Classes/
# Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others.
# -- Fred Rogers, aka Mr. Rogers (1928-2003)
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